Matters of taste: dim sum

Paul Vong makes it look so easy. He deftly crimps a tiny parcel of chopped vegetables, placing it onto a bamboo steamer. But then he does make 2,000 dumplings a day, I tell myself, as I tear yet another one, spilling the contents onto my shoe. Vong is a chef at Royal China, one of London’s top Chinese restaurants, and he has gamely offered to show me how dim sum is made. Now I understand why we don’t see it on television cookery shows.

Making dim sum may be hard, but it is becoming one of our most popular foods, with the rise of specialist restaurant chains such as Ping Pong and Dim T and a place on our supermarket shelves: Marks & Spencer launched a dim sum range in 2009. Dim sum means “touch the heart” in Cantonese. It was originally a snack to be taken with tea—or yum cha, as you say in the south of China. Over the centuries it grew into the loud, happy dining experience that we have today. Yet no one cooks them at home. Everyone goes out for dim sum, even in China.

Dim sum is at its loudest and best, many agree, in Hong Kong, where restaurants serve it as early as 5am, and where old folk gather after their morning exercises for a restorative snack of shao mai (pork dumplings) and fung jao (deep-fried chicken feet). Streetside eateries there specialise in everything from congee (rice porridge) to wonton noodle soup, and each will have a stack of the distinctive bamboo steaming baskets concealing a dim sum delicacy. Most serve classics, such as char siu bao (puffy white steamed buns filled with sweet barbecued pork) or har gau (plump prawns wrapped in a translucent wheat starch skin).

If you’re going out for dim sum—to mark the Chinese new year, perhaps, on 3rd February—bear in mind that most restaurants, including Royal China, only serve it until late afternoon. What to drink? Tea is as important to the experience as the food, from chrysanthemum and oolong, to bolay—and green tea, said to aid digestion. If you really want to get into the swing of things then remember to pour tea for others before helping yourself—and if you want to follow Cantonese custom then you can thank the pourer by tapping your bent index finger on the table (or both index and middle finger if you are married).

If you want more of a punch then there’s wine, of course. The best matches are to be found in Alsace: their aromatic, minerally whites are the perfect foil for the more delicate dim sum. A zesty, limey Clare Valley Riesling from Australia copes brilliantly with the stronger flavours, and there’s South African Chenin Blanc when a bit more weight is called for.

Cookery lesson over, it is time to eat, but the gaffes continue. I think I managed to insult half the restaurant. I spear a dumpling on the furthest plate away from me (you should start with the morsel nearest to you), before pointing a chopstick at my fellow diner (just rude), and then dropping it on the floor: inauspicious, and the rest of my day will go badly, apparently.

Though it can’t get worse than my attempt at making har gau. The prawn dumpling is the most popular dim sum, particularly at Royal China. But the pastry is easy to tear and hard to seal. “It’s all about how you handle the dough,” explains Vong.

He’s been a chef for 18 years and reckons that it takes six years to master dim sum. “It’s the section in a Chinese kitchen that requires the most skill,” he says, watching me pat down the filling so hard that I break the delicate pastry, while he flicks another perfect dumpling into the basket, all precision pleats.

To the white, powdery mountain of wheat starch, Vong adds a few handfuls of potato flour, then weighs the mixture to judge the right amount of boiling water to add. “It’s got to be almost translucent—this, and the texture, is the key,” he explains, folding the vegetable oil into the stiff dough with a fat bamboo spatula, which give the dumplings their trademark sheen.

“The dough needs to be more elastic for har gau. We don’t roll it—we shape it with a knife,” he says, producing a blunt-edged cleaver which he slaps down on a walnut-sized nub of alabaster dough, flattening it into the wooden work surface before flipping it to one side, ready for me to stuff.

My har gau look like comedy wontons, the filling oozing stickily out of the edge. They don’t make it onto the bamboo steamer. “Try this one, called fun gau—much easier,” offers Vong, who brags that he can make any dim sum blindfolded.

I put a teaspoon of chopped prawn, coriander, water chestnut, shiitake mushroom, celery and carrot in the middle of a two-inch dough circle then fold it over and pinch it, just like a Cornish pasty. Result. It makes the bamboo steamer—my only dumpling that does. Though with 150 diners in for lunch today there’s no chance I’ll get to taste my efforts.