Ding Tai Fung has become surprisingly famous considering its unassuming location at First Markham Place, and for good reason. The dim sum here is the most authentic I’ve ever had, and lucky for me, it is Shanghai-style as opposed to Cantonese-style. That means, no carts rolling around and plenty of xiao long bao for all!
Pai gu may have been my favourite dish at home as a child, but xiao long bao were hands down my favourite thing to order when we were eating out. I grew up in Nanjing, which is not far from Shanghai and certainly influenced by Shanghai cuisine. We always went out to eat steamed buns (filled and unfilled) and steamed dumplings because they were cheap and extremely time-consuming to make at home (there were no such things as frozen buns and dumplings in those days so we’d have to make it from scratch). Not to mention, I spent a summer in Shanghai with my grandparents and I made sure to eat enough xiao long bao to last me until the next time I returned to China.
There is an art to eating xiao long bao, one that I don’t care to exercise unless I’m in China. What is this art and why don’t I exercise it? The proper way to eat xiao long bao is to gently lift it out of the long zi (bamboo basket), dip it in vinegar (optional – but if you are a native of the JiangSu province, you will not skip the vinegar), and eat it in one bite so that no soup leaks out. The xiao long bao wrapper is very thin and delicate, and it sticks to surfaces, so it’s easy to break if you set it down. And letting the soup leak out is a blasphemy for all Chinese, so be sure the xiao long bao goes straight from the basket to your mouth if you are eating with “real Chinese.”
The reason I tend not to follow this technique when I eat is because the soup is so hot that I’ll often burn my mouth if I eat the xiao long bao in one bite. However, I am not going to let the soup leak out either, so I’ll put the xiao long bao down in a small bowl or on a soup soon, and then I bite a small hole in the wrapper and suck out the soup before I eat the xiao long bao. Still tastes delicious!
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