Xiasha shaomai

Zheng Yuxia only opens her restaurant in Xiasha Town for four months a year and she only sells steamed dumplings or shaomai.

The eatery is open now.

In Shanghai, steamed shaomai feature glutinous rice and a filling of minced pork and minced mushroom. Xiasha shaomai are different, made with pork, pigskin jelly and bamboo shots.

“Bamboo shoots really bring out the delicacy of the filling,” says Zheng, a middle-aged woman and the fourth-generation of Xiasha shaomai makers.

The bamboo shoots are a bit crunchy and cut through the fatty meat.

January is the best time to eat bamboo shoots, when the shoots just begin to grow and they are very tender, but the price is relatively high. Around March, it’s time for bamboo shoots lovers. The shoots are not quite as tender as in winter, but they are crunchy and tasty. By the end of April, people have to wait a year until it’s back on the market.

So this is when Zheng does her cooking, starting at 3am daily. She chooses the tenderest tips of the bamboo shoots for the filling. The pigskin jelly and dough are always freshly made, never refrigerated.

“I care most about the freshness of ingredients and if they are made in advance, the taste is different,” she tells Shanghai Daily.

The outer shell is important, the texture varies and the center is a bit thicker than the edges.

“Xiasha shaomai are seasonal dim sum and it’s very important to eat it just after taking it out of the steamer when the temperature is right,” says Zheng.

Sanlin benbang dish

Around 100 years ago, traveling cooks called shovel gangs went from village to village in downtown Shanghai cooking hearty flavorful fare with plenty of fat, sugar and soy sauce. They actually used flat shovels to move pans around on the coals.

The first cooks came from Sanlin Town and their cooking is known as benbang, meaning native and original (本帮). It contributed to what is now Shanghai cuisine.

Li Mingfu, 58, has inherited the cooking skills and runs a homey eatery in Sanlin Town. The dishes are not delicately presented, but they are tasty and authentic.

There are eight classic dishes: streaky pork braised in brown sauce (zou you rou 走油肉); steamed slices of ham, bamboo shoots and chicken (kou san si 扣三丝); steamed chicken in soy sauce (benbang kou ji 本帮扣鸡); steamed egg rolls (kou dan juan 扣蛋卷); pigskin soup (zhu pi tang 猪皮汤); stewed bream in brown sauce (hong shao bianyu 红烧鳊鱼); stewed trotter, pigskin, chicken and bamboo shoots (zheng san xian 蒸三鲜) and stewed salted pork with bamboo shoots (xian rou kou shui sun 咸肉口水笋).

“Zou you rou, in the old times was the food that would make your day,” Li says. However it’s not anymore. In fact, most families no longer cook it and many young people don’t even know about it.

It has a sweet, soy glaze and a lot of fat. Each slice is around eight centimeters long, 1.5cm thick.

Kou san si requires 1,999 pieces — each ingredient should be sliced vertically 72 times and horizontally 36 times.

According to Li, there is no big secret to Sanlin benbang cooking. It takes patience, careful slicing and the precise heat control.

Gaoqiao cakes

Over the past century, it is has been a tradition that locals eat Gaoqio cakes at weddings, during Spring Festival, at baby showers and other special occasions.

Making the rich and flaky snack cake is laborious work — it has exactly 16 handmade layers and savory fillings.

Fillings can be pork or a sweet paste of various ingredients such as red bean, sweet osmanthus, nuts and seeds.

The ingredients must be of the best quality. The red beans should come from Chongming Island because they are famously big, bright and tasty. The lard has to be from pigs raised on the northern side of the Yangtze River in Jiangsu Province.

Zhang Lingfeng is one of the best Gaoqiao pastry cooks.

Here is her recipe:

She uses an old iron pan, a rolling pin, a Z-shaped knife and her oven.

The hardest part is making the hallmark 16 layers.

First, she makes two kinds of dough with wheat flour: water dough (3kg flour), 1kg oil, 1 kg/liter water); and oil dough (2kg flour and 1kg oil).

She divides each into 20 or 30 small pieces and rolls them out in circles.

She places a round piece of oil dough on top of a round piece of water dough, covering the work counter.

Then she presses the two doughs together and forms them into flat “ox-tongue” shapes in her palm.

She folds one in half, and then half again, making four layers. Then she folds it three times, making 16 layers.

The cake is then roasted for around 45 minutes until they are dry. She puts an iron-aluminum basin under the pan to make sure the heat spreads evenly and the cakes don’t get scorched.

Qian Wanlong soy sauce

Food saturated in soy sauce are a hallmark of Shanghai cooking, whether it’s stewed, simmered, sauteed or braised.

Qian Wanlong is a venerable brand of “handmade,” naturally fermented Shanghai soy sauce, founded in 1880. Its 400 vintage fermenting urns have been moved to a larger factory in Zhangjiang, Pudong New Area.

Each of the urns produces around a ton of soy sauce. Annual production is 400 tons.

Today, most soy sauce products are artificially hydrolyzed and commercially fermented in a mechanically controlled environment — it takes around 20 days.

But Qian Wanlong adds no chemicals and it takes at least six months to make the sauce. It uses a natural brewing process involving salted water, wheat, soybeans and mold. After it ferments, it’s refined and bottled.

In 1880, Pudong landlord Qian Ziyin opened the Qian Wanlong Soy Sauce Factory with an investment of 6,000 yinyuan, or silver dollars. At the time, an average worker earned 5-10 yinyuan a month.

The brand is famous for its “12 steps.” These include selecting prime soy beans, blending wheat, exposing beans to sunlight to form mold, and fermenting them in urns for as long as 10 months. Oil is also extracted in an old-fashioned press.

“The sauce is 130 years old and its flavor is absolutely unique,” says 57-year-old Wang Liangguan, who has been making soy sauce for more than 30 years.