How To Speed Up The Cooking Process Of Soup Dumplings

Soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, are one of those incredibly delicious and intimidating foods that seem out of reach for most of us to make at home. These Chinese delicacies are made by wrapping meat filling and aspic, or meat stock jelly, in flour skins. The aspic then melts upon steaming and becomes soup within the dumpling.

Traditionally, the gelatinized soup takes hours or even days to prepare by simmering animal bones and skins and cooling the mixture — often overnight — until it gelatinizes. With such a tedious cooking process, it's no wonder we might opt to visit a Chinese restaurant or heat up the best frozen soup dumplings we can get our hands on instead.

But if you're determined to tackle these dumplings from scratch, we have a simple ingredient hack that will make the process much faster and easier. Instead of simmering and cooling for hours, you can substitute the homemade broth for a seasoned soup mixed with gelatin powder. Gelatin is made from animal bones and will give your broth the necessary texture for wrapping; no wait time is required! For the easiest aspic ever, combine store-bought chicken stock with a mixture of gelatin powder and cold water — and aromatics, of course. The result, once cooled and set, will be a solid, jelly-like substance that you can chop up and wrap into your dumplings.

Soup dumplings are made of three main components — the soup jelly, meat stuffing, and, of course, thinly rolled dumpling dough. Most soup dumpling recipes use pork for the meat filling, though if you don't eat pork, you could experiment with a different protein, like beef or shrimp. Be warned that gelatin is derived from pork, so if your diet is completely pork-free, this recipe will be a challenge. Some vegetarian recipes suggest switching out gelatin for agar, a seaweed-based product with similar properties, but it may result in a different texture than intended due to the products' different setting properties. You could also make homemade gelatin from chicken bones, but that would require the long process of simmering and cooling that gelatin powder circumvents.

However, if you do make your own broth from scratch, you can cut down on other prep time by using store-bought dumpling wrappers in lieu of making your own dough (which is made from flour and water). 

If you have extra time on your hands and want to make these dumplings the old-fashioned way, you can always upgrade your homemade soup dumplings by ditching the store-bought substitutions and making your broth and wrappers completely from scratch. If efficiency is what you're aiming for, though, these small shortcuts will still result in total deliciousness. All that's left to do is to steam them, typically in a bamboo steamer.