There’s a good reason this Chinese dumpling is now everywhere

The dish: Xiao long bao, China

Plate up

Consider the foreign dishes that once seemed so unusual in Australia, and yet now form part of mainstream dining. Pho, the Vietnamese soup, would be one of them – once exotic, now ubiquitous. Thai curries. Even humble Italian pasta was once viewed as bizarre. And now let’s add to that list Chinese xiao long bao.

Xiao Long Bao: Joining a list of culinary favourites.Credit: Wayne Taylor

The much-loved “soup dumplings” were almost impossible to find in Australia just a few decades ago, but now they’re everywhere (to the point that if you say to someone you feel like “XLBs”, they’ll probably know what you’re talking about).

The reason for their ubiquity is they’re just so good. The basics are simple: a flour-based dough wrapper is filled with pork mince and gelatinised pork stock, which is then steamed until the wrapper and meat cooks and the stock liquefies. Easy? Take one look at the delicacy of the folds in each small dumpling, and you immediately understand the skill required.

First serve

The history of the xiao long bao is simple and easy to define. Ha, just kidding. There are, as ever, several stories to its creation. One has it that the dumplings were invented in the Shanghai district of Nanxiang in the 1870s by a man named Huang Mingxian. Another popular legend is that Emperor Qianlong, who died in 1799, discovered the dumplings in nearby Wuxi. And finally, cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop says these soupy dumps were developed by shops around Nanxiang’s Guyi Gardens, before being popularised in central Shanghai in the early 20th century.

Order there

It might be something of a chain store, and hardly a local secret, but Jia Jia Tang Bao in Shanghai does a seriously good XLB (no website).

Order here

Whether you’re in Sydney or Melbourne, you can’t go wrong with the xiao long bao at Din Tai Fung (dintaifungaustralia.com.au) – we will explain why below. In Brisbane, head to New Shanghai (newshanghai.com.au).

One more thing

The global popularity of xiao long bao is almost unanimously credited to a Taiwanese restaurant: Din Tai Fung. The now-worldwide chain began in Taipei in the 1950s as a cooking oil shop, and only switched to serving XLBs when the owner, Yang Bing-Yi, was struggling to sell oil in the 1970s.