Difference between handmade dimsum vs factory made
LIFE LESSONS
Have you ever visited a dim sum restaurant where the food is really yummy compared to others?
In my experience, the better tasting dim sum tends to be made in-house as opposed to reheating factory made ones.
I found out recently a dim sum dish is made by hand, look at how each piece differs from one another, maybe there's slight imperfections in shape and size. Real handmade dim sum is made by eye and hand, no weighing scale, so each piece almost never looks alike. If they look exactly the same, then it's probably made by a machine, whereas in the hands of a dim sum masterchef, every piece looks different, perhaps to purposely differentiate themselves from mass-produced dim sum.
Like look at this xiao long bao. Every piece looks kind of different from one another. The shape of the folds and the overall structure differ.
As opposed to this popular quick dining Chinese eatery (Ging Sun Ho King of Bun) where it appears to serve factory made xiao long bao. Notice how the folds look almost identical to each other and perfectly spaced apart, so it's likely done by a machine and not by hand. It's still decent xiao long bao according to reviews, but I'm just pointing out how we could differentiate between machine-made food versus handmade food.
Consider another example: the baked char siew puff. A good puff pastry is freshly made so notice how each triangular shape is different one from another.
This is one of my key takeaways after watching how this experienced chef prepared dim sum from scratch, so now I better appreciate how much it takes to make dim sum taste better.
