A stab at making xiao long bao

Spoiler alert: as so often happens in the kitchen, all did not go to plan.

Welcome to the fourth edition of What’s Cooking. Good news – there is some actual cooking in this week’s edition! This may not always be the case, despite this being touted as a food-centric newsletter, so this is something to celebrate.

An attempt at making xiao long bao

Let me start by saying that although this is my photograph, it is not an image of my dumplings. I wish.

A couple of weeks ago I stuffed myself full at one of my favourite restaurants in Melbourne, Hu Tong. There are two venues – one in Prahran, an inner-southeast neighbourhood and another in the city. Pre-covid, I used to frequent the one on Market Lane to such a degree that the maître d' recognised me. Sadly, this isn’t the case anymore, but granted I was previously eating there at least a couple of times a week.

There’s a lot to like about this dumpling house. The staff are efficient, the food affordable and everything tastes so darn good. Over the years, the restaurant has become a go-to place for bringing out of towners, or even just catching up with friends I haven’t seen for quite some time. And the one dish that draws me back again and again, is their xiao long bao.

These are the dumplings that arrive pipping hot, filled with not only delicately flavoured meat, but a delicious broth. There’s a real art to eating them. I’d never advise shoving them straight into your gob, unless you want to scald your mouth or have the broth spurt out and hit your dining partner(s) in the face. No, what you do is give them a minute or so to cool down – you want the broth to still be warm. You then nibble off the top of the dumpling, slurp out the broth and eat the rest as desired. I usually dunk them in a mixture of soy sauce and balsamic vinegar. You can mix some chilli in, if that’s how you roll.

I love this dish and think about it all the time. So, I thought what better way to ruin one of my favourite meals, than to have a go at making it for myself.

I’m no stranger to dumplings. I have a fairly yummy recipe I’ve adapted over the years, which basically consists of throwing whatever you want in with pork mince (hoison and soy sauce work well, as does garlic) and wrapping around two teaspoons of the mix in softened rice paper, before steaming. Et voilà. A cheap and tasty meal.

Soup dumplings – now this is a challenge. I followed a Donna Hay recipe, from The New Classics. I’ve found some of the recipes in this cookbook to be hit and miss. Roasted honey carrots? A hit. Cheesecake brownies? Hard miss (way too dry). Probably would have been better off just finding a recipe on the internet, but I was interested to see how Donna’s version would play out.

The stock that would become the jelly, that in turn, became the soup.

I planned to make these dumplings on a Sunday night. I started cooking around 7pm, not a strong start. The first thing I notice is that the soup element (chicken stock and ginger, with gelatine), which needs to be made in advance, has to sit for two hours. Oops. Keen on eating something before 10pm that night, I make the soup and pop it in the fridge to set. I make a tagine instead. Yum.

Tuesday night. I return to the dumplings. The chicken and ginger soup has turned to chicken and ginger jelly. Ready to rock and roll, then. All that’s left to do is prepare the meat mix and pop everything into the dumpling wrappers. Easy, amirite?

Ingredients for the dumpling mix, sans pork mince.

The mix contains:

• pork mince

• caster sugar

• soy sauce

• Chinese cooking wine

• sichaun pepperberries (grounded, sort of)

• spring onion.

Once all this is mixed together, I realise I’ve stuffed up. The dumpling skins I bought are not quite big enough. They’re perfect for say, gyoza – not so much xiao long bao.

Well, we’ve come this far, so we may as well continue. I follow the recipe, popping the mix into each dumpling skin at the recommended amount. The jelly mostly squirts out the sides. I’m fairly certain I’m folding them wrong, something that’s later confirmed when I check online. Oh well. There’s no instruction on how to fold them in the recipe, which is a bit annoying.

I stick some in the bamboo steamer and give them around 15 minutes to cook. Opening the lid, the soup has mostly escaped the casings and congealed around the dumplings. They’re cooked however. I try them. They’re… okay. I had thought at the time the recipe called for way too much ginger in the soup (confirmed upon taste). There’s no garlic, which seems like a big omission. Some minced garlic and a bit more salt would add some flavour. The skins issue is my muck up, sure, but the recipe would be more successful if it included instructions for dumplings dough. Plus it’s always satisfying, making everything from scratch.

Dumplings pre-steaming.

So, I think I’ll be going to Hu Tong to satisfy my xiao long bao cravings for now. I’ll have another crack at this in the cooler months – with a different recipe and hopefully higher level of success.

Have you made xiao long bao before? Any dumplings recipes you love and recommend?

Review: The Menu – a deliciously decadent thriller

One of the things I miss most from the 90s/early 00s and therefore, my youth, is going to the video store. The anticipatory feeling of really hoping the film you missed seeing at the movies has finally come out on New Release, so you can pay some ungodly sum to rent the VHS if it’s the 90s or DVD if the 00s (usually around $7, highway robbery) overnight. The whole family sitting down to watch the film. The satisfying clunk when you pop the thing through the returns chute the next day. Get to Friday – rinse, lather, repeat.

A bygone era. As much as I still love going to the cinema, it is rather nice when a film you really want to see speeds its way onto a streaming service you happen to have a subscription for. Even if, as someone who used to work in TV, my feelings on the streams are less than lukewarm at times.

Anyway, I digress. The Menu, which is being marketed as a horror (I guess part of that new ‘elevated’ horror trend that we’re hearing so much about these days) sees Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) an intolerable foodie and his date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) spend an evening at Hawthorn, an upscale restaurant run by Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), the charismatic and somewhat frightening head chef.

Hawthorn is so exclusive it is located on its own island and merely seats 12 guests a night – each paying $1250 a head, for the privilege. There’s an older couple settling in their seats for the 11th time, a trio of finance bros, a washed up movie star turned amateur foodie and his assistant, and a renowned food critic – in fact the food critic who jump started Julian’s career with a positive write up, and her editor. Oh and Julian’s mother, who sits in the corner drinking bottle after bottle of wine. The guests are seated, the doors are closed, and the service begins, with Julian intent on feeding his guests something a little out of the ordinary for dinner tonight – a very special menu.

I’ve eaten at my fair share of fancy and unusual restaurants – Attica in Melbourne, KOKS in the Faroe Islands, Insects in the Backyard in Bangkok, which was basically fine dining, but with insects in every course. I ate at a few Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK & Europe when I lived in London. To achieve this, I’d pay for everything in cash, pop my spare pounds in a jar and when I had over a hundred quid, splurge on a set menu somewhere fancy (without the drinks, to keep costs down). Some of these experiences have been out of this world, but then I’ve also found love in a box of 3 quid chicken from an unassuming shopfront in London’s southeast, or a juicy burger from the Icelandic equivalent of a service station. Sometimes, you pay for the privilege of being bitterly disappointed, as I felt during my very one bad meal in Melbourne, a city renowned for its food, at a high-end restaurant where the first course served was a piece of cos lettuce with a sprinkling of herbs on top, with everything deteriorating further from there.

I loved watching The Menu, because it takes everything that is just awful about the high-end dining experience – the egos, the foodies, the slavish conditions for staff and the quest for perfection against all odds – and serves up a more than palatable movie.

What’s cooking next time

I’m off to what is a fairly unexplored corner of Victoria this weekend, which just happens to be off the grid. The weather looks to be atrocious despite it still allegedly being summer here in Australia, so that’s great. Plus I read what I reckon will end up being a top 3 book of the year (bold claim, but am sticking to it). Very thought-provoking and I’d like to share it with you.

-Celine

PS. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, I’d really appreciate a like, a comment or even a share. The more ‘engagement’ a post gets, the more it has the chance of getting eyeballed by others who aren’t subscribed.

This is the world now. I don’t like it either. But I do appreciate it!