Dim Sum
Forty years and a thousand dim sum later, I was in Hong Kong, which is to dim sum what New Orleans is to gumbo soup. The charming and super efficient PR woman at the Peninsula Palace – one of Hong Kong’s top hotels -- arranged a one hour cooking lesson for me from the hotel’s master dim sum chef.
The chef first took me on a tour. The kitchen was on three floors – top floor for dim
sum, grills and a phalanx of woks. Middle floor – pastry, slow simmered soups stocks and roasting ovens for duck and suckling pig. There were also pots for blanching veggies and meats (Chinese cooking often calls for briefly boiling meat and poultry before roasting). Bottom floor – dish and pot washing, storage, and lockers for the kitchen staff of 27. I’m no expert on kitchen layout and logistics but it all seemed to make great sense. And the level of cleanliness would have impressed even my mother.
The tour ended at the dim sum tables, normally manned (Chinese kitchens are heavily male) by six dim sum specialists. Now the lesson began.
First step: making the paper-thin wrappings of high class dim sum. We started by mixing water, flour and starch (no salt) and kneading the resultant elastic dough into a melon-size oblong, which was then rolled into a sort of white snake. So far I was able to keep up. Next step: cutting off a small piece of the snake and mashing it into a pancake with the heel of the hand. The hard part was next: using an oiled cleaver to squeeze the dough outward and spread it into a thin round, which was then stacked with previously (and more expertly) done rounds.
Now the filling for the first dim sums – har gow shrimp dumplings. You take three medium shrimps, squash two of them into a chunky goop, cut the third one into two pieces and mix it into the goop. That’s then placed carefully in the center of a wrapper, which is crimped closed into the classic har gow shape.
I did OK until then. The chef was working at space warp speed and producing perfect, identical har gows. Me? The wrappers tore in my hands, the filling oozed out, and the edge crimping looked as if it were done by an especially clumsy chimpanzee. So we tried again. Same result. The chef reassured me: “I’ve been doing it for 36 years, and my first har gows looked like yours” I’m sure he was lying, but I was grateful anyway.
Eventually his dumplings and mine were put into steamers, cooked for a couple of minutes, and placed in front of us with chop sticks and little saucers of soy. I thought it 
would be courteous to eat one of his first. It was delicious and held nicely together even when I picked it up with my chopsticks and dunked it in the soy sauce. My har gow, alas, separated into filling and wrapper the moment my chopsticks touched it. I popped the pieces in my mouth as the entire dim sum staff looked on smiling. It passed the taste test. We ate a couple more and drank a celebratory glass of tea.
When I joined my wife and Suzy Gershman for lunch, lo and behold, there were my remaining har gows – along with plate after plate of other and far more attractive dim sum. We ate them all, every single one. har gow So, for the first time in years, I ended up fully dim-summed -- and convinced that I would leave the making of dim sum to the guys who know how to do it.
