Savory and Sweet Stuffed Rolls

Whenever my mother had to be at PTA meeting or something, she used to make a big pot of curry for us to heat up for supper later.  In Japan, unless one specifies Indian, Thai, or Vietnamese style curry, people think of 'Japanese style' curry made with curry powder or store bought curry roux.  It is an easy one pot meal and we usually have plenty of leftover.  One way to use the leftover is to make Curry Stuffed Rolls, or Karē-pan.  These rolls are popular at Japanese bakeries and are usually deep-fried.  Well, deep-frying happens to be one cooking method I do not practice at home.  When I crave something deep-fried such as Vietnamese spring rolls, I head to a restaurant.  Although I insisted on sticking to one of my many rules to cut down on fat intake, I wanted to make curry rolls.  The buns used for Chinese BBQ pork buns seemed to be the best bet. 

The recipe for buns was adopted from Baked BBQ Pork Bun recipe I found at cooking.com. I put shredded chicken breast meat and insane amount of vegetables in my curry while most Japanese cooks prefer to brown chicken/pork/beef cubes in a pot and use less vegetables.  This is a pretty good way to hide veggies---make sure to chop veggies into small pieces.  If yous are a veggie lover like me, however, eating big chunks of veggies in curry sauce is the way to go.  Japanese curry roux can be found at most Asian markets.

There was enough curry to make 12 rolls.  I had some blueberries I cooked a few days ago, and blueberry-stuffed rolls sounded great for breakfast.  I divided the remaining dough into 8 small rounds and stuffed with blueberries.

The blueberries were cooked with small amount of sugar and was sweetened further with stevia when the berries were cooled to room temperature.  The only problem with making these small rolls was that some juice leaked out of every single roll.  Silicone baking mat saved my baking sheet from a huge mess!  I enjoyed the rolls with a big cup of coffee next morning.  This bread dough recipe works for both sweet and savory stuffing equally well.