Dumplings make everyone smile. Make and eat lots.
Asian dumplings are a hot commodity these days. Last week in New York City, I checked out the hipster BaoHaus in the Lower East Side. Eddie Huang is doing some interesting things to introduce food savvy diners to Taiwanese sandwiches made with plain steamed bao, which are like steamed rolls. BaoHaus is clever and smart in its effort to sell an old fashioned snack to a young new crowd.
See the review of BaoHaus on Viet World Kitchen.
If you’ve ever wandered through a Japanese market, chances are that you’ve noticed the dainty and lovely confections collectively known as wagashi. Diminutive, they can often take on gorgeous forms, such as the most perfect-looking peach painted with the subtle blush of summer. Bite into one and you may be surprised. The peach skin could be made of chewy sticky rice and the flesh may be made of sweetened bean paste. Several years ago, renowned Japanese food expert Elizabeth Andoh, author of Washoku among other titles, urged me to include wagashi recipes in Asian Dumplings but I demurred as the specific ingredients and precise techniques seemed way beyond mortals. Recently, however, Chef Michael Siegel of Betelnut restaurant in San Francisco convinced me otherwise.
Siegel and I met at the Culinary Institute of America’s World of Flavors conference last November 2009 in Napa. Alexander Ong, a partner and the executive chef of Betelnut introduced us, and Mike and I hit it off over a discussion of our mutual love for pastrami and bagels. Chef Siegel is Jewish-American and two years ago, his professional skills and innate curiosity brought him to Betelnut, a long-standing, acclaimed pan-Asian restaurant. He is Ong’s right-hand man in the kitchen, and Ong’s management style is to encourage his team to experiment all the while staying true to traditions. (If you go, reserve one of the three beggar’s chicken cooked in lotus leaf and clay that are cooked each night!)
After that initial meeting, I lunched at Betelnut and for dessert, Ong sent out the above plate of three spheres. The waiter presented it as the “mochi trio” – and indeed, they had the unmistakable opaque white appearance of sticky (glutinous) rice. My eyebrows rose with interest. Inside, each mochi dumpling contained a different type of chocolate ganache: white, milk, and dark. The little garnishes of marmalade, salted caramel sauce, and a Kahlua and espresso cream offered flavor counterpoints to the rich filling and slightly sweet wrapper. When I asked Ong for the low-down on the mochi dumplings, he proudly said they were Siegel’s creation. I promptly asked if Siegel would share his story and technique. We scheduled a demo a few weeks later.
Last year CHOW.com invited me to do a video on what goes into making perfect Shanghai soup dumplings (xiao long bao). As you can imagine, I had much to say about the subject, especially after spending 3 weeks making them every day to get the recipe instructions right. It was hard to pick a spot that consistently produced excellent dumplings, and I deliberated for weeks. But CHOW.com producer Meredith Arthur was super patient, even though she was expecting a baby. Then I settled on Shanghai Dumpling King (3319 Balboa Street, between 34th Ave & 35th Ave) located in the Outer Richmond in San Francisco; I’ve mentioned this restaurant before as being the inspiration for the Chinese sugar egg puffs recipe (bai tang sha weng) .
CHOW videographer Eric Slatkin just finished editing the video and released it over the weekend. "The Perfect" is a series of CHOW.com videos that asks experts to share their insights on culinary excellence. Here is what I had to say about Shanghai soup dumplings:
For the video above, Meredith, Eric, and I convened at ‘the King’ last September. We had a great afternoon of filming and were very well fed too. The cooks and staff at Shanghai Dumpling King were friendly, gracious, and proud of their xiao long bao. They spoke limited English and I got to practice my Mandarin, which you’ll hear in the video. But we all love food, and their xiao long bao brilliantly communicate the skill, ingenuity, and care that goes into making excellent Asian dumplings.
What do you think makes for a perfect soup dumpling?
If you've got a favorite place to get good xiao long bao, do share your tip in this 1/24/10 post.
When I was in Sydney last November, Chris Tan of Foodfella.com was raving about tasting some freshly made Portuguese egg tarts that a local Portuguese baker had made. He showed me a food porn-type of photo he’d taken to whet my appetite, and explained that it was a Macau specialty. That makes the little sweet kinda like a Portuguese Chinese egg tart, seeing how they’re very very similar to Cantonese egg tarts that you find at dim sum joints and bakeries.
I let the notion of that tart simmer in the back of my Asian dumpling brain. I even saw a recipe in a new book coicidentally by Chris’s dad, Terry Tan, called The Food and Cooking of South China. It’s hard for me to make something I’ve never tasted. How was I going to get my hands on one? Portuguese egg tarts are not a commonly found item in the United States at Chinese restaurants, or so I thought.
[Read more…] about What do you know about Portuguese Chinese Egg Tarts?
It’s hard to believe that it just over a week ago that I came back from Australia obsessed with figuring out how to replicate a particular style of pot stickers that I enjoyed at Hutong dumpling restaurant in Melbourne. As I noted, Hutong’s pot stickers were united on their plate by what could only be described as a crisp skirt. I asked for help to answer this question — How to produce that little skirt at home? A number of people came to my immediate rescue.
Robyn Laing from New Zealand translated a gyoza recipe from Gyoza no Daigasshou (Gyoza Grand Chorus) cookbook, scanned in the pages from the book, then sent the pdfs to me. I’d asked about the origin of the skirt and Robyn noted that the skirt recipe in the cookbook came from Chef Yagi:
Chef Yagi was born in China where his parents ran a restaurant. He stayed in China after the war but returned to Japan in 1979. To learn Japanese he invited friends over and made gyoza for them the way he’d had them in China. He went to cooking school and worked in a number of Chinese restaurants to learn the trade. This led to him starting a small restaurant and gradually expanded his business. It suggests that he came up with the idea of the skirt as a way differentiating his gyoza. So no way of telling whether this was an idea he adapted from China or from Japan.
As I understand them, pot stickers resulted from a delectable mistake made by a Chinese cook who left his dumplings poaching unattended and all the water boiled out of the wok (guo), making the dumplings stick (tie). So the Asian dumplings are technically wok stickers (guo tie) but in English, we know them as pot stickers. I thought that that was the story, but last week in Sydney, my dear friend Christopher Tan, a Singapore-based food writer and Asian pastry expert told me about a type of pot sticker that I’d not heard of or seen.
“The cook pours on a thin layer of batter into the skillet as the pot stickers pan-fry. When they are done, there is a crisp layer that comes out with all the dumplings,” Chris told me in his lilting, slightly gravelly Singaporean accent. I kind of understood what he was talking about and thought it was a novel trick and extended play on the concept of a pot sticker.
[Read more…] about Help! Mysterious Pot Stickers with a Crisp Skirt
