Chef Martin Yan Talks Dumplings with Lilly Jan (His Biggest Fan!)
The legendary Chinese cuisine ambassador on innovation vs. tradition, his earliest dumpling memories, and the dumplings you're all but guaranteed to find in his freezer.
As promised, we’re officially back in action! The below essay by Lilly Jan and conversation, between Lilly and legendary chef Martin Yan, is the first excerpt from the brand-new print edition of Above the Fold. (Going forward, the rest will roll out on a monthly-ish basis).
For a hard copy that you can revisit from your coffee table/backpack/bookshelf whenever the mood strikes—plus much more!—order Issue 1 today:
I’ll let Lilly and Chef Yan take it from here. —Leah
The first time I saw Martin Yan on television, I was nine years old. It had been a challenging couple of years for my family: My parents separated, and a significant shift in financial stability required us to leave my childhood home and change schools. My mom took a job in Hong Kong, and my father, a reluctant parent at best, moved us from Long Island to Bayside, Queens, and assumed the role of my primary caretaker.
With my dad running the day-to-day, there’d be weeklong stretches of time when we ate nothing but Japanese curry or big bowls of pasta and jarred sauce. I missed the dinner parties where my mom would cook endless platters of Chinese noodles and dumplings to share with our American friends and neighbors. I yearned for these flavors but had no understanding of how to make them—they’d always just appeared like magic on the table, steaming hot and delicious.
One day, walking in the front door after school, I saw my father sitting on the couch, watching a man on television cooking something that looked like a dish I knew. Here was a Chinese man that looked like my dad, cooked dishes like my grandma, and smiled joyfully on my television, making the food I missed so much and telling me that I could too. I happily followed along every day after school, absorbing the lessons from my new part-time babysitter.
Martin Yan’s shows sustained me as I navigated life with my father, helped me understand my own culture’s cuisine and regionality when I moved to Hong Kong to live with my mom as a teen, and taught me how to build my Chinese pantry when I landed in San Francisco in my early 20s. When I went to graduate school in Boston, I drove to Rhode Island to watch a cooking demonstration where he broke down a chicken in 60 seconds for a thrilled audience. My culinary career and academic research have centered on Chinese cuisine and restaurants because of his early influence.
I was overjoyed to see the James Beard Foundation recognize Martin Yan with the 2022 James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. But if I’m being honest, it’s still not enough. In my mind, all the appreciation and acclaim in the world would fall short of what we owe Chef Yan. He’s been at the forefront of bringing the complexity and nuance of Chinese cuisine to global audiences for over 40 years through his many shows (including Yan Can Cook, Martin Yan’s Chinatowns, and Spice Kingdom), his 30 books, and his restaurants.
I could think of no better way to explore his knowledge and passion than with a conversation about dumplings, a food he’s brought to life on many of his shows. Through two Zoom interviews, I learned that the man I have loved on TV is just as humble and generous in person, and he takes his role as an educator incredibly seriously. And, as he made clear during our conversations, he’s not done yet. —Lilly Jan1
LILLY: We know that you were a dim sum chef in Hong Kong, but what was your earliest memory around dumplings?
CHEF YAN: When I was in Hong Kong, the restaurant I worked at specialized in porridge, noodles, and all kinds of dim sum dumplings. When I was young, my mother actually made little simple wontons, because a wonton wrapper was the only wrapper available that you didn't have to make yourself. Dumplings bring back a lot of wonderful memories. Because as you probably know from when you did your thesis2, in Northern China, prior to Chinese New Year, the whole family sits around to make jiaozi. Because it’s so cold in Northern China, they cover them with a towel and then just put them outside and close the window—they will be frozen. This way they can eat them throughout the new year. It’s very much a family affair, and also, it’s a communal affair. You go to the village and all the elderly ladies, everybody is just sitting around and doing the same thing. Dumplings are one of the best ways to bring people closer and do things together.
Were they the Hong Kong style wontons? Like the wonton mein wontons?
More or less. But actually, the best wonton is not in Hong Kong—it’s in Guangzhou: In Liwan, there’s a small restaurant where they make the wontons with whole fresh little baby shrimp, those freshwater shrimp—very crunchy, very small. The best wonton uses an entire shrimp with some bamboo shoot and a tiny bit of pork fat.
My mom is waishengren from Taiwan. My father is Taiwanese. I grew up in Hong Kong, and my grandparents are from Sichuan and Shanghai. I’ve been making dumplings all the different ways my whole life. I believe that dumpling filling should be song3. But a lot of the time, it’s dense like a meatball.
See, what makes Chinese cuisine uniquely Chinese is the contrast: the yin and the yang. So each bite you have different flavor contrast, texture contrast, and color contrast. Sometimes you might want to add something special to the filling, then you can use water chestnut or jicama. In Chinese cuisine, each bite is very important. If you use a knife to chop the filling up, you have different shapes and different sizes, so each bite has a different feel to it. When you use a grinder, every single one, it’s the same size, same shape so it doesn’t have that texture. So that’s why Chinese chefs like to use two knives to chop.
How do you define a dumpling? This is something that I get into arguments with my students about all the time. They always have different ideas of what a dumpling is.
You have an ingredient, you wrap it up with a variety of wrappers made from a different variety of materials—flour, rice flour, glutinous rice, and wheat starch. Anything you wrap together into a little pouch to me is a form of dumpling. I think the dumpling to me is an art form. It’s an art form by itself. Except you, probably people don’t look at the dumpling like the way I look at dumplings.
When we talk about wontons and chaoshou and things like that, do you think that the filling and the texture is as important as the sauce around them?
Well, this is exactly what I want to talk about. In every single cuisine of the world and particularly in different parts of China, they have all kinds of different dumplings. The variety is infinite. First of all, you have a choice of wrapper. The wrapper can be made with flour or different grains, or it can use glutinous rice or long grain rice flour. You have the har gow, which is made with wheat starch. Wheat starch is translucent, you can see the stuff inside. A good har gow chef can make that wrapper so thin, without breaking, that you can see through it.
And then of course the filling, right? You go to Sichuan, they have different filling. You go to Shanghai, they have different filling. And then Northern China, in Dongbei, they have jiaozi—they have different filling. And the Cantonese, because it's close to the water, they can use more seafood in it.
[There’s] also the flavoring, the way you marinate. And then of course, the shape and the form. You visit Xi’an, they have a dumpling banquet. They have 108 different types of ways to make dumplings. They can shape them like a rabbit, a duck, a chicken, a maple leaf flower, a rose, all kinds of stuff. When I go there, I make arrangements to have three or four of the ladies come over to the dining room and bring the wrappers and filling. And then all of us can all make our own dumplings. At the Muslim Market in Xi’an, they have their own dumpling with lamb and a lot of different spices. Xi’an is about an hour from Chengdu. You go to Chengdu, they have the chaoshou.
The next one is the dipping sauce. The dipping sauce is a very important part. It can be sweet and sour, for deep-fried wontons or dumplings. It can be mala, hot and spicy and numbing with the Sichuan peppercorn. And then hongyou for chaoshou. A lot of people don't realize hongyou, the Sichuan- style red chili oil, actually has over 25 different spices and ingredients. So it's not just red, it's not just hot, it's actually very aromatic, very spicy.
And then besides all the things that we talk about, there's a choice of cooking. With Italian ravioli, it’s just boiled. They’re all boiled, that’s it. The choice of cooking for Chinese dumplings is—you can steam it, you can poach it, you can bake it. You can deep fry it. You can pan fry it just like sheng jian bao.
If you look at the infinite variety, the choices of wrapper, filling, flavor, shape, dipping sauce, and cooking method, Chinese dumplings are probably the most diverse, the most complex, and the most amazing and most interesting.
I want to talk to you about the naming of dumplings. Some of them are named after how they’re cooked, others after the way that they look, or what is in them, or mythology. We have shui jiao, which is “water dumpling.” That’s very straightforward—how it’s made. Guo tie, that’s the cooking method.
It’s interesting. Jiao is “dumpling.” Shui is, you boil them—you put them in water and boil them, so shui jiao. But you use the same [kind of dumpling], you pan fry them as potsticker, it’s guo tie— “stick to the pan,” right? So this itself is fascinating. This is about heritage and culture and history.
Wonton means “swallowing clouds,” right? It’s such a beautiful name.
Well because you know why? Because this basically is something they describe. When you boil the wonton, when it’s done, they float on top. And the way that the wrapper is floating on top [of the water] is just like a cloud moving.
Really? I never knew that.
Floating on the cloud. They float on top and they move around. When you boil them, the wrapper kind of spreads out, like a moving cloud. It basically describes the motion.
Are you somebody who believes in having traditional dumplings or are you happy to have these fun and new interesting ones? For example, Mott 32 in Las Vegas has a hot and sour xiaolongbao. And then there’s a couple of places in Hong Kong, like Hong Kong Dim Sum Library, where they do a mapo tofu xiaolongbao. What do you think about these places and these new formats of dumplings?
People always debate tradition. What is tradition? If you look at the evolution of Chinese cuisine, you know that tomato is called fānqié. From the West. In Beijing, one of the most popular soups is tomato-egg soup. Every home cook makes that. I always tell people, when I was growing up—it was not a thousand years ago, even though I’m old—I had never seen broccoli. Gai lan, but not broccoli. I’d never seen asparagus. I had never tasted any cheese. I had never, ever seen an avocado. Now, avocado is used by everybody. All the Japanese restaurants have California rolls.
To me, the key is that we stay with tradition in terms of preparation and basic flavor profile. The ingredients you use, it can be very creative. One of my friends has a dim sum shop in the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong. Instead of using regular oil, he used truffle oil in his har gow. And then he put shaved truffle on top of someone’s dim sum. And then some say,“Wow, this is no good. This is not traditional.” But the har gow itself was traditional. The way they shape it is traditional. The only thing is the flavor, the dipping sauce is different. So you cannot say this is not Chinese food, or that it’s not Chinese tradition. You can put mapo tofu or Kung Pao chicken flavor in a xiaolongbao. You can do anything you want. It’s just about being creative, more innovative. The chef—we’re all artists, we’re magicians. We turn things into something else. Otherwise all the artists paint the same picture.
What we’ve seen in the past, historically, is that the pricing of [Chinese] dumplings is very different from the pricing of ravioli or dumplings in other cultures. As an educator, how do you help students that might come to you and say, “Well, when I make dumplings, I can only charge this much but when I make ravioli, I can charge that much?” How do you reconcile the two?
This is about perception. A lot of people don’t realize the work put into a typical Chinese dumpling—a lot more work than a typical ravioli, I guarantee you. And the thing is also, I always believe for the longest time, the Chinese have been a silent minority. We just do [the work], we never promote it, we never market it. So marketing and promotion is what is lacking in some of these smaller dumpling houses. I think 20, 30 years ago, you would hardly see a dumpling restaurant in New York or San Francisco. Now, you have places that specialize in dumplings. Restaurants that specialize in Northern dumplings, or restaurants specializing in xiaolongbao just like Din Tai Fung—they’re opening all over the world. If you serve them individually like an appetizer, you can mark up [the price] a lot more. Like one that I make as an appetizer— I take a har gow, and then I serve it with a butterflied tiger prawn. It’s so beautiful. And then you can charge more.
Also, if you go to a typical Chinese dim sum restaurant, a lot of the customers are the traditional, elderly, senior Chinese citizens. They can’t afford to pay more. But you rely on those people to go over there every day and read the newspaper and have a cup of tea. Now, if you go to Empress by Boon in San Francisco, they charge you a fortune, and it’s booked for two months in advance. So if you do a good job, and you do it well, I think there’s a great market for it. I remember my good friend, Joyce Chen, changed jiaozi to [Peking] ravioli. They call it [Peking] ravioli. I think it’s about marketing: promotion and marketing and PR.
Is there one dumpling that you think is harder than the rest to make?
I think that one of the most difficult dumplings to make is xiaolongbao. It’s supposed to be so many pleats. When you’re good, you have many pleats. When you’re not good, you have lousy pleats. So not only do you have to have so many pleats to be a master, but then also it has to be shaped perfectly. And then also after you steam it, when you lift it up, it can’t break. That is difficult to do if you don’t have experience.
You know so much about dumplings and Chinese food. What’s left for you to learn? What dumpling do you want to learn about or what dumpling master do you want to learn from?
Well first of all, Chinese dumplings, particularly Cantonese dim sum, some of them can be made by machine but the majority of them cannot be made by machine. There’s no culinary school in the US for Chinese cuisine training. Hopefully, one day I will open a Chinese culinary academy in the US to actually teach people how to make Chinese appetizers, finger food, and dim sum. And hopefully that would be able to elevate [dumplings] because dim sum is a skill. So we’re working on it. We will have a satellite campus, but the main campus will probably be in Las Vegas. And I’ll try to develop that in my own restaurant.
I always have dumplings that I made in my freezer. I know all Chinese people do. So what dumplings do you have at home?
I always have two wrappers at home. I always have wonton wrappers at home, I always have jiaozi wrappers at home. With jiaozi wrappers I can do potstickers, I can do jiaozi. I do a lot of recipe testing. So whatever the leftovers are, I put it in [the wrappers] and go to my garden and get some fresh herbs and incorporate those into it. So I always have dumpling A, dumpling B, dumpling C. For lunch, I always eat dumplings.
Really?
It's all so easy because it’s already done. I just boil them for 5 to 6 minutes. Then I can have dumplings. Then I have different dipping sauces. Sometimes I use oyster sauce. Sometimes I use hoisin sauce, sometimes I use mala sauce. Sometimes I use chili crisp. If you ever come and visit, I’ll show you my pantry.
When I was little, every time I was hungry, my mom asked, “How hungry are you?” Six dumplings is a little hungry. Seven dumplings is more hungry. Eight dumplings is the most hungry. And then 10 dumplings is, “Oh my God, I have to eat right now.” So this is what my family calls the dumpling hunger index. What do you think about the dumpling hunger index, and how many dumplings can you eat at one sitting?
That's a good question. Yesterday, we had some xiaolongbao. And my wife asked me, “How many do you want?” And I said, “Well for you, you’re never that hungry. You're going to have six.” Then I had 12. So I can eat 12 dumplings.
As you look back at your legacy, when did you realize that what you were doing was really changing the way that people were looking at Chinese food in America? What do you think is one of the most important parts of your legacy?
I do probably about 75 to 85 live events [a year] for anywhere from 300 people to 50,000 people in a stadium. A lot of the time people come up to me very emotional, shake my hand, sometimes even hug me and says, “Chef Yan, I want to tell you, the reason why I became a chef is because when I was growing up, I had the opportunity to watch you.” Or “Chef Yan, I want to thank you because when my parent or grandmother, when they’re laying on the bed seriously ill, the only time they smiled is when they watched the Yan Can Cook show in the hospital bed.” I really don't care about legacy. But to me, this is a testament that all the years of hard work have made a little dent, a little impact on somebody's life.
Interview has been condensed and edited. Photos via UC Davis and Martin Yan; video stills via KQED/Martin Yan on YouTube. As an honorarium for the interview, Above the Fold has made a donation to the Welcome to Chinatown Longevity fund.
Dr. Lilly Jan is a food and beverage management academic, researcher, consultant, chef, and educator with nearly 15 years in hospitality and foodservice across the industry in catering and events, retail, television production, and more. She is currently a faculty member of Cornell University’s Hotel School in Ithaca, New York, teaching courses in food and beverage management, cultures and cuisine, and restaurant design.
Lilly’s masters thesis was, in part, about xiaolongbao.
“Loose” in Mandarin