Har Gow From Nom Wah

Author Notes

Pretty much everyone who walks through the door at Nom Wah orders the har gow—the shrimp dumplings. They’re like the pastrami sandwich at Katz’s. Shrimp dumplings are the quintessential measure of dim sum. When it comes to har gow, a restaurant’s caliber is judged on how thin the dumpling wrapper is and how many folds join the wrapper together. The more folds, the higher the quality of the kitchen and the more dexterous the dumpling maker. Dumpling folds are like thread counts in suits but better, because dumplings are more delicious than suits.

Back in the day, we used to make all our dumplings by hand. We’d get eight, ten, even twelve pleats into each dumpling. But it was a laborious process. Making dumplings is traditionally a two-person operation. You have the person who rolls out the dough using the side of a cleaver to press it paper-thin and the person who spoons the filling in and folds. The two work in tandem and fast, since once the dough is rolled out it quickly dries and becomes brittle. We started off that way, but we do crazy volume these days, so a few years ago I dropped 50 Gs on a fancy automatic dumpling-wrapping machine. Now our pleats are molded. Some might call that cheating; I call it innovation.

For most of our dumplings, I recommend buying premade wrappers, but har gow is different. The wrappers are so delicate and thin that we haven’t been able to find a better solution than making the wrappers from scratch. The trick to achieving the crystal skin is using scalding hot water, which allows the starches to dissolve nearly completely.

How to steam: Steaming is perhaps what sets dim sum apart from all other dumpling- loving kitchens of the world. We steam everything at Nom Wah in an industrial Vulcan steamer. At home, I recommend steaming in a wok. Steaming times vary depending on the density and size of what you are steaming. But the general setup to steam in a wok is as follows.

Fill the wok with enough water to come up to the lower rim of the steamer but not so much the waterline is above the food bed. Line the bottom of the steamer with paper or a lotus leaf or something so that the fiddly bits won’t fall through the cracks. (If steaming dumplings or bao, you won’t need to line the steamer.) Place whatever needs steaming in the basket, leaving ample room between items. Bring water to boil and steam for the desired duration. If you need more water—water tends to evaporate—add boiling, not cold, water so as not to stop the steaming.

If you do want to DIY it, just use a plate in a pot. All you need is tinfoil and a plate that fits in your pot. Fill a pot with 1/2 an inch of water. Then make a sort of tripod out of tinfoil by forming three golf ball–sized balls and placing them in the bottom of the pot, making sure their tops rest above the water- line. Rest the plate on the tinfoil, cover, and steam. This method is especially useful when making rice rolls, in which you’ll be using a cake pan instead of the plate. You can put anything in the steamer as long as it isn’t so small that it would tumble through the holes into the roiling waters below.

From The Nom Wah Cookbook by Wilson Tang with Joshua David Stein. Copyright 2020 Wilson Tang. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. —Food52