Shanghai Styled Soup Dumplings

My dad, who is originally from the Shanghai region, tells me that dumplings, noodles, and all sorts of bread-oriented foods tend to be more Northern in cuisine since wheat and meat are more readily available. You'll likewise find a plethora of vegetarian dishes the farther south you go within China. While these dumplings are very labor intensive and you'll have the satisfaction that you didn't pay a small ransom to eat at Bellevue's Din Tai Fung restaurant, even though they have a visitor's window that lets you see their prep cooks rolling, filling, and making the very same dumplings.

Think of the last bread recipe you've done then multiply the time you spent waiting for that lazy dough to rise up by two and you get the approximate time it takes for all these ingredients to come together. Good thing gelatin that comes in small neat packages or else we'd be scraping down a length of pig skin for its gelatinous properties.

This recipe ratio comes from Brian Yarvin's A World of Dumplings book. The secret to having soup in a dumpling is to add a small amount of jelled soup to the dumpling before it gets steamed. The heat melts the soup that gently bathes the dumpling in a rich meaty broth, enhancing the elements of the dumpling; or at least that's the idea.

Dumpling making is a group affair, and doing this recipe with others is pleasantly more enjoyable. I should also mention that for this batch, I only made the dough and had the patience to pleat one dumpling. Oh, and I wrote the post and took the pics. :)