The mysterious art of dumpling cuisine


	April 6, 2002	atimes.com

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FINER THINGS
The mysterious art of dumpling cuisine
By Chawadee Nualkhair

BANGKOK - Steamed dumplings, especially in a city that loves its Cantonese food as much as this one does, are a big deal. Repeated entreaties to divulge even the most basic information about how one shop's dumplings differ from those of another are met with evasion, stonewalling or, worse, downright duplicity. I recently asked one maitre d' at upmarket Chinese restaurant Silk Road in the Hotel Plaza Athenee to tell me how his chef managed to come out with such fluffy, scrumptious cream-filled dumplings, which he then had the wherewithal to deep-fry to a dark honey sheen. The maitre d', who had just finished giving us the most important nuts-and-bolts information on the making of his restaurant's shark's-fin soup, told us that even he was not allowed to see what the chefs did with a dish as precious as steamed dumplings.

Hmmm. I was a bit dubious, but he wasn't the only one. The owner of the popular Mandarin Restaurant on Thong Lor Road - noticeable for its large, glassed-in statue of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus out front - also remained strangely ignorant about how his cooks made their tasty steamed dumplings. "I really don't know what they do," he said in carefully enunciated Thai that betrayed a bit of his Hong Kong background. "But I do know that, in order to make anything that is truly good, you have to use only the very best of ingredients, which is what we do here."

Right. So nobody was going to tell me. I really couldn't blame them. The Colonel's "secret blend of herbs and spices" has kept Kentucky Fried Chicken on people's waistlines and bottoms for years. The Coca-Cola Co's top-secret recipe for bubbly sugar water has been rotting people's teeth for even longer. Successful cooks, in order to stay that way, have to have their trade secrets. Do you think that chefs divulge their deepest secrets in the cookbooks they trot out regularly in the local bookstore? Think again.

So imagine my surprise (I know you're really, really trying) when the owner of the Montien Hotel (54 Surawong Road), famed for its Hainanese chicken rice and, well, its steamed dumplings, invited me to come to the hotel kitchen to watch his steamed-dumpling chefs in action. It was an opportunity I couldn't miss.

Steamed dumplings themselves, or jiaozi or char siu bao, depending on where you come from, might have started out as a trade secret of someone's, once. After all, wheat flour didn't make an appearance in China until the grindstone arrived - with a lot of effort - in the 3rd century BC via the Silk Road, when the Roman Empire began trading with the Han, according to food historian Rachel Laudan. Before then, wheat was boiled or steamed whole (as wheatberries, still consumed in their whole form by masochistic health-food types) and, quite naturally, considered food for only the very poor, who didn't have a choice of what to eat to stay alive. The grindstone changed all that by allowing the wheat to be ground into flour and mixed with water to form a dough. However, instead of frying or baking like Westerners, the Chinese still used the tried-and-true cooking methods of boiling and steaming - resulting in noodles, pancakes, steamed breads, and yes, dumplings, all called "ping" by the Chinese.

But the favorite "ping" of all was the stuffed dumpling, says Laudan. Cooks sieved the flour twice, mixed it with water, pressed it, stuffed it with pork and mutton flavored with ginger, onions, cinnamon, Szechuan pepper, and black beans, and then steamed the resulting lobes of meat-filled dough. These creations were then ready to travel the world, enlightening all on the benefits of taking time for "yumcha" and having a "dim sum" meal, which is traditionally eaten at any time from late morning to the afternoon. Dim sum was said to have reached California via Cantonese rail workers in the later stages of the 1800s - coincidentally, around the same time that the meal "brunch" (the combination of breakfast and lunch into a large mid-morning meal) was invented in 1880, according to about.chinesefood.com.

One Wednesday morning, I arrived at the Montien Hotel at the designated time to find that I had missed the entire dough-making process. There was one chef scraping out the dough from the bowl of a commercial-sized mixer on to the stainless-steel counter. Chef Thanawat Honghiran told me that the pang mee, or flour, was of the same type used to make Chinese fried flat bread, what the Thais call pathonko and eat with their rice congee. Honghiran said that the Montien's Chinese restaurant, Jade Garden, offers two types of steamed dumplings: one, the Guangdong type, and another, Ta Chiew, preferred by the owner because its dough is softened by the addition of yeast.

After being mixed with water, the dough is gathered together by the chef like a piece of fabric and thrown repeatedly against the counter until it resembles a fat pancake. It is then rolled up, and the chef rips off each piece one by one, apparently measuring each dumpling by ripping the dough off where it meets the midpoint of his middle finger. He then pats each piece, which will look like a big cotton ball, and scrapes the pieces off the counter with a flat steel utensil called a "corn" by the French that is used in making pastries. Each "cotton ball" is then flattened with a small wooden rolling pin, paying particular attention to the edges. Touching the dough is like touching the softest, most pliable silk imaginable. It's a heady feeling, but it has its downside: this dough is also hard to manage.

Then comes the fun part: filling each pancake with, depending on the stuffing, a highly seasoned mixture and closing it up in a counterclockwise motion that appears to be akin to pinching up some sort of fabric as you go along. I write this part vaguely because, frankly, I still haven't mastered it. No matter how many times I watched the chefs closing up their dumplings, no matter how many times Honghiran slowed down his lightning-quick fingers to show me how it was done, I could never really get my hands to comply with the commands issuing from my brain. My dumpling, the one effort I could coax from my leaden fingers, resembled a white turd.

The famous red pork stuffing is made up of grilled shredded pork, black pepper, garlic, sugar, water, oyster sauce, sesame oil, black and white soy sauce, and red food coloring. Contrary to what I'd thought earlier, there is no tomato paste. The minced pork stuffing is the pork flavored with water chestnuts, cilantro, garlic, and hard-boiled egg. And those seductive sweet buns are stuffed with a mixture of corn flour, rice flour, condensed milk powder, cream, fresh milk, butter, and food coloring.

After the stuffed pork buns are cooked, the circular pinching at the top of each dumpling becomes a sort of X-mark, sometimes breaking open a bit to reveal some of the stuffing within. This is more true of the Guangdong-type dumplings, says Honghiran, which are meant to "crack". Eaten hot, these types will be soft but, once cooled, the dough will end up hardening a bit, a bad thing to the steamed dumpling aficionado. Sweet cream-filled dumplings, for their part, aren't meant to crack at all, so in closing them, chefs pinch them off at the bottom, keeping the top a smooth dome. "You can try this one, it's easy to do," invited Honghiran, eying me askance. I told him it would be a waste of food.

The buns, once they're stuffed, are placed on bamboo steamers (at the Montien, they're big restaurant-style steamers made up of wooden slats, completely flat, with handles on the sides). They're put in the oven at full power for seven minutes; for cream-filled dumplings, the door is opened a little to ensure they don't crack. The finished dumplings are then placed on slips of paper to keep them from sticking to the bamboo steamer (now switched to the type diners are used to seeing on dim sum carts), and sent downstairs. Honghiran says he comes in every morning at 7 to begin the process, finishing by 10. "Today we're a little late," he added.

I was in a hurry to get back downstairs to the Jade Garden to buy a few of these dumpling treasures for my very own. Try to imagine my surprise, again, when I discovered the restaurant would not open until 11:30. At the neighboring Ruenton Coffee Shop (where coffee is a whopping 100 baht, or US$2.30, a cup), I attempted to address the injustice, explaining that the dumplings that I saw up in the kitchen were ready to be bought - now. I was told the cashier wasn't in yet, and to wait until both restaurants opened for lunch service - at 11:30.

I informed the waitress that some people have to go to work for a living, and can't support themselves by stuffing their faces with delicious food all day long. I picked up my take-out orders of spring rolls and turnip cakes and stalked out, making a mental note to come back the next morning, late enough for the cashier to prepare herself, before my boss could notice my absence from the office.

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