Culinarily, dim sum is a case study in gelatin. It’s not real gelatin, the one formed by the denaturing of collagen in a braised dish, but that shiny, contrasting, creamy texture, that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s a starch and protein thing. Translucent dumpling wrappers and delicate steamed buns evoke it, and slow-cooked pork (and, in some instances, chicken feet) lends real gelatin to thicken fillings and soups. What is generally relegated to stocks and braises in Western cuisine is in dim sum the focus, a sensory testament to the marvelous powers of heat, moisture and time.
That said, in many of the items on a dim sum menu some element imposes itself on this gelatinized base. It might be the deep-fried exterior of the shrimp ball or a quick searing for taro cakes, but the contrast is always evident. Many of the tiny entrees have long preparation times or complex manual labor involved, and some dim sum restaurants serve as many as a hundred items on their weekend menus. To say that dim sum is labor-intensive is to understate the issue.
So why am I telling you all this? Because dim sum means “touch the heart,” and touch my heart it has. With the help and translation of Betty Lee, I was invited to spend some time in Dim Sum, a Cantonese restaurant on Central Avenue. Lee is the best Chinese “home cook” I have ever met, if someone who cooks dishes for eighty people can be called a home cook. Dim Sum serves up some of the highest quality Chinese food available in the city. The restaurant is the product of a trio of experienced, talented chefs – owner Kent Chan, barbecue chef Ming Wong, and dim sum chef Peter Pang have known each other for thirty years, since their adolescence in Hong Kong. The trio parted ways when they left Hong Kong but have since reconnected in Charlotte. The menu includes authentic Chinese fare side by side with more familiar American Chinese dishes such as chop suey and fried rice.
Dim Sum’s kitchen looks unusual to an American cook. Wok stations and basket steamers replace the more familiar stoves and their associated ovens. Whole ducks hang on hooks in a seven-foot tall barbecue oven. It’s completely open, without any racks. The ducks are slowly basted by their own fat as they cook over the course of an hour or two. As we arrive, Pang is making turnip cake batter in a huge wok. This is a mishmash of daikon radish and rice flour that will be poured into a pan and steamed, and then cut into slices and pan-seared just before service. He adds dried shrimp as he explains to us the method of preparation. Lee tells me later that the Chinese words for “turnip” and “radish” are the same, which is why the turnip cake contains no turnips. We won’t get to try these for another hour or two; they’ve got an extended visit to the steamer scheduled.
Talking as he goes, Pang moves across the kitchen to a mixer, where he starts to make the dough for har gau (shrimp dumplings). He dumps wheat starch, potato starch and tapioca powder into the bowl and adds boiling water – just the right amount, without any measuring or scaling. The water has to be boiling, he says, or the dough won’t come together. Western bakers call this “cleanup.”
This traditional Cantonese morning meal was derived in part from the need for merchants on the Silk Road to rest and eat. Service would begin in the roadside teahouses in the early morning and frequently extend only until mid-afternoon; many dim sum restaurants in the United States, therefore, serve only in the morning, and some only on weekends. Charlotte’s Dim Sum is a little different. Though the weekend menu is a little more extensive, dim sum items can be ordered at any time of day, alongside an extensive menu of traditional and contemporary Chinese cuisine.
Watching Pang make dumpling wrappers is a revelatory experience. It’s not often I see something in the culinary arts that I know I could never duplicate, but here it is: should I stop now and dedicate my life to dumpling-craft, or accept that this is beyond my ken? Snip. WHAM. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Pang uses a special cleaver, lightly oiled and wrapped in a side towel after use, to remove precisely the
amount of dough he needs for a single dumpling.
“It’s not very sharp,” he says to Lee. Using the flat of the blade, Pang smashes the ball of dough, forcing it into a nearly perfect circle. Each wrapper is slightly thinner on one side to compensate for the pleats that will seal the dumpling. He scrapes the wrapper from the cutting board. “Only wood will work.” Pang makes every dumpling skin this way. They’re never stored or frozen. For me, it would take ages, eons. But Pang has been doing this for 25 years, and he’s a little faster.
Next to us, a gaggle of prep cooks fill Pang’s dumplings with shrimp stuffing and seal them; this particular skin is used for only a handful of dim sum: har gau, the aforementioned shrimp stuffing, and shrimp and scallop dumplings. Different crimps are used when sealing the dumplings, to distinguish between them, and then they’re steamed until done. The skins are mottled white when the dumplings are removed from the steamer, but as they cool they become translucent—there’s that gelatinization again. The whole process is done by hand; nothing is automated and nothing is “bought-in,” that is, purchased fully prepared and merely cooked on-site. As the assembled morsels are finished, my desperate call of “I’ve never had this! What is it?” is answered with a hail of foodstuffs: shrimp crêpes, deep-fried shrimp balls, crispy taro dumplings, turnip and taro cakes, and leek dumplings. All are delicious.
Before we break for lunch, Pang asks me a curious question. Can I make croissants? Well, of course I can make croissants; that’s first-year culinary student fodder. I’d be happy to teach him. He demurs. “I just need the recipe, and then I can figure out how to make it.”
Lee and I are run out of the kitchen, plates piled with rice, broccoli and steamed fish. “I’ll never eat all this,” I remark to her.
“Just eat the fish,” she advises. I do. It’s simply prepared, perfectly cooked and delicately flavored with ginger, scallions, a touch of soy sauce and the slightest splash of sizzling hot oil. It’s probably the best steamed fish I’ve ever had. And they serve it for family meal! It’s available on the menu. Ask for the steamed sea bass.
As we wrap up our lunch and, with it, our visit, a case of live lobster arrives. Pang and Wong, the barbecue chef, seem excited by this. Pang asks me if I know of “wok hay,” the breath of the wok. I don’t. He explains that wok stations in restaurant kitchens reach temperatures that would make Vulcan envious; temperatures of 1400° F are not unheard of, and BTU levels are completely astronomical – as much as 200,000 in some Hong Kong restaurants. “Wok hay” is the Cantonese term for the confluence of well-seasoned carbon steel,fresh ingredients, and incredible heat--a kind of Maillard reaction on steroids--which produces flavor and aromatic compounds unavailable to those of us cooking with the more modest gas. Not everything cooked in a wok receives this incendiary treatment, but these lobsters will, cooked briefly with scallions and ginger. Pang laments his inability to elicit the wok’s spirit at home; his stove just doesn’t get hot enough, and he can’t produce dishes like the lobster with ginger and scallions without that heat. Lee and I make our way back to the car. The next day, I return to Dim Sum with the croissant recipe for Pang.
On the way home, I buy a carbon steel wok and a steamer basket. My dumplings are uneven.
~Marcus Walser
Dim Sum
2920 Central Ave (just outside of Plaza Midwood on Central)
Hours: Mon. - Fri. 11am - 10pm
704.569.1128 |
