xiao long bao

October 11, 2006

To my knowledge, one of the most labor intensive and delicious food is xiao long bao (”XLB”). I’ve been in love with this little steamed lumps of goodness ever since I was introduced to them when I was living in Hong Kong. I vividly remember the place that we used to go to for dinner almost every other sunday. I’ve not had many good ones since I moved here, but the BEST one I’ve had was definitely Joe’s Shanghai in New York. Jeng Chi in Dallas is decent, but I never fail to visit everytime I go back to Dallas. Before you go out and order this item at a chinese restaurant, I must warn you that most of the places that are offering XLB are doing them an injustice.

Yesterday, (I’m pretty sure out of the sheer bordem offered by the stock market) LL sent me an IM with two XLB recipes that he found online. After a quick trip to Albertson’s to pick up a few things, we were in the kitchen trying to recreate these delightful goodies. We’ve actually tried to make them before, but our previous attempts failed miserably as we couldn’t get the skin to hold the soup inside the dumpling.

We finally figured out (from the recipe) the secret to making the soup stay inside the dumpling is high gluten flour. I didn’t take any pictures of our creations because we haven’t really figured out how to wrap the dumplings like the pros yet. But the dumplings turned out to be great. I’ve linked the recipes below so you, too, can enjoy the awesome-ness that is known as XLB. Here’s a word of advice, don’t skim out on the gelatin!! Put as much of it in there as possible.

The only thing that we have to figure out now before we have perfected the art of making XLB is figure out how to wrap these dumplings to create “the look” above, and also how to create space in between the skin and the filling. If you have any idea how to do this, please leave a comment!!! I’d really appreicate it.

Recipe 1 (The one we used)

Recipe 2

Posted in Creations, Recipes, Restaurants