Shortcut Soup Dumpling with Gelatin, Pasta Roller, & Cake Ring!
This is a hacky way of making my childhood favorite dim sum. My mother laughed at all my cop-out's, but was delighted at the result. Truth is, while xiaolongbao is an ubiquitous Shanghai specialty, a lot of locals have never actually made it themselves because the traditional way is quite time consuming. In a nutshell, the soup was added to the dumplings by cooking down pork or chicken collagen until you get a thick enough broth that gelatinizes when cooled. The solid soup jelly is then chopped up and mixed into the meat, which is then wrapped into the dough. When steamed, the jelly dissolves into soup again at high temperature, and you have soup dumpling. To save you hours of cooking and chilling, my shortcut is to add gelatin into store-bought broth. To further reduce chilling time, warm up only half of the broth needed, dissolve bloomed gelatin in it, and stir in the remaining cold broth into the mixture. This will cool down the mixture a lot faster. My broth was set
