Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • When it comes to Chinese food, few dishes are as recognizable as the bow.

  • The Chinese word originally looked like a baby in a woo.

  • The delicious bun wrapped filling Berries across China and its culinary history and the strict definition of what a bow is gets murky depending on who you ask and where you go.

  • Yeah, let's start with this.

  • What is about native and its most generic form?

  • The skin is wheat flour, water and yeast.

  • The dough is usually made hours beforehand and left to rise so that it's easy to shape.

  • The filling usually consists of fatty ground pork mixed in with aromatics.

  • It's then wrapped so that the filling doesn't fall out.

  • Yeah, mm hmm.

  • Finally, more often than not, it's steamed.

  • Because wheat flour was more typically found in northern China.

  • It said that the archetypal bow originated there, and as trade routes developed, variations of it began to exist all over China.

  • And now many provinces have their own renditions with different types of fillings, skin and cooking methodology.

  • In Guangdong, there's Cha SIU bao, fluffy buns stuffed with the iconic sweet BBQ pork of the region.

  • In Shandong, there's pan fried pork buns.

  • And in Shanghai, there's Xiao Long Bao soup filled dumplings.

  • But wait, what's the difference between a bow and a dumpling?

  • To be honest, not much in Chinese.

  • This is Xiao long bao, but in English it's sometimes called a soup dumpling.

  • We asked Twitter and got a wide range of answers.

  • Bells tend to be more fluffy and dry, right?

  • Pretty sure balls are steamed and dumplings or boiled weight, but on a bow also be a dumpling.

  • We found the formal definition of a dumpling.

  • According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, a dumpling is a small mass of dough cooked by boiling or steaming.

  • So his this challenge, but also a dumpling.

  • Yes.

  • Then we try to define about by mapping its characteristics.

  • We found that while most bows have a thicker rapper and esteemed, there are exceptions to this rule this year.

  • Long bow, for instance.

  • So is yelling about.

  • Also about yes.

  • Semantics aside, bows are a universal dish within China, and while we've profiled them many times before, this season will be diving into regional variations from Shandong, 14 Jiangsu, Shanghai, Hong Kong and since young and we'll show you how they're made and what's in them.

  • You'll find out that there's a lot more to about than just a bun and a filling.

  • It's for the first episode will be going to Shanghai to see how soup dumplings are put together and what makes them so, well, soupy.

  • Stay tuned.

When it comes to Chinese food, few dishes are as recognizable as the bow.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it