One week I got it in my head that I wanted to make baked pork buns. The delicious pork in the filling, char siu, was a recipe from Joshua Weissman. Sadly, the grocery store aisles had no Chinese five spice that the marinade requires. So I went hunting for a homemade recipe for the powder. This is the scaled-back, simple version I arrived at after viewing several variants that made gigantic amounts of the fragrant blend.