Dim Sum

Dim sum refers to a style of Chinese food prepared as small bite-sized or individual portions of food traditionally served in small steamer baskets or on small plates. Dim sum is also well known for the unique way it is served in some restaurants, wherein fully cooked and ready-to-serve dim sum dishes are carted around the restaurant for customers to choose their orders while seated at their tables. It is usually linked with the older tradition from yum cha (tea tasting), which has its roots in travelers on the ancient Silk Road needing a place to rest. Thus teahouses were established along the roadside. Rural farmers, exhausted after working hard in the fields, would go to teahouses for a relaxing afternoon of tea. At first, it was considered inappropriate to combine tea with food, because people believed it would lead to excessive weight gain. People later discovered that tea can aid in digestion, so teahouse owners began adding various snacks. The unique culinary art of dim sum originated with the Cantonese in southern China, who over the centuries transformed yum cha from a relaxing respite to a loud and happy dining experience. In Hong Kong, and in most cities and towns in Guangdong province, many restaurants start serving dim sum as early as five in the morning. It is a tradition for the elderly to gather to eat dim sum after morning exercises. For many in southern China, yum cha is treated as a weekend family day. More traditional dim sum restaurants typically serve dim sum until mid-afternoon. However, in modern society it has become common place for restaurants to serve dim sum at dinner time, various dim sum items are even sold as take-out for students and office workers on the go. While dim sum (literally meaning: point of the heart) was originally not a main meal, only a snack, and therefore only meant to touch the heart, it is now a staple of Chinese dining culture, especially in Hong Kong.



Here are some typical dishes ...

▪ Gao, or Dumpling - is a standard in most teahouses. They are made of ingredients wrapped in a translucent rice or wheat starch skin flour, and are different from jiaozi - found in other parts of China. Though common, steamed rice-flour skins are quite difficult to make. Thus, it is a good demonstration of the chef's artistry to make these translucent dumplings.
▪ Shrimp Dumpling - a delicate steamed dumpling with whole or chopped-up shrimp filling and thin wheat starch skin.
▪ Chiu-chao style dumplings - a dumpling containing peanuts, garlic, chives, pork dried shrimp an Chinese mushrooms, in a thick dumpling wrapper made from a glutinous rice flour or Tang flour. It is usually served with a small dish of chili oil.
▪ Potsticker – a Northern Chinese style of dumpling (steamed and then pan-fried jiaozi), usually with meat and cabbage filling. Note that although potstickers are sometimes served in dim sum restaurants, they are not considered traditional Cantonese dim sum.
▪ Shaomai - a small steamed dumplings with either pork, prawns or both inside a thin wheat flour wrapper. Usually topped off with crab roe and mushroom.
▪ Haam Sui Gaau – a savory, small stuffed dumpling, made with a deep fried oval-shaped dumpling of rice-flour and filled with pork and chopped vegetables. The rice-flour surrounding is sweet and sticky, while the inside is slightly salty.
▪ Bau - a baked or steamed, these fluffy buns made from wheat flour are filled with food items ranging from meat to vegetables to sweet bean pastes.
▪ Char siu baau - the most popular bun with Cantonese barbecued pork filling. It can be either steamed to be fluffy and white or baked with a light sugar glaze to produce a smooth golden-brown crust.
▪ Shanghai steamed buns - these dumplings are filled with meat or seafood and are famous for their flavor and rich broth inside.
▪ Rice noodle rolls - these are wide rice noodles that are steamed and then rolled. They are often filled with different types of meats or vegetables inside but can be served without any filling. Rice noodle rolls are fried after they are steamed and then sprinkled with sesame seeds. Popular fillings include beef, dough fritter, shrimp, and barbecued pork. Often topped with a sweetened soy sauce.

▪ Phoenix claws - these are chicken feet – deep fired and boiled then marinated in a black bean sauce and then steamed. This results in a texture that is light and fluffy (due to the frying), while moist and tender. These are truly awful!
▪ Steamed meatball - finely-ground beef is shaped into balls and then steamed with preserved orange peel and served on top of a thin bean-curd skin.
▪ Spare ribs - in the west, it is mostly known as spare ribs collectively. In the east, it is Char siu when roasted red. It is typically steamed with douchi or fermented black beans and sometimes sliced chilli.
▪ Lotus leaf rice – an amount of glutinous rice is wrapped in a lotus leaf into a triangular or rectangular shape. It contains egg yolks, dried scallop, mushroom, water chestnut and meat (usually pork and chicken). These ingredients are steamed with the rice and although the leaf is not eaten, its flavour is infused during the steaming. Lo mai gai is a kind of rice pudding. A similar but lighter variant is known as "Pearl Chicken".
▪ Congee - thick, sticky rice porridge served with different savory items. The porridge one will see most often is "Duck Egg and Pork Porridge".
▪ Sou - a type of flaky pastry. Char siu is one of the most common ingredients used in dim sum style sou. Another common pastry seen in restaurants are called "Salty Pastry", which is made with flour and seasoned pork.
▪ Taro dumpling - made with mashed taro, stuffed with diced shiitake mushrooms, shrimp and pork, deep-fried in crispy batter.
▪ Crispy fried squid - similar to fried calamari, the battered squid is deep-fried. A variation of this dish may be prepared with a salt & pepper mix. In some dim sum restaurants, octopus is used instead of squid.
▪ Spring roll - a roll consisting of various types of vegetables — such as sliced carrot, cabbage, mushroom and wood ear fungus — and sometimes meat are rolled inside a thin flour skin and deep fried.
▪ Tofu skin roll - a roll made of Tofu skin
▪ Turnip cakes - cakes are made from mashed daikon radish mixed with bits of dried shrimp and pork sausage that are steamed and then cut into slices and pan-fried.
▪ Taro cake - cakes made of taro.
▪ Water chestnut cake - cakes made of water chestnut. It is mostly see-through and clear. Some restaurants also serve a variation of water chestnut cake made with bamboo juice.
▪ Chien chang go - "Thousand-layer cake", a dim sum dessert made up of many layers of sweet egg dough.
▪ Zh or kwun tong gau or goon tong gau – a soup with pork, shrimp and dumpling.

Sweets

▪ Jin deui or Matuan - especially popular at the Chinese New Year this is a chewy dough filled with red bean paste, rolled in sesame seeds, and deep fried.
▪ Egg tart - composed of a base made from either a flaky puff pastry type dough or a type of non-flaky cookie dough with an egg custard filling, which is then baked. Some high class restaurants put bird's nest on top of the custard. In other places egg tarts can be made of a crust and a filling of egg whites and some where it is a crust with egg yolks. Some egg tarts now have flavors such as taro, coffee, and other flavors. There are also different kinds of crust. There is also a flaky crisp outer crust with layers and layers of crunchy crumbs.
▪ Dou fu fa -a dessert consisting of silky tofu served with a sweet ginger or jasmine flavored syrup.
▪ Mango pudding - a sweet, rich mango flavoured pudding usually with large chunks of fresh mango; often served with a topping of evaporated milk.
▪ Sweet cream buns - steamed buns with milk custard filling.
▪ Malay Steamed Sponge Cake - a very soft steamed sponge cake flavoured with molasses.
▪ Longan Tofu - an almond-flavoured tofu served with longans (a fruit that it called Dragons-Eye), usually cold.

Tea service
The drinking of tea is as important to dim sum as the food. The type of tea to serve on the table would be typically one of the first things the server would ask dining customers. Several types of tea is served during dim sum :
Chrysanthemum tea does not actually contain any tealeaves. Instead it is a flower-based tisane made from chrysanthemum flowers of the species Chrysanthemum morifolium or Chrysanthemum indicum, which are most popular in East Asia. To prepare the tea, chrysanthemum flowers (usually dried) are steeped in hot water (usually 90 to 95 °C after cooling from a boil) in either a teapot, cup, or glass. However, Chrysanthemum flowers are often paired with Pu-erh tea, and this is often referred to as guk pou or guk bou.
Green Tea - picked leaves only go through heating and drying processes, but do not undergo fermentation. This enables the leaves to keep their original green color and retain most natural substances like polyphenols and chlorophyll contained within the leaves. This kind of tea is produced all over China and is the most popular category of tea. Representative varieties include Dragon Well (Long Jing) and Biluochun from Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces respectively.
Oolong tea leaves are partially fermented, imparting to them the characteristics of both green and black teas. Its taste is more similar to green tea than black tea, but has less a "grassy" flavor than green tea. The three major oolong-tea producing areas are on the southeast coast of China e.g. Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan.
Pu-er or Puer tea is one that has undergone years of fermentation, giving it a unique earthy flavor. This variety of tea is usually compressed into different shapes like bricks, discs and bowls.
There can be various mixtures of flowers with green tea, black tea or oolong tea. Flowers used include jasmine, gardenia, magnolia, grapefruit flower, sweet-scented Osmanthus and Rose. There are strict rules about the proportion of flowers to tea. Jasmine tea is the most popular type of scented tea, and is often the most popular type of tea served at yum cha establishments.
It is customary to pour tea for others during dim sum before filling one's own cup. A custom unique to the Cantonese is to thank the person pouring the tea by tapping the bent index finger if you are single, or by tapping both the index and middle finger if you are married, which symbolizes 'bowing' to them.
Leaving the pot lid open is another common way of attracting a server's attention and indicates a request for the server to pour hot water into the teapot.