Soup dumplings for the soul

I'd been hearing about soup dumplings from my dad for at least a year before I tried them. If you've never had one, a soup dumpling (or Shanghai steamed bun, as it's often called on menus) is an approximately golf ball-sized dumpling that's been filled with soup and a round ball of meat and twisted closed. That's right--the soup is on the inside. Which requires a certain finesse in the consumption.

Craig Laban, a Philadelphia food critic, favors biting the top off the dumpling and slurping the soup out. It was he who recommended Dim Sum Garden, a nondescript little place near the Reading Terminal Market that makes the exquisite soup dumplings I tried for the first time just a week ago.

My dad taught me to do it like this:
1. Grab a dumpling out of the steamer with your chopsticks
2. Place said dumpling into your soup spoon
3. Use a chopstick to poke a hole in the side of your dumpling, and let the soup run out
4. Drink the soup from your spoon, sucking more liquid from the dumpling as you see fit
5. Bite the dumpling to finish the remaining meat and dough
(6. If you are my dad, you will require the extra step of discarding the twisted top of the dumpling, which he regards as excessive)

It may not sound like much, but the soup dumpling is an exquisite little package. As I slurped the rich broth contained within, I immediately thought of the flavor known as umami, and of Jonah Lehrer's chapter on Auguste Escoffier in Proust Was a Neuroscientist:

The year was 1907 and Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda asked himself a simple question: what does dashi taste like? Dashi is a classic Japanese broth made from kombo, a dried form of kelp. Since at least 797 A.D., dashi has been used in Japanese cooking like Escoffier used stock, as a universal solvent, a base for every dish. But to Ikeda, the dashi his wife cooked for him every night didn't taste like any of the four classic tastes or even like some unique combination of them. It was simply delicious. Or, as the Japanese would say, it was umai.

And so Ikeda began his quixotic quest for this unknown taste. He distilled fields of seaweed, searching for the essence that might trigger the same mysterious sensation as a steaming bowl of seaweed broth. He also explored other cuisines. "There is," Ikeda declared, "a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well known tastes." Finally, after patient years of lonely chemistry, in which he tried to distill the secret ingredient that dashi and veal stock had in common, Ikeda found his secret molecule. He announced his discovery in the Journal of the Chemical Society of Tokyo.

I'm told Gourmet Dumpling House in Boston's Chinatown makes a good soup dumpling. And given my fondness for that rich, earthy flavor of umami--whether it's seeping out of a doughy steamed bun or an expertly cooked steak--I'm ready to give them a try.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.