It takes skill to make a thin shell of dough watertight for hot soup and meat. Soup dumplings are akin to ships in bottles or full-sized pears in bottles of pear brandy. It’s difficult to get the stuffing out once it’s in. In the case of soup dumplings, or 小笼包 (xiǎolóngbāo), extraction requires practice.
Experience is everything. 小笼包 are made by wrapping jellified meat stock into a pocket of translucently thin dough. A master will take a round piece of flat dough, place the jelly enveloped pork piece into its centre, raise the sides and carefully fold the top. A set of six is steamed for a few minutes, the jelly melts, it’s ready for you.
The first challenge is to pick one up without rupturing skin and spilling soup. You need to transfer it from the basket to your spoon. Successful transfers with unruptured shell should be quietly admired, accidental ruptures commiserated softly.
If the soup dumpling is fresh the soup inside will be very hot. This sets the basic dynamic of the challenge ahead: a delicate piece of dough containing very hot soup is cradled in your spoon. What next?
If you’ve managed to bring the dumpling to spoon without rupture, there are various ways of approaching the challenge of eating the thing. Techniques vary, some are more advisable than others.
The safest but worst option would be to wait for a few minutes and let the liquid cool enough to eat the dumpling in a mouthful. That’s not the way to go. You don’t win this way. This is like pouring the pear brandy away, waiting for the pear to decompose and then proudly shaking out its remains. It doesn’t count.
A mouthful of a fresh piece will burn your gums, but pleasure can build on pain. Don’t be too risk averse. The best option is to make a little hole at the top of the dumpling, elegantly pour some vinegar into it, and then as it cools ever so slightly, begin to imbibe the vessel and its juicy contents through an elegant choreography of testing nibbles and gentle slurps, completing at a point where there is enough soup to explode pleasantly at the right temperature when you chomp down on the remains.
Where should you go for soup dumplings?
A famous restaurant empire called Din Tai Fung is built around 小笼包 . Its website tells the story of a young couple selling the dumplings to supplement their cooking oil business.1 There are now over 170 Din Tai Fung restaurants world-wide, including one in London.
Din Tai Fung has built a machinery around the soup dumpling. It’s unlikely you’ll be disappointed in one of its chain-restaurants. But will you find the ultimate expression of the soup dumpling there?
When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something. In zazen what you are doing is not for the sake of anything. You may feel as if you are doing something special, but actually it is only the expression of your true nature; it is the activity which appeases your inmost desire. But as long as you think you are practicing zazen for the sake of something, that is not true practice. (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki.)
Din Tai Fung is the safe option. You should try it. But don’t let that be the end of your search for the perfect soup dumpling. Look for a place where the soup dumpling expresses its true nature.
There is a small restaurant run by a two-person team in Cambridge called “Noodles Plus” or 八方(bāfāng) 小(xiǎo)厨(chú) in Mandarin, which translates into “eight points of the compass - small - kitchen” or, as I’d like to think: “the small kitchen that points you in the right direction.”
“Noodles Plus” / “small kitchen with the right direction” is a temple to the soup dumpling. The dumplings that hide so modestly as the plus behind the noodles are made in an atmosphere of meditative care and attention. This little green restaurant on Mill Road is a sanctuary to the spirit of the soup dumpling.
A review written by the FTs Nicholas Lander is displayed (with some pride no doubt) on the central window pane at Noodles+. Lander says what needs to be said about the need to seek the source.
Din Tai Fung and Noodles Plus approach the xiao long bao from diametrically different places. Both were made for you, seconds ago, by someone highly skilled, who really cares a great deal that you love them, yet one makes me very happy; one leaves me strangely sad. 2
If you keep up the search you will find your pillows of happiness somewhere.
https://www.dintaifungusa.com/us/about-us.html
https://www.ft.com/content/ff6256ca-191e-11e9-b93e-f4351a53f1c3