With a population of more than 24 million, Shanghai isn't just the biggest city in China, it's also the nation's street food epicenter. In part that's thanks to the area's compelling food culture—the city sits in the Yangtze River Delta where it meets the Yellow Sea, and the often sweet, oily cuisine is especially well known for its use of freshwater fish, eels, and crustaceans, seafood, and water plants like lotus root. But mostly it's because the city is a magnificent, pulsing magnet for migrants from all over China who come to Shanghai seeking work. When they can't find the jobs they dreamed of, many start street food businesses, bringing the food culture of their home province and some of the best foods from all over China right into the heart of Shanghai.To get more news about shanghai special dishes, you can visit shine news official website.
Those influences combine in a food lover's paradise, one in which searingly spicy aromatic bowls of Sichuan mala tang are sold alongside Nanjing's mild and sweet puffy bread jidan bing, and crispy guo tie potstickers are hawked amidst local dishes like rich, porky soup dumplings and shansi leng mian—chilled slippery wheat noodles studded with pieces of warm, meaty eel.
Let's just say it's enough to overwhelm the senses, albeit in the best possible way. So what should you look for? I've gathered 14 of Shanghai's most popular, not-to-be-missed street foods, from traditional specialties to dishes born elsewhere in China but no less beloved by the city's locals.
Given how much we talk about them, xiao long bao need no real introduction here. Questions of provenance aside (Did Shanghai invent them? Or did Shanghai steal them?), they're a miracle of creation and construction—seemingly delicate, semi-transparent dumpling skins wrapped and neatly pleated around an aromatic filling of pork and a mouthful of hot savory broth.
Xiao long bao are all about the filling: ground pork seasoned with a little ginger and Shaoxing wine mixed with a gelatinized pork stock that melts on cooking, transforming into a rich, sticky soup. The addition of crab meat and crab roe from the famous Shanghai hairy crab makes for a bold but equally traditional xiao long bao in the late autumn months.
In either case, that soupy stock is the dumpling's essential element: a flavored pork aspic typically made with pork skin, chicken bones, ginger, scallions and Shaoxing wine, simmered for hours until the collagen-heavy ingredients have turned to gelatin, and then cooled until it sets. Every kitchen has its own secret recipe—my local xiao long bao joint uses cow eyeballs because they make great gelatin. Not so secret now, and surprisingly tasty.
When you eat xiao long bao, the skin or wrapper should be fine and translucent, yet strong enough to hold together when lifted out of the basket. The meat should be fresh tasting, smooth and savory. Lastly, the all-important soup should be hot, clear, and fragrant of pork. It should scald your throat a little as you swallow, because a little bit of pain and a whole lot of intense pleasure are what xiao long bao are all about. The only accompaniment needed is dark Zhejiang vinegar over angel-hair slivers of ginger, although a bowl of clear soup is often eaten alongside.
When Shanghai chefs are asked what they like to eat after a long night in the kitchen, it's not fried chicken, it's these pan-fried dumplings, crackling-crisp on the base and pillowy soft on top. Sheng jian bao are literally dumplings (bao) born (sheng) of being shallow-fried (jian). Born of the oil, so to speak.
They share a lot in common with xiao long bao, being filled with savory pork and a big slurp of piping hot broth, but are bigger, breadier, and less refined. The dough has a little yeast, so the skins are thicker and softer and the topknot of the dumpling is tucked underneath, rather than sitting on top. How is that contrasting combination of crispy bottom and soft top achieved? Street-side, the bao are closely packed into a large, shallow griddle and ladled with oil until the bottoms are crisped and browned. Then the whole panful is doused with a bowl of water and fitted with a heavy wooden lid until the tops of the dumplings are steam-cooked. As the water evaporates, the bottom gets an extra dose of heat to seal in the crisp crust just before serving.