ESSAYS SCIENCE Behind the Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index 52 restaurants, a 200 g/0.01 g scale, a pair of 0‐150mm digital calipers, and an appetite.

By CHRISTOPHER ST. CAVISH

he Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index has launched. (http://www.theshanghaisoupdumplingindex.com/) Technically speaking, it is a “quantitative interpretation of the colloquial standards for a well­constructed soup T dumpling.” Anyone in Shanghai with an appetite can recite a variation of those standards: thin skin, plentiful soup, abundant filling, fresh meat ( , , , ). Each restaurant is given a score based on the formula (weight of soup + weight of filling) ÷ thickness of the skin, and then grouped into one of three classes. Class A is the best.

The index is a long, ridiculous project boiled down to an A3 poster with a visual representation on one side and an objective analysis on the other. Soup dumplings plus science. A lot of soup dumplings.

In service of the Index, I have eaten 7.243 kilograms of soup dumplings in the past sixteen months. Rather, I have ordered 7.243 kilograms of soup dumplings, one basket of six—or sometimes five, or sometimes eight, and once, twenty—at a time. I gave up trying to finish them around establishment #11, Nanjing Tangbao (Class A), after realizing that the actual eating was much harder than my data collection, which consisted of weighing each dumpling on a digital scale before dissecting it, measuring the weight of the soup and filling separately, and whipping out my digital calipers for the skin. About a year and exactly forty­three shops later, I had ordered, partially consumed, and thoroughly examined a quantity of soup dumplings as heavy as the maximum legal limit for a bowling ball.

The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index is the end result. It’s a visual representation of the variance of Nanxiang­style soup dumplings, or what’s commonly called the Shanghai xiao long bao. (Nanxiang was once a nearby town. As Shanghai’s city boundaries have crept westward, Nanxiang has now become just another far­flung stop on the city’s Metro network.) It’s a spreadsheet collection of soup­filling­skin ratios, a treatise on the thinning skins of soup dumplings in Shanghai, and an eraser on every “I like it because it’s delicious” comment. Delicious to whom? Why? Is that an objective fact, or a memory of going to that restaurant twenty­two years ago and sitting on your mom’s lap? Define your delicious for me, please. Or at least the architecture you use to build that conclusion.

Mine starts with this: a xiao long bao must be filled with pork. Crab, crab roe, and Chinese black truffles are all delicious in a soup dumpling, and all readily available in Shanghai, but they do not qualify. The only permitted seasonings are spring onions, ginger, Shaoxing wine, sugar, or MSG—but not too much. The soup dumplings must be of the Nanxiang class, not the Suzhou or Wuxi class, which are named for their respective cities of origin —both within a thirty­minute train ride of Shanghai—and may be confused for Nanxiang xiao long bao to the untrained eye. In fact, there is a debate whether these are xiao long bao, “small bamboo steamer dumplings,” or just tang bao, literally “soup dumplings”—but if there is something more boring than picking these semantics apart, I can’t think of it. I use the terms interchangeably, and hope for a day when all of our children can come together and do the same.

There are hundreds of Nanxiang­, Suzhou­, and Wuxi­style chains in Shanghai, and they append “xiao long bao” or “tang bao” as they please. What is important to know is that Suzhou and Wuxi soup dumplings are larger than Nanxiang­style xiao long bao by up to 50 percent, and they are heavily seasoned with sugar and soy sauce. Amber, syrupy broth is a sure sign you are in the wrong category.

Next comes the engineering. A soup dumpling is basically a balance between two competing forces: a thin­as­possible skin (whose purpose is to transport a meatball and soup, and then get out of the way) and as much filling as possible. There is a debate here as well, over the thickness of the skin, and whether a thicker wrapper represents a lack of technical faculty or a theoretical position on the balance of wheat flavor a dumpling should achieve. I subscribe to the former school of thought. There is no shortage of thick­skinned dumplings in China, filled with pork, even with soup; if you want one like that, don’t eat a xiao long bao. The elegance of a soup dumpling is its poise, the narrow margin that a cook must master to overcome the physics of a hot, wet package that wants to break. Soup dumplings are feminine. Sheng jian bao, a doughy, leavened dumpling that’s tough enough to survive a pan­fry and retain its pork and soup, are masculine. They are built of different stuff.

The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index started with an ulterior motive: as a defense of Taiwanese chain Din Tai Fung. This is another fraught issue in Shanghai that must be addressed up front: the contest between Shanghai’s homegrown Jia Jia Tang Bao (Shop #35; Class A) and Din Tai Fung (Shop #14; Class A), a corporate raider from Taiwan. There wasn’t a clear answer when I started, and I haven’t found one since, but I set out thinking I’d collect a bit of hard proof about skin thickness.

Living in China has cured me of my teenage aversion to big business. I like chain restaurants (any successful restaurant in Shanghai quickly opens more); I go to malls to eat (e­commerce has fucked landlords, who now stock their malls with even more restaurants than before in order to compete); I prefer Tyson chicken over a stressed live chicken from a street market (bird flu, rigor mortis). I am in awe of Din Tai Fung’s consistency, quality, and service. The argument against Din Tai Fung goes like this: It is corporate, it is for foreigners who don’t know any better, and it is overpriced. A basket of standard pork xiao long bao costs about 58 RMB there, depending on location—$9.50 US—or 5.8 RMB per dumpling, compared to 1.1 RMB each at Jia Jia Tang Bao. The counter­argument: “Chain” is not a bad word in China, and even if it was, these days Jia Jia Tang Bao is a chain as well. At least 80 percent of Din Tai Fung’s customers are Chinese, according to the company, and $9.50 is still reasonable for when tiny orange stools, a shared table, and a sticky floor—on offer at Jia Jia Tang Bao—aren’t what you’re going for. (Jia Jia also gets tripped up in the silly “authenticity” argument, on account of its ever­present queue and packed tables of locals. Listen closer to the accents, and you will realize that no small amount of these “locals” are tourists from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.) The arguments are rarely about the actual dumplings.

I still think Din Tai Fung’s xiao long bao are excellent, though my opinion has become more nuanced. Skins: you can find thinner ones at six other stores in Shanghai, including, ironically, at a Din Tai Fung rip­off. But few match their delicacy—the eighteen folds that close their dumplings—or their pure, clear soup. The point of difference is the filling. Din Tai Fung’s pork is mild. “Light,” if you like it; “bland,” if you’re a member of the Fuchun camp (Shop #38; Class B) that likes a strong pork flavor and doesn’t mind a thicker skin. The savoriness or “pork­iness” is the most elusive factor, unquantifiable without analysis by potentiometric solid­state electrodes or near­infrared spectroscopy. Jia Jia Tang Bao is somewhere in the middle in the porky factor; to deviate again from my objective pretense, they are also excellent.

I was nervous that first day in December 2013 when I started collecting data. I kept my Kubei 200 gram/0.01 gram scale and Mitutoyo 0­150mm digital calipers (Model 500­196­20) hidden on my lap, shuffling dumplings on and off, undoubtedly looking all the more suspicious. In fact, no one cared. At Qin Huai Fang a few weeks later (Shop #15; Class C), I shared a table the size of a Monopoly board with the auntie who makes the dumplings. She was off dumpling duty and hunched over a bowl of soup noodles, close enough to head­butt me. My side of the table was covered in a yellow legal pad, scissors, and my analysis kit, with hardly any room left for the bamboo basket. Surely, I thought, I’m going to have some explaining to do. She didn’t look up once.

At other shops, the best I’d get was a double­take from another customer. I thought Din Tai Fung would be different, a rigid corporate environment that would be quick to spot and eradicate corporate espionage. Instead I drew an unfailingly polite manager who killed me with kindness, and then handed me her business card.

It was only at Qiancheng Jiu Jia (Shop #8: Class C), a workingman’s dumpling shop in a workingman’s neighborhood, that anyone took notice. It was late afternoon and the only other customer was a Shanghainese woman in her sixties. As I lifted the first specimen out of the steamer basket with my fingers—chopsticks are not for science—and started to dissect it, she turned to look at me. I ate as I went. First the soup, tipped out of my tiny measuring dish. Then the meatball, tossed back like a shot. And then the empty skin. She began muttering. Around dumpling number five, she stood up, furious, and not much bigger than a dumpling herself, to yell at me. “Don’t you know how to eat a xiao long bao? What are you doing?! You can’t eat it like this! That’s wrong! Wrong!” She walked off in disgust, shaking her head at the barbarians eating soup dumplings piecemeal, with scissors.

There are limits to the engineering formula. At Taikang Tangbao (Shop #25; Class C), one of many revered old brands in China that should be quietly put to sleep, I was duped by an adorable scene at the table next to me. A mom in her thirties was leaning on the table, lovingly staring at her daughter. The daughter was dangling her feet off the banquette, digging into her plate with full focus. I half expected to see a banana split at the end of her chopsticks. Instead, it was a monster crab roe soup dumpling. I was moved by the scene. I’d had the standard­issue pork soup dumplings. I needed the love.

Ten minutes later, a plastic­gloved hand palmed an orange­sized dumpling on to my plate, which was itself balanced on an ornate stand. The dumpling blew my formula apart. It weighed 85.69 grams, 314 percent larger than the average soup dumpling in Shanghai, and yet its skin was just 1.44­mm thick.

I snipped the top. The skin was rigid. A flood of sewage­looking liquid rushed out, crested over the side of the plate, and fell onto my notebook and scale. The smell of old crab wafted up. The formula wouldn’t tell you any of this, or that the wrapper was thin but as hard as plastic. I did not have a tool to measure the shear force. Fortunately, I had a category for these: Class C. Disqualified.

The first time I went to Zun Ke Lai, which would top the index, the staff was positively giggling as I snapped photos. It was only later, after I paid for their master pleater to make me nine baskets of xiao long bao for a time trial, and then dissected her handiwork over the course of an hour, that their friendliness evaporated. At You Yi Cun, the manager who was assigned to the place decades ago, under the old planned economy, bullied her old­timer customers to give me and a guest two seats together. A few months later, when I came back to interview her, she tossed off quick answers to my technical questions and then turned her bullying on me. The chef at Ding Xin Di told me the story of how he ended up a dim sum chef. He was assigned to the state guesthouse, which then assigned him to the kitchen, where he was lined up with all the other new employees by height. Tall ones went to work the woks; short ones went to the dim sum kitchen, presumably for their small hands. (Average­height cooks were doomed to a career of cutting and prep work.)

And at Jia Jia Tang Bao, the second­generation owner spun a marvelous tale of how the once­wealthy proprietors, ruined by the class revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, found themselves struggling for a living in the 1980s, and turned to the memories of dim sum from their privileged childhoods. They didn’t cook in those days. They had cooks. But they turned those memories into a sixty­square­foot shop, which eventually found what passes for fame in the world of soup dumplings—a long line—and became a Shanghai institution. The family rebounded. Most left for Chicago, and the current owner is not far behind, perhaps with his chain in tow.

I couldn’t measure those stories. I wouldn’t want to. I don’t have the tools and I didn’t want them influence to me. The Index is a scientific project, an objective look at a simple packet of pork, gelatinized broth, and a wheat skin. A questionable idea extended far enough to become ridiculous. Or important—but that’s not for me to judge. I know how many millimeters make a difference to the mouth feel of a soup dumpling wrapper, and I can judge a dumpling by looking at the drape of its wrapper over a meatball, but that’s where I stop. The Index is done.

You can download or order the Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index on theshanghaisoupdumplingindex.com (http://www.theshanghaisoupdumplingindex.com/), and read more about it here (http://luckypeach.com/the­shanghai­soup­dumpling­index­ faqs/).

Photographs by Christopher St. Cavish

CHINA, CHINESE, SHANGHAI, SOUP DUMPLINGS, XIAO LONG BAO