Soup Dumplings: the miserable failure

If you live, dear reader, in NYC, you can go to Chinatown and dine at the New Green Bo restaurant on Bayard Street, across from the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory (which has the best black sesame ice cream). Everything on the menu is delicious but the soup dumplings are so sublime and inspirational that they continue to haunt me six months later.

If you, dear reader, like me, live somewhere other than NYC and cannot get to New Green Bo for soup dumplings you might attempt to recreate these delicate parcels of soup and pork. I tried just that yesterday. I did not enter into this task at a whim. Oh no, I’d given this delight a great deal of thought and felt certain that I had mentally dissected its components precisely and could adequately recreate them…perhaps not perfectly, but adequately.

But as you can see I’ve met the enemy and the enemy is me…or perhaps my dumpling wrapper.

Soup dumplings are soup dumplings because encased within their delicate and tasty dumpling wrapper is a small portion of soup and a morsel of flavorful pork. I decided that the soup had to begin as a concentrated, jellied stock. I began days ago by making a pot of chicken stock from the backs, wings, necks, and bones of two chickens. I allowed the stock to sit overnight and then I reduced it to half of its original volume. This gave me a firm, jellied stock.

Next I created the meat filling. The basis for the morsel was ground pork obtained from my favorite purveyor. I finely chopped fresh ginger, shallots, and garlic and sautéd this over medium heat, adding salt, pepper, soy sauce, and red chili flakes. Once it cooled I mixed it into the pork and formed it into nickel sized balls. This was the epicenter of the dumpling.

The last piece of the equation was the dumpling wrapper. I searched all my cookbooks and came across a dumpling wrapper in China, The Beautiful Cookbook. Their picture of the dumplings looked remarkably like my memory of the famed soup dumplings so I looked no further and went with that recipe.

Yes, the dough did seem too wet when I mixed it up. But since I had to break that large piece of dough into 20 small pieces and roll them each out by hand into very small, very thin circles I thought “it’ll be OK, I’ll add more flour as I work”. Which I did. But what a ton of work it was rolling out twenty circles and adding flour as I went and seeing that the consistency didn’t really seem to be firm enough to hold the meat much less the soup. But I soldiered on.

Yes, mistakes were made in execution. For instance, once the dumpling wrappers were filled with a spoonful of jellied stock and the meatball, I placed them on a cookie sheet where they would sit until I finished all 20. When I moved the filled, less that firm, dumplings to the steamer I realized my mistake. I should have placed them directly into the steamer basket. Many dumplings ended up sicking to the wax paper and losing their soup before even hitting the steamer. Others made it to the steamer only to leak their soup out slowly as they steamed. In the end there was only one steamed survivor with soup intact.

Overall, once they were cooked the dumpling wrappers were more like semi-firm glue. However, the meat filling was delicious, but let’s face it….its hard to screw-up good pork. Obviously I need to work on the dumpling wrapper. Does anyone have any suggestions? Should I freeze the jellied stock? I’m sure this guy would know the answers but he really doesn’t look very friendly plus he’s in New York and I’m not.

There you have it…my miserable failure. A great way to end 2006. Oh and I almost forgot…Happy New Year to all of you and thank you for being my readers. We’re going to have so much fun this year…really! And we’ll solve the dumpling dilemma!

1 January 2007 | Asian, beef, fish, poultry, pork, food | Comments