XLB short for Xiao Long Bao are Soup Dumplings that originated from Shanghai. They have a pork based filling with a flour outer layer that wraps in the soup. You bite it open to reveal the soup where you can then slurp up the savory juices. It’s just delicious!
How’s it going everybody this is beat the bush today we’re going to make some steamed soup dumplings and it’s filled with pork and soup inside so when you bite into it you can kind of slurp it and there’s all this juice inside for you to drink it originated in shanghai and in a lot of chinese restaurants we would call it xiao long bao or a lot of people like to
Call them excel bees so we’re gonna make the skin we’re going to make the soup be part and also the filling and i’m gonna wrap them and steam them all for you guys i’m gonna start with this unbleached bread flour you need to use bread flour so it’s a little bit more chewy because it has a higher level of protein in it so i’ve got two cups of that bread flour and
I’m gonna add about 2/3 cups of water and dash of salt in it and just mix it slowly it’s all mixed up now and i’ve covered it in saran wrap let it rest for about an hour in the fridge before you start making the wrapper so i have about a pound of pork here with a skin on what i’m gonna do is remove the skin from all these pieces you may not have it in cubes like
This like me so in that case just remove the skin along with the fat what we’re going to do is make a pork skin soup the pork skin will actually turn very jelly like after you boil it for a long time you want to leaving a little bit of fat but not as much as you see here i cut some ginger and some green onion cut it into maybe one inch chunks like this so boil about
Two cups of water and put your pig skin in there along with some ginger some green onion a couple dash of this fish sauce for taste about a tablespoon of shouting rice wine so bring this to a slow boil and do it for about hour and a half to let all the pork skin dissolve into the water to make a jelly so if you have a food processor use that i’m just going to use
This mini one to grind up my pork you put the lid on and you just let it rip put about 1 part of ello mushroom in with the minced pork they’ll actually make it so that each piece of pork it will kind of separate it a little bit so that the pork will taste more tender and i’ll give it a nice aroma so just start by removing the little stem here just peel it off like
This we don’t eat that and just cut it into pieces and i’m gonna blend it again inside this thing so you see after you blend it all up it’s just this dark mashed up mushroom great about 1 tablespoon of ginger this fiber stuff that’s leftover don’t put that in just put in the grated stuff i’m reusing the bowl that i made the dough with so i don’t have to wash extra
Dishes 2 tsp of white soy sauce 1/2 1 tsp of sesame oil and 1 tsp of sugar so here i’m going to cut up 2 stalks of green onion i might even just cut it into four so it took me less time to cut the whole thing and then you just squeeze them together and this minced um cut them up a little bit more because we want it to be kind of minced up inside the dumpling so i’m
Gonna put in the 2 tbsp of green onion here you just mix it all up add about half a cup of water in it the meat will actually absorb all this water makes it a little easier mix around to cover this up it’s about hour and a half now and the soup looks about the same but if you cool it will turn into into a jelly now let’s see how it tastes it’s pretty good i’m just
Going to remove some of this ginger cuz i don’t want to blend this in there let me take all these pork skin and blend it we’re going to incorporate all this pork skin back into the batter all right there is a little bit of a fat in here so if you want to make it less fatty you can remove more of the fat before you blend it put it in here now this itself it’s kind
Of fatty it’s kind of like ramen broth and just refrigerate this and turn this into a jelly first just add that to the filling and mix it all up so i’m going to put it in the refrigerator to solidify it a little bit more here’s my dough i’m just gonna take it out and just take out half of it for now now keep in mind all this is is bread flour water and some salt
Roll this up to be about this big you want each piece of dough to be about the size of your thumb so i’d say about this big four pieces here now i get some flour to make it not sticky put some flour on your rolling pin so here is your one piece of dough we’re gonna make one wrapper let’s try to get it as thin as possible make it to about four inches in diameter
And then i’m going to put about one tablespoon of the meetin in here so i like to put the skin on the table and fold it this way you just make a whole bunch of little folds like this bring it over to the center of the meat and make a whole bunch of little folds every single fold squeeze it a little bit so that it gets together and then you just keep on doing it
Make i don’t know twenty thirty little folds all the way around like so then when you get to the very end pinch it together and turn it and you got your double i set this aside and you’re ready to make another one about one tablespoon in there make sure you don’t walk off because if you keep on folding it you might kind of add the folds all the way over here so
To make sure you use it at the same spot hold it at the same spot like this i don’t know where i was 10 11 12 23 23 24 25 26 27 your second one i’m prepping the plate for steaming the dumplings i don’t have a steamer so i’m just going to use this plate just a couple of leaves of napa cabbage wash them first take the leafy part of it and put it all around the
Bottom so that the dumpling won’t stick to the bottom because if it sticks it up on them and you rip it the soup will just fall all over the place and you won’t be able to drink your soup okay boil some water put your dumplings in there and steam it for about 8 9 minutes just take one of these out and put it on your spoon very carefully so the soup doesn’t leak
Out a couple of slices like this and then just thinly shred them put one spoon of vinegar in here one spoon of water to dilute it a little bit and one spoon of dark soy sauce one more spoon of vinegar you put some other sauce on there the vinegary sauce and then you just bite off the top so you can reveal the inside that you can see the inside has a bunch of soup
In there you can splurt this and then you can proceed to eat it with some ginger so that’s all there is to it excel bees let’s try this there is a little bit of soup in here so every time i make something i would eat it and i would go home you know it could do a little bit better here a little bit better there notice the skin could be a little bit chewier and i
Realized making xlv is hard because you can be off a little bit in the recipe and it would completely change how the xlb taste with this particular recipe i noticed a skin could be a little bit chewier which means you need to make the skin so that it has less water content so that when you handle the dough you can’t feel moist arintero lling thin and you roll it
And that it shouldn’t stick to your rolling pin that much it should stick a tiny little bit it turns out that when you’re making dough it’s easier to add more water to it than adding more flour because the dough ball when you add more flour it just coats the outside it can’t get into it whereas when you add more water the outside would get would soak up the water
Easily and then you can mix it the second thing i notice is that you can add a little bit more portobello mushroom probably twice as much even to make the mushroom flavor a bit stronger and also when you make the soup you need more pork rind more pork skin in order to make it congeal more it’s because i notice the meat is soaking up a lot of the liquids so when
It’s soaked it up it won’t release it back out after you cook it so that it will be outside the trick to it is that you want to add water content to it in the form of a gelatin so that it would actually release when you’re steaming it when you add water it just gets soaked into the pork and it won’t get released it’ll just taste like um like a juicy pork but it
Won’t have soup surrounding it to me this recipe is pretty good already but i think i can make it better so i’m gonna make another video later when i perfected this recipe don’t forget to give me a like comment down below if you have any questions about this recipe and don’t forget to subscribe over here thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
How to make XLB Shanghai Soup Dumplings | BeatTheBush By BeatTheBush