I want to post a series of blog entries about some of my favorite food in China.  Generally, I have become kind of a fussy eater, especially when it comes to what I eat on a daily basis.  It is one thing to try food once for an ‘experience’ but it is quite another thing to eat something everyday.  The foods described in this blog ’series’ are foods I consider good enough to eat regularly.

The first food is called Xiǎolóngbāo (小笼包).  At first glance, it just looks like your average dumpling.  But actually, it is quite different from any dumpling you’ve probably had in the past.  For starters, the way they are cooked is pretty cool.  You can see these vendors on the street all over Shanghai, wrapping dough in this shape, around some kind of meat filling, and then putting them in the steaming baskets, where the hot air is rushed from the floor upwards to cook the food.  As with a lot of foods in Shanghai, they are almost only served on the street and because of this, they are always very cheap, a 10 - 20 cents each.

Inside the dough is usually a meat mixture with this sweet taste that I can’t put my tongue to.  In addition to the meat, there is  a soup of sorts inside which surrounds the meat.  The Xiǎolóngbāo is usually served directly from the steaming basket, so its quite hot.  This makes eating them kind of tricky at first because the soup inside is blistering hot.  You have to pick up the Xiǎolóngbāo with the chopsticks, bite a hole inside the dumpling, slurp the soup out, and then slowly guide the thing in your mouth, so as to not burn the inside of your lips.  The overall taste is quite excellent, and unlike other street foods in Shanghai, Xiǎolóngbāo actually has meat that doesn’t make you wonder what is inside (well, it makes you wonder a little I guess).

If you want to study a lesson in Chinese about this awesome food, checkout this ChinesePod lesson.  They have great lessons and its been a good service so far to improve my Chinese (not to mention that I am in the least bit biased due to the Facebook application I made for them:  LanguageProd, and possibly more to come…)