bao
Pluralbaos, bao
- 1A soft steamed bread or bun made from wheat flour, used across many styles of Chinese cooking.
She steamed a fresh batch of bao for the family dinner.
Fluffy bao pairs well with rich, braised meats.
Similarbun
Note
The bread sense, and where the word comes from: English borrowed it from Mandarin bāo or Cantonese baau1, and Vietnamese bánh bao is a cognate. The dough is leavened wheat flour that is steamed rather than baked, which gives it its soft, white, pillowy crumb. Used as a mass noun it names the bread itself (a tray of bao); used as a count noun it names individual buns.
- 2A sandwich or stuffed bun made from soft steamed bread, holding fillings such as braised pork or vegetables.
She bit into the warm bao and the sauce dripped down her hand.
A good bao balances tender filling with pillowy bread.
Note
Here the bread becomes a vessel for what goes inside it. The clamshell form is folded around its filling and left open on one side, much like a sandwich. The sealed form encloses the filling completely before steaming. For more than one, English accepts both baos and the unchanged plural bao, and either is correct. Unlike the plain bread, this sense is usually counted.
- 3A mancala-style board game popular in East Africa, played by scooping and dropping seeds around rows of hollows on a wooden board.
Crowds gathered to watch two masters face off at bao.
He moved the seeds quickly, sweeping them around the bao board.
Note
A different word entirely, borrowed from Swahili bao and unrelated to the steamed bun. Bao is a two-player mancala variant from Swahili-speaking East Africa. It is played on a wooden board of thirty-two pits in four rows, and counters are sown in continuing laps under strict capture rules. As the name of a game it takes no article: people play bao, on a bao board.
Practice
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Origins
Borrowed from Mandarin 包 (bāo) or Cantonese 包 (baau1), and related to Vietnamese bánh bao.
From Swahili bao.