Cantonese Dumplings  (Wuntun雲吞)

As Cantonese people are extremely demanding about their foods, they have always tried to innovate and re-create the foods that are introduced from other places in order to suit their tastes. One prime example is the dumpling soup. As the local history of Canton has it, that dumpling soup was a dish that was introduced from the northern part of China in Qing Dynasty in the early nineteenth century. Dumplings from the North according to local Cantonese had too strong taste, too rough materials and too monotonous compositions.

For the local Cantonese, the best foods should be delicate, smooth, easy to chew but not so slack, the interactions between the teeth and the foods should be consistent, sufficient but not ineptly tiresome. Traditionally, northern dumplings were only composed of several kinds of meats hastily wrapped up by flour layer. The taste was intolerably intense and dominating because chives was added.

The Cantonese took a totally different approach. They renovated not only the layers and the materials contained inside, but also the soup. It is no longer a flour layer, but rather a thin piece of smooth mixture of flour and egg fluids; the materials inside are not just pork, but are mixture of pork, chives and shrimps. The layer contains most part of the materials inside, and a stitch is left and will be filled with egg-yolk fluids. The pork should be carefully chosen, better to be 30% fat. The size of Cantonese dumpling is strictly calculated: the perfect size for a Cantonese dumpling is to be swallowed with one mouthful.

Big shrimps visible through the transluscent layer made up with flour and egg-yolk

The soup of Cantonese dumplings (wuntun) is also innovated, as it is no longer plainly boiled. Instead it is soup cooked with fish and pig bones. The thicker the soup, the better it will taste. Most of the time, it takes three hours to finish cooking a jar of soup like this. To increase the aroma of the soup, some restaurants might add shrimp eggs, which belongs to much higher level. But some other might use shrimp shells in the bottom of their boilers in order to produce the same aroma. Actually both taste the same but the shrimp shells can make people’s temperament violent.

Besides dumplings and soup, a dish of Cantonese dumplings actually includes the noodles in the soup. The noodles are not just plainly flour-made noodles in the North; rather it is made of a mixture of flour and egg fluids in the proportion of 100:55. In the process of making noodles out of such pile of mixture, any drops of water should be avoided in order to increase the flexibility of the noodles. To formulate beams of noodles, experienced chefs use bamboo basket to filter out the beams from the pile of the mixture. This process will take almost two hours.

When the soup is boiled, noodles should be thrown into the boiling soup soon after the dumplings. A specially made spoon will drag the noodles to the bottom of the huge soup-container, and the noodles are not supposed to stay inside the soup for more than twenty seconds!

Compared with Mandarin dumplings from the North, Cantonese dumplings are apparently more popular in Canton. Wuntun, as the local Cantonese people call it, is more lovely, more delicate, and less aggressive than the Mandarin dumplings. The difficult processes of preparing the soup and the noodles also reflect a typical outlook on living of the Cantonese people.