Shengjianbao: Shanghai's pan-fried soup buns, and how to eat them

Overview

A shengjianbao is a pan-fried pork bun with a crisp golden base, a soft steamed top and a mouthful of hot broth hidden inside. It is the griddle cousin of the steamed soup dumpling: the same trick of setting pork-skin jelly into the filling so it melts to soup in the heat, but wrapped in a thicker, faintly leavened dough and cooked in a wide flat iron pan rather than a bamboo basket. The buns are packed into the pan in a tight spiral, fried until the underside is deep brown and crackling, then a little water is poured in and a lid dropped on so the tops steam through. Sesame seeds and chopped spring onion go on at the end. The result is a single object with two textures — shattering-crisp underneath, pillowy above — which is the whole point of it.

In Shanghai it is as often called shengjian mantou, the older local name (in the local Wu speech a filled bun could be a mantou), and you will see both on signs. It is a morning and mid-afternoon street food, an everyday snack rather than a restaurant dish, and it belongs to this city in a way few things do: it grew up in the teahouses and snack stalls here in the early twentieth century and never became a national staple the way steamed buns did.

What to order

You usually order shengjianbao by the portion, and the portion is small — four buns is a common unit, enough for a snack, not a meal, so order two rounds if you are hungry. The classic filling is plain pork; some stalls also do a version enriched with crab in autumn, and occasionally shrimp, but the pork bun is the thing to judge a place on.

The words worth knowing separate it from its lookalikes:

• shengjian on its own is what most locals say; a stall that sells them will understand this instantly, and it is the whole order.
• shuijianbao — a northern “water-fried” bun, larger, doughier and with no soup inside. It is a real and good thing but it is not this, and a stall selling the big dry version is not the one you came for.
• plain baozi are the steamed buns with no crisp base and no broth. Fine for breakfast, but a different food entirely.

There are, loosely, two schools in the city, and it is worth knowing they exist so you are not surprised. One fries the buns pleat-side down, so the gathered seam crisps and the filling runs thinner and souper; the other sits them pleat-up on a smooth round base, giving a thicker, breadier bun. Neither is the “correct” one — they are two honest traditions, and a place will be committed to one of them.

Eat it the way you eat anything full of scalding liquid: bite a small opening at the side, let the steam out, sip or slurp the broth, then eat the rest with the crisp base last. A dish of black vinegar is the usual companion and a light dip suits the richer, fried dough well.

What to avoid

The failure of a shengjianbao is almost always the same one, and it is easy to see: it has gone soft. A bun that has sat around loses the crisp base that justifies the whole method, and what is left is a heavy, greasy, ordinary bun. So the thing to watch is not the stall’s decor but its pan. A good stall is cooking in batches — a covered iron pan, lifted every few minutes to reveal a fresh golden spiral — and there is often a short wait for the next panful. That wait is the good sign, not the bad one.

Conversely, a tray of pre-made buns sitting out under a lamp, sold the instant you point, is the version to walk past: those are the ones cooked an hour ago, reheated at best. A bun whose base is pale and bendy rather than dark and brittle was never properly fried, and one that has no broth at all was either made without the jelly or has already leaked it into the pan.

Be a little wary, too, of the giant single “soup bun” sold as a spectacle with a straw. That is a different dumpling borrowed for the camera; the shengjianbao is a small, unglamorous, fist-of-four street snack, and a stall staking its window on the photogenic novelty is usually better at photographs than at frying.

Practicalities

Shengjianbao is breakfast-to-teatime food, busiest first thing and again in the middle of the afternoon, and the freshest buns come off the pan in waves rather than continuously — so timing your arrival to a just-lifted lid beats any amount of choosing between stalls. Many places wind down their frying by the evening; this is not a dinner dish, and a stall still selling them late is likely selling the morning’s leftovers.

A portion of four costs very little — roughly ¥6 to ¥15 at an ordinary stall — which makes it one of the cheapest good things to eat in the city; a price much above that usually means the setting rather than the bun. It is bought at a counter or a street window, not from a table, and the queue moves in the rhythm of the pan: you pay, you wait for the batch, you carry the buns off in a paper box or a flimsy plastic tray.

As across the city, the payment apps are assumed and the smallest, best griddle stalls are exactly the ones least equipped to take a foreign card, so having a working mobile-payment method is what lets you eat at the good hole-in-the-wall rather than only the tidy chain counter. And eat them where you buy them — a shengjianbao carried back across town is a sadder, softer thing than the one lifted straight off the iron.