Xiaolongbao: what Shanghai's soup dumplings are and how to eat them

Overview

A xiaolongbao is a small steamed dumpling with a twist of thin, unleavened dough and a pork filling that is half meat and half liquid. The soup is not poured in. Pork skin is simmered down into a gelatin, chilled until it sets, diced, and folded into the mince cold; when the basket goes over the steam the jelly melts and the dumpling fills with broth from the inside. That is the whole trick, and it is why the thing is eaten so carefully — a good one is a bag of scalding soup held together by a skin you can nearly see through.

The name is literal and worth knowing, because it tells you what you are looking for. Xiaolong is the small bamboo steaming basket; bao is a filled bun. The dumpling is named after the vessel, not the filling, and it arrives in that same basket, sitting on a square of cloth or a slice of carrot so the skins do not stick.

Its home is Nanxiang, an old town on the northern edge of the city, now part of the Jiading district. The generally accepted account credits a cook named Huang Mingxian with refining the recipe there in the 1870s — thinner skin, more filling, the jellied broth — and selling it under the older name nanxiang mantou. That origin is repeated everywhere and is plausible food history rather than folklore, but the documentation is thin and the precise date should be held lightly. What is not in doubt is that the dumpling spread from here across the wider Jiangnan region, and that the versions you meet elsewhere diverge from it.

What to order

The default, and the thing to order first, is the plain pork xiaolongbao — usually written on a Shanghai menu simply as xiaolongbao or xiaolong. It comes by the basket, not the piece, and one basket is a snack rather than a meal, so order more than looks sensible.

The variant worth planning around is crab: xiefen xiaolongbao, pork enriched with hairy crab meat and the orange roe. It is richer, distinctly sweeter, and costs a good deal more. It is also seasonal in the honest sense — it is at its point in autumn, when the local crab is in season, and a place selling it in spring is selling you something frozen. If you are in the city in October or November, this is the one to spend on.

Two words separate the real thing from its near neighbours on a menu:

• tangbao — a much larger soup dumpling, sometimes fist-sized, drunk through a straw. It is a genuine dish of the region but it is not xiaolongbao, and a stall offering a giant straw-fed dumpling for photographs is offering a different, more theatrical thing.
• guantangbao — literally “filled-with-soup bun”; a general term some places use. Fine, but check the skin: you want thin and translucent, not the thick bready wrapper of a breakfast bun.

The eating is the part visitors get wrong, and it is simple. Lift the dumpling by the topknot of pleated dough without piercing the base, set it on your spoon, bite or nip a small hole in the side, and let the steam out before you drink the soup — thirty seconds of patience is the difference between a mouthful of broth and a burnt palate. A little Chinkiang black vinegar with slivered ginger is the standard companion; dip lightly, because the point is the dumpling, not the vinegar.

What to avoid

The failure of a bad xiaolongbao is visible before you taste it. A skin that is thick, pale and doughy, that folds rather than tears, means a breakfast-bun wrapper standing in for the real thing — and it almost always means no soup inside, or a thin trickle of it. The dumplings should look wet and fragile and slightly slumped under their own weight, not plump and dry like little steamed buns.

The other tell is uniformity. Hand-pleated skins vary; a basket of identical, machine-crimped dumplings with a perfectly regular seam is frozen stock reheated over steam, common in places that turn over tourists near the big gardens and waterfront. Freshly made baskets are cooked to order and take several minutes, so a dumpling that appears the instant you sit down was made hours ago somewhere else.

Be wary, too, of the Wuxi style sold as if it were the Shanghai one. Wuxi’s version is deliberately larger and markedly sweet, closer to a dessert in its seasoning; it is a real and respected dumpling in its own city, but ordered in Shanghai expecting the local savoury balance it reads as a substitution. Neither is wrong — but know which one you asked for.

Finally, the single giant “soup dumpling” presented as a spectacle, punctured with a long straw for a photo, is built for the camera. It is edible and occasionally good, but it is the tangbao wearing the wrong name for the tourist trade, not the small-basket dumpling this city is known for.

Practicalities

Xiaolongbao is a morning-to-early-afternoon food more than a dinner one. Dedicated dumpling houses fire their steamers from breakfast and the freshest baskets land mid-morning; by late afternoon many have switched to reheating whatever is left, which is exactly when the skins go gummy. If you can, eat it before two.

A basket of plain pork runs roughly ¥15 to ¥40 in an ordinary neighbourhood dumpling house, which puts a satisfying sitting well under the price of a restaurant meal. The crab version can be two or three times that, and in autumn that premium is buying real seasonal crab rather than a markup — a suspiciously cheap “crab” basket is the one to doubt, not an expensive one. Prices climb sharply inside the walled tourist gardens and along the river, where you are paying for the queue and the setting; the same dumpling a few streets back is both cheaper and usually fresher.

Payment follows the city’s rule: the mobile-payment apps are assumed everywhere, and a small, genuinely local dumpling counter may have no easy way to take a foreign card at all, so having the apps working before you go is what lets you eat at the good plain places rather than only the ones set up for visitors. Baskets are ordered and paid for at a counter as often as at a table; watch what the regulars do and follow it.