After thousands of failed attempts and several kilograms of discarded dough, pork and broth, James Fu finally, after a month, made a pork soup dumpling good enough to serve at Din Tai Fung, where he was a trainee. The renowned Taiwanese restaurant chain’s xiao long bao are considered by many dumpling connoisseurs to be the world’s best, and praised for their consistency – the result of a meticulously crafted product first sold at the restaurant’s original Taiwan location in 1972 and followed to a T since then.
Din Tai Fung has more than 165 locations globally and this month opened its first Canadian outpost in Vancouver. Fu, who is Din Tai Fung‘s head chef for North America, has spent the past few months flying from California to Vancouver to oversee training of the 40-odd kitchen staff they hired.
Those tasked with making the prized XLB attend a dumpling academy of sorts, a four-tiered standardized training system implemented globally to ensure the dumplings the Vancouver restaurant dishes out taste identical to the ones served in Shanghai, Tokyo, Dubai or Las Vegas. After a few weeks, most trainees can make passable xiao long bao, but to reach the final tier of the program and be anointed “dumpling chef” can take years, Fu says.
“All these rules on weighing the dough, the number of folds, and then how much stuffing, and the position of stuffing on the wrapper all makes a difference,” he says.
He explained the exacting standards that made Din Tai Fung‘s xiao long bao so famous.
5 grams of dough for the wrappers
When Fu was a kid growing up in Taiwan, he slurped down countless xiao long bao from a range of restaurants, each slightly different: some with very thick skin, others with particularly porky broth. His first xiao long bao from Din Tai Fung was a revelation, due in large part to the ultra-thin wrapper that was still strong enough to contain the filling.
“Wow, the skin is shiny and soft,” he remembers thinking. “How did they make this?”
Despite the scale of the operation – the Vancouver location turns out 10,000 dumplings a day – everything is made in relatively small batches to ensure freshness and consistency. The dough for the wrappers is mixed, stretched, cut and rolled out by hand. Each nubbin of dough used to make a wrapper weighs about 5 grams – only 0.2 grams of variance is tolerated – and is rolled out by hand into a circle with a diameter of 7.5 centimetres.
8 to 12 hours of simmering
The most time-consuming step in making xiao long bao is preparing the rich umami broth, in which aromatics like ginger and green onions are simmered in water with pork bones and stewing hens.
A crucial ingredient is pork skin: 1-centimetre squares of it are added to the pot and over the 8- to 12-hour cooking process, they release collagen. The broth is strained and cooled in the fridge and that natural collagen helps it gelatinize into what Fu calls “pork jello.”
16 grams of filling
The bulk of the filling is made with Kurobuta pork, also known as Berkshire pork, a heritage breed known for its marbling. Fattier meat from the shoulder is mixed with leaner, more muscular leg meat to create the perfect blend that doesn’t have so much fat that it’s greasy, but also isn’t so lean that it’s dry and tough.
It’s rounded out with plenty of ginger, green onions and seasonings, as well as the “pork jello” which is diced and folded into the mixture. There are two scales at each chef’s station to ensure the filling is 16 grams so that each finished piece is 21 grams.
“It’s a perfect ratio,” says Fu. “It’s bite-sized. We wanted our guests to finish the xiao long bao in a bite to ensure you have the explosion of the freshness in your mouth.”
18 pleats
It’s not 12, it’s not 21, it’s always exactly 18 pleats that crown each xiao long bao carried out of the kitchen at Din Tai Fung – and that’s for good reason.
The so-called “golden ratio” of pleats developed by the restaurant’s Taiwanese founder Bing-Yi Yang ensures the thin wrapper can be properly sealed, even with 16 grams of filling inside. The pleats work like an accordion when the xiao long bao are cooked: They create room for expansion once the broth re-liquifies, boils and creates steam, inflating each dumpling like a balloon.
Fitting 18 pleats into the dumpling isn’t that difficult, Fu says, but pulling it closed is. It was the hardest step to learn when he went through the training program.
“The first two, three weeks? Oh, wow, it was hard. I was like, ‘Maybe I don’t have the talent. Maybe I’m just not fit to do this.”
But then something clicked.
He looks like a sleight of hand magician when he pleats and seals a xiao long bao at full speed, so quick and dexterous it’s hard to understand what his fingers are doing. But he slows it down when he’s teaching: He puts a few folds in at a time while simultaneously rotating the dumpling; the fourth and final set of folds gets pressed in with the other three to create a seal with a small point.
185 degrees Fahrenheit
The magic of the soup dumpling happens when it is put into a bamboo basket to steam: that trip into the wet sauna transforms the “pork jello” into a rich, umami broth. Depending on the mineral content of the water and the heat output of the stove, cooking them through takes anywhere from three and a half to four minutes – staff know they‘re ready when they reach an internal temperature of 185 degrees Fahrenheit.
5 minutes to the table
The lifespan of xiao long bao is short. Very short. If you let them sit too long, the soup cools, the wrappers turn unpleasantly gummy, the meaty filling loses its tenderness. They cannot be premade and re-heated. Ideally, they are on diners’ tables within five minutes of being cooked, Fu says.
During each shift, there are at least seven runners on the floor whose job it is to transport food – including those prized bamboo baskets filled with xiao long bao – from the kitchen to the table in question. This is no small feat in a massive restaurant with capacity for 340 diners.
1.5- to 2.5-inch strands of ginger
The one part of the xiao long bao experience where Din Tai Fung surrenders some control to the diner is with its sauce. You can dip your dumplings in just soy if you’d like, or vinegar, or nothing at all. Staff present the ingredients of the sauce to each table with a gentle suggestion of how to best combine them: three parts vinegar to one part soy, poured over a tangle of ginger strands. The piquant aromatic is key to balancing flavours, says Fu.
“The ginger infused in the dipping sauce will enhance your pork flavour to ensure it brings you to another level of the umami-ness,” he says.
But converting a pile of knobby, gnarled ginger roots into uniform strands is tedious work.
“The shape of the ginger I have no control over. I wish everything could just grow in a rectangular box, like how the Japanese grow those watermelons,” Fu jokes.
The ginger is peeled and cut into 1.5- to 2.5-inch slivers that have a proper kick but texturally are delicate and yield easily to the teeth.
