The history of dim sum as told to Lucky Peach

The "Chinatown" issue of hipster food magazine Lucky Peach just hit the stands, and a combo article by moi is in there.

Called "The Beginner's Field Guide to Dim Sum," this introduces the history behind one of China's most gracious contributions to human civilization. This elegant definition of afternoon sloth around the dining table is none other than the glorious Cantonese tradition of enjoying a dim sum meal in an endless relay of tiny dishes. 

The article then breaks form and segues into an actual field guide replete with detailed line drawings on the best of the best dim sum, replete with their backgrounds and contents and the occasional weird story. The featured 24 delectable culprits have contributed to the delinquency of many a food tourist who wandered into a Hong Kong or Chinatown teahouse one day and was never quite the same again. 

If you relied only on the cover, you would never know that I was in there in a spread that stretches across eleven pages. No, I am not famous enough for that. 

I sob quietly as the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Fuchsia Dunlop, Martin Yan, and Danny Bowein bask in the limelight. But to be fair, a tiny slice of "Dim Sum" can be seen to the immediate left of the Lucky in Lucky Peach, so I guess I qualify as sort of a walk-on role here in a major crowd scene.

Chicken buns, or jibaozi

Be that as it may, I feel just like a small-town girl who landed a bit part in a major motion picture. I even got to draw everything here, and that was loads of fun. (Be on the lookout for a goldfish jiaozi with green eyes.)

If you do get your hands on a copy, please check out the article by the brilliant Harold McGee on "酒餅," which means jiubing, or Homemade Fermented Rice. Highly recommended.  

Lucky Peach is not yet available online, so you'll have to read it while you're standing in line at Whole Foods. When you do, turn to the blushing pink pages that run from 114 to 124, the ones that are bedecked with ink drawings that garnish "The Beginner's Field Guide to Dim Sum," which starts out like this...

"Nowadays, the terms "dim sum" (點心 in written Chinese and pronounced dianxin in Mandarin) encompasses a vast roster of small dishes selected from carts (rather than ordered from menus) in Hong Kong-style restaurants that serve little else during the daylight hours.

My drawing of Taotaoju
teahouse in Guangzhou

"In the beginning, dianxin was a verb that merely meant 'to eat a little something.' The first recorded use of the term dianxin comes from about 1,000 years ago. In the Tang shu 唐書 (History of the Tang), the wife of a man called Zheng Can said, 'I haven't finished putting on my makeup and so cannot eat yet, so you should first have a little something to eat (dianxin).'

"Around the year 1300, dianxin turned into a noun that referred to snacks and very light meals, a definition that has more or less remained unchanged to this day. In the entry for dianxin in every authoritative Chinese dictionary, this always appears as a complete term that cannot be reduced and thus defined according to its individual characters. What this means is that rather than translating to 'dot heart' or 'touching the heart' or 'a little bit of heart' -- which is what these characters mean separately -- the term dianxin refers solely to snacks and so has nothing to do with the heart at all, much in the same way that in English a 'cocktail' has no feathers..."

When you get to the actual field guide, be sure and read about Steamed Pork Buns, aka char siu bao, for "in Hong Kong, char siu bao suffers a reputation like that of hot dogs in the U.S. -- it's thought that any mystery meat could end up inside, even human. This urban legend was memorialized in a bloody 1993 Hong Kong movie called The Eight Immortals Restaurant: The Untold Story...."

Bon appetit!

Both ink drawings by Carolyn Phillips,copyright (c) 2012; all rights reserved.

The world's most insanely beautiful noodles

Chinese noodles... we've all had them. Depending upon who makes them, they can be good, they can be lousy, they can be soft and silky, they can be soggy or doughy, they can be snappingly chewy, and they can be slithery conduits for sauce or soup. Noodles can easily make or break a dish, but you almost never hear the word "glorious" applied to what in fact is little more than strings of flour and water. 

Pulled noodles, though... now those are my idea of perfectly glorious food! But what's the big deal, right? After all, what are noodles anyway but flour and water? 

It's just not that simple, at least not when it comes to what the Chinese call lamian (pulled noodles) or shoulamian (hand-pulled noodles). Pulled noodles are truly extraordinary. They're totally different from any other noodle that I know of because of the artistry involved in shaping them and the resulting texture. (See the embedded video below for an almost 10-minute performance by Chef Tony Wu as he turns a blob of dough into thousands of threadlike strands, with Chef Martin Yan narrating.)

And yes, this is artistry in my book. This takes talent. This takes practice. And this takes the right ingredients.

If you've never seen them made or you've never enjoyed a ridiculously sensuous  mouthful of these delicate strands, I fully understand your skepticism and envy the moment when you take that first bite, because if you love noodles, you'll get a rush of pure joy. 

A skein of noodles in the making

It takes a master to pull these off (that was a pun, folks), and masters of this caliber are few and far between, especially outside of China. Let's first talk about why these pulled noodles are so perfect and some of the secrets I've been able to glean as to how they are made, and then come back to a video of a noodle master at work.

Pulled noodles are so great because the repeated pulling and twisting of the high-gluten dough results in an extremely resilient noodle. Water is added to the flour, it's kneaded until it's very smooth, and then it's left to rest until the dough becomes as soft as a baby's bottom. You can see how soft the dough is when the chef in the video starts pulling the dough, as the ends keep coming off, but that soon ends as the dough toughens up.

Chefs Yan & Wu having fun

Note that the chef keeps pulling away, but always in the same direction. The reason for this is that the gluten has been rudely startled out of its nice floury stupor and has come alive, ordering up all of its tiny protein strands into extremely tensile threads, and by carefully folding the dough back on itself in one direction, the strands get lined up, and then the noodles allow themselves to be pulled longer and longer and longer, all the while stretching out their tense little gluten muscles. So, when you bite down on them, they fight back a bit, and that is my idea of a wonderful noodle. Another thing is, all that pulling ensures that the surface of the noodle gets covered with little crags and jaggedly bits.


Why is that important, you may ask. Well, unlike rolled noodles that are soft and smooth and have the texture of silk sheets, those bumpy surfaces on lamian cradle droplets of sauce and soup, making each mouthful a mind-blowing combination of flavors. See, you don't have to slurp up your soup with a mouthful of these noodles - they're toting all those flavors on their own, thank you very much. And if you get a lusciously rich meat sauce on them with tiny nuggets, say, of garlic and ginger? What happens is that all those flavors are going to have a big party in your mouth, so you've got textures, tastes, aromas, mouth feel, and pure bliss, just from a mouthful of noodles.

Dragon whisker noodles

So, we have all the reasons for why the noodles do what they do, but what allows them to be pulled so perfectly? What are those secret little knacks that no one wants to mention? The answer to this eluded me for years. I talked to folks from Shanxi province up in the cold Chinese north where these noodles came from, but nothing was revealed. I read Chinese cookbooks, tracked down Chinese websites, and searched around for the longest time trying to ferret out the answer. And it wasn't until about a year ago that I finally landed a few of those precious ah-ha moments.

What happened was that famed Chinese chef Martin Yan came to our area last October and hosted an event called the Noodle Fest in Celebration of Autumn Moon. What's even better, we had a chance to meet and eat with this completely charming and personable t.v. host. The food and the wines were, as to be expected, more than simply fine, located as we were in his Yan Can Cook restaurant in the South Bay. There were little lessons on fruit and vegetable carving that warmed up our appetites and made us happy to be there. These alone should have been enough.

But then we had a fabulous demonstration of Shanxi province's bizarrely beautiful pulled noodles. Performing the honors was the astounding Tony Wu, executive chef of Fortune House Seafood Restaurant in Burnaby, B.C.

After watching Chef Wu at work, I figured out at least four secrets to pulled noodles: To begin with, they have to be made with Chinese high-gluten flour, which is a totally different animal from American bread flour. Chef Yan told a story about trying to bring Chinese noodle flour into the States and getting lots of grief from Customs, so that was clue number one.

Try this flour

Many of the Chinese flours I've tried have been of uneven quality, and about the best that I have found for Chinese dough is actually a Korean brand with a polar bear as the trademark; it comes in a white bag with green on it, and there's an illustration of a bowl full of dough and bread fixin's (see the photo on the left). I've used this flour for lots of Chinese noodles and breads, and it's the best I've found by far insofar as gluten count and quality of the product are concerned. The same brand also offers a flour with blue on it, and that's the low-gluten variety, so don't pick up the wrong kind.


The second secret has to do with moisture, I think. Watch the video below and see how Chef Wu skillfully pulls and winds the skein of noodles - it's a pretty wet dough to begin with that dries and toughens as the pulling gets going. Filtered water would be a good idea because at least in my area we have terribly hard water, and all those chemicals wouldn't do the dough any favors.

Water is important in another way, as well. Chef Yan pointed out that California's air is notoriously dry, and so the dough quickly becomes brittle if water isn't added at critical times. You can see Chef Wu occasionally dipping a hand into a pan of water, which drips down onto the dough and turns it supple again. Flour is scattered over the dough only at the end when he's ready to turn the dough into noodles, and then the dough is dipped in the flour at regular intervals so that the strands take on a bit of the flour and stay separate.

The finished noodles, fine as threads

A third key that Chef Yan mentioned was that the dough is twisted one way and then twisted in the opposite direction the second time around. That makes sense. In this way the dough strands stay more or less straight, because if the dough was twisted in only one direction, the strands would soon tighten up into an angry coil that nothing could ever untie.


Finally, even pressure is used in the pulling. And towards the end, when the strands are much more brittle, this careful monitoring of how much and how little pressure to exert on the dough appears critical.


Anyway, that's what I gleaned from watching these delightful chefs at work.

I'm still working on the ingredients, which seem to be little more than the flour, water, and some salt. I haven't discovered any secret additives yet. If I do, you'll be the first to know... (And if you happen to have any lamian secrets to share, please post a comment!)

Chef Tony Wu's pulled noodles, with Chef Martin Yan from C J Phillips on Vimeo.

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