when it comes to chinese food
few dishes are as recognizable as the
bow
the chinese word originally looked like
a baby in a womb
the delicious bun wrapped filling varies
across china and its culinary history
and the strict definition of what a bow
is gets murky depending on who you ask
and where you go
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let's start with this what is a bow made
of
in its most generic form the skin is
wheat
flour water and yeast the dough is
usually made
hours beforehand and left to rise so
that it's easy to shape
the filling usually consists of fatty
ground pork
mixed in with aromatics it's then
wrapped so that the filling doesn't fall
out
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finally more often than not it's steamed
because wheat flour was more typically
found in northern china
it said that the archetypal bow
originated there
and as trade routes developed variations
of it began to exist
all over china and now many provinces
have their own renditions
with different types of fillings skin
and cooking methodology in guangdong
there's cha bao fluffy buns stuffed with
the iconic sweet barbecue pork of the
region
in shandong there's pan-fried pork buns
and in shanghai there's xiaolongbao
soup-filled dumplings
but wait what's the difference between a
bow and a dumpling
to be honest not much in chinese
this is a xiaolongbao but in english
it's sometimes called a soup dumpling we
asked twitter
and got a wide range of answers
bows tend to be more fluffy and dry
right
pretty sure bows are steamed and
dumplings are boiled
wait but can a bow also be a dumpling
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we found the formal definition of a
dumpling according to the
merriam-webster dictionary
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a dumpling is a small mass of dough
cooked by boiling or steaming
so is this jalon bao also a dumpling
yes then we tried to define a bow by
mapping its characteristics
we found that while most vows have a
thicker wrapper and are steamed
there are exceptions to this rule the
xiaolongbao for instance
so is xiaolongbao also a bao yes
semantics aside boughs are a universal
dish within china
and while we've profiled them many times
before
this season we'll be diving into
regional bow variations from shanton
futien shanghai
hong kong and sinjiang
and we'll show you how they're made and
what's in them
you'll find out that there's a lot more
to about than just a bun
and a filling for the first episode
we'll be going to shanghai to see how
soup dumplings are put together
and what makes them so well soupy
stay tuned
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