Hong Kong - Din Tai Fung (dim sum)

Din Tai Fung - lunch on August 28, 2017

Din Tai Fung is a famous dim sum place that has locations worldwide. Much as I like dim sum, I have to admit I’d never heard of it until they opened a location near me. There was so much hype before, during and after the opening that I never went to that location. I heard tales of 90-minute+ wait times and “it’s not as good as the one in Southern California”, two things that don’t make intuitive sense to me unless people who were willing to wait that long for dim sum had never tried the So Cal location or didn’t care. 

While I like dim sum as much as the next person, I could not see myself waiting that long for a table, no matter how good the dim sum is reputed to be. I told myself I would wait until it had been open longer and the hype had died down but that was well over a year ago and I was still hearing about long wait times so I never made it over there. So I took advantage of being in Hong Kong and having a Din Tai Fung within walking distance of our hotel to go try it.

After Sandra and I did our bakery trek, we both needed to change into dry clothes back at the hotel (seriously, Mother Nature’s shower did us in) but at least we were comfortable again on our way to lunch. We got there around 1 pm and I was pleased to see there were no lines and no waiting. The hostess seated us right away, taking us past the glass-enclosed cubby where their workers were expertly making dim sum. I wanted to gawk but by then I was actually hungry.

I was used to thinking of dim sum being served in carts being pushed around the restaurant and you flag the server who might have the dishes you want. Uh, no, not at Din Tai Fung. It was a notch above the dim sum cart scene in that you had a picture menu at the table that showed their offerings and you checked off the items you wanted on a separate, disposable, printed menu.

Steamed Pork Bun

My plain eating ways led me to the typical dim sum fare: siu mai (steamed pork dumplings), har gow (steamed shrimp dumplings) and a steamed pork bun Sandra and I split. Sandra was a more experienced dim sum and Din Tai Fung eater so she knew to look for the dishes that were available in Hong Kong but might not be the same at other Din Tai Fung locations. I had nothing to compare the Hong Kong location with so I was happy to go along. We also ordered pork fried rice (such an innocuous name for seriously good pork) and a gyoza-like dim sum that was, as she put in, “in a different form factor”.

Har Gow

I’ll say here and now that everything was pretty good. They served the dim sum one dish at a time so that you could eat it at its peak warmth and freshness. The dumpling wraps were not too thick but thin, the filling inside of each was ridiculously juicy and tasty and that was an amazing steamed pork bun. Normally I prefer baked pork buns as I like the bread baked more than steamed but since the steamed bun wasn’t too thick (and hence not too filling), it was delicious and hit just the right note. Plus the filling was perfect.

Siu Mai

My favorites were the shrimp dumplings. Not only were they cute and aesthetically pleasing with the “loot bag” look (I don’t know how else to describe it) and the whole shrimp on top, but the dumpling wrap and pork-and-shrimp filling were so good. 

Pork Fried Rice

Probably the only one I was less enthused about was the gyoza-like dumplings in their different form factor. I liked the form factor and the crispness of the wrapper but the filling had too much chive flavor for my taste. It wasn’t bad but as I was getting full, I’d rather expend the remaining room in my waistband for the other dishes.

I have no idea how the Hong Kong Din Tai Fung stacks up against its sister locations but from my one experience, it gets multiple thumbs up from me. I still don’t think I’d wait 90 minutes or more for it if I had to but it’s seriously good dim sum nonetheless.

Hong Kong - Hei Lee Bakery

Hei Lee Bakery - visited August 28, 2017

Since Jenny Bakery didn’t offer any samples of their cookies, it was fortunate that literally next door to them was Hei Lee Bakery. They didn’t offer samples either but they had individual baked goods for sale and were the more typical Asian bakery I had been hoping for in Hong Kong.

If you’ve never gone to an Asian bakery before, get the bread or any bread product. They make the best, no lie. I don’t happen to like the paste-filled stuff as in rolls filled with red bean paste or mung beans or any other kind of bean paste but I do like the baked pork buns and the cocktail buns which are filled with coconut and sugar. The pineapple buns are good too although I don’t get the name since they don’t contain a lick of pineapple in them. Instead, they’re fluffy, pillowy, delicious sweet rolls. Like King’s Hawaiian rolls on steroids but better.

Sandra and I had already had a typical Chinese breakfast earlier (pork chop with rice noodles and broth for me) but given we’d slogged 4 kilometers in pouring rain to buy cookies we wouldn’t be able to eat for another 5 days, we deserved a little local bakery goodness. The heat and humidity were doing a bang up job suppressing my appetite and we had designs on dim sum for lunch (next post) so I exercised some self control and only bought a cocktail bun and an egg white coconut tart for later.

Hei Lee Bakery’s offerings were similar to Sheng KeeBakery which I visit regularly back home – probably too regularly. They had the usual fare of bean paste-filled buns, cocktail buns, buns filled with hot dog (it’s an Asia thing), pork buns, bread rolls, bread slices and butter cookies. The cookies are only sold by the pound and the minimum you could buy was half a pound. Sandra bought some for us to share later but we both ended up forgetting about them and I never tried them. 

The cocktail bun was good though. I ate the egg white coconut tart the next day but forgot to take a close up of it. It was a little dry. I don’t know if that’s because I ate it a day later or if that’s how it’s supposed to be but the texture of the bottom crust was a bit dry and crumbly and the filling was also (I think intentionally) dry. It wasn’t a custard filling but more like a dense cake that wasn’t cakey. The flavor was good but I think the texture could’ve been improved if I’d been able to warm it up when I ate it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a microwave in my hotel room.

Hong Kong - Jenny Bakery

Jenny Bakery - visited August 28, 2017

Rainy Hong Kong view from my hotel room

As I arrive at the 8-year anniversary of my blog (8 years, wowsa, first blog post was on September 13, 2009), I reflect back on how much it’s evolved. When I first started it, I was simply publishing online what I did whenever I tried a new recipe: I would copy the recipe, note where I got it from, attach a picture of the finished product, and write myself a note on whether I made any changes, how the recipe turned out, and what I thought of it. I had separate Word documents, some of which I printed out and bound into my own collection of recipes for a “recipe book”. 

Then I ventured into the world of blogging, started to get more verbose than my earlier, terse recipe notes and began taking more (and more and more) pictures of what I made. I’d throw in the odd recipe or two for savory food, known as “real food” in my sweet tooth nomenclature. Then began the period where I took pictures of just about everything I ate. Thank you, Steve Jobs and Apple, for the iphone which meant I had a built-in camera whenever I sat down to a restaurant meal. Bakery reviews and restaurant reviews were launched, partially as my effort to promote small foodie businesses that I experienced and raise awareness about patronizing small businesses in general.

It got even more fun (for me) when I traveled and blogged about my (mostly foodie) experiences and my blog expanded to include my nomadic adventures. It was partly to capture the experiences, partly to serve as references in case I wanted to recommend places to others and partly as a reminder of what I’d done and eaten and eaten some more in my past.

This post marks the beginning of my latest trip to Hong Kong. Prepare for some serious culinary consumption. I hadn’t been back to Hong Kong in over 19 years, prior to the British handover back to China. I wasn’t as much of a foodie back then so most of my memories were of Hong Kong as a fascinating mixture of Chinese and British culture as well as being a mecca for shoppers. I was more of a shopper than a foodie back then and Hong Kong defeated even my shopping inclinations because everywhere you turned, there were shops.

For this trip, I replaced those shopping memories with food ones. You know by now that before I travel anywhere, I look up must-visit bakeries as recommended by the internet, yelp where available, trip advisor when not. I look up local foodie lists of “must-try” foods, bakeries and restaurants. I map different recommendations from my hotel and see what’s within walking distance. I’m not a fan of taxis during my travels unless I’m coming from or going to the airport. Whenever possible, I take easy-to-follow public transportation (in Hong Kong, that would be the MTR or the HK version of London’s Underground) or I simply walk. It’s the best way to see a new city as long as you have a good sense of direction or data roaming-enabled GPS.

Jenny Bakery was my first bakery stop on this trip. It not only came up on a google search as “famous” but a coworker recommended them and said they had “crack cookies”. I rarely need much more encouragement than that to seek out a bakery in a new city. I was in Hong Kong for business but I came in a day earlier than I had to in order to give myself time to recover from jet lag. I love to travel but I’m a horrible traveler since I can rarely sleep on planes and need time to adjust to the local time zone.

What the tin looked like for Chinese New Year 2017

My coworker Sandra and I were both early for our meeting so we used part of our adjust-to-Hong-Kong-time period to make the 4-kilometer walk from our hotel to Jenny Bakery. 4 km is completely walkable and like me, Sandra prefers walking in order to be able to see more of the city. Unfortunately, we were walking in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s most recent typhoon so it rained pretty much the whole day, including during our walk. When I say it rained, if you’ve ever been in Asia during typhoon season, you know I’m not talking gentle pitter patter of raindrops. It means we both got Nature’s shower and became soaked to the skin. Fortunately, it wasn’t cold rain nor was it windy and the temperature was warm enough that I really didn’t mind the rain that much. Okay, my shoes got soaked and I had to change completely into another outfit by the time we got back to the hotel but hey, that’s part of the adventure.

It took us awhile to find Jenny Bakery. Neither one of us activated the data roaming on our phones (I hadn’t bought international roaming and didn’t want the exorbitant, mortgage-a-kidney charges) so we went off screen shots I’d downloaded of the directions I mapped earlier. I’ll spare you the description of how we didn’t quite end up following the path Google said to follow. By luck of the baking gods, I spotted the street name Jenny Bakery was located on by the merest chance. It wasn’t so much a “street” as an “alley”. No matter, we made it.

I wasn’t quite sure what I had expected of Jenny Bakery other than it was a bakery that sold cookies. After arriving, I had to revise my assessment to “a storefront that sells cookies in tins”. Because that’s literally what it was. You walk in, there are posters of the choices of various tins you could buy with differing combinations of flavors and sizes of tins, you go to the counter, tell (or point to) which ones you want, the ladies behind the counter select your choices, you pay (they only accept cash) and they hand them over. If you want a bag for your cookie tins, it’s 1 HKD. The small tin is 320 grams and costs 70 HKD. The large tin is 640 grams and 130 HKD. 

The most common tin is the one with 4 flavors: original butter, coffee, shortbread and oatmeal raisin. I got the 4-flavor tins for gifts and a 2-flavor mix of butter and coffee cookies for more personal taste testing. The cookie tins are vacuum sealed so I felt confident in buying them so early in the trip since they would last until I got them back home. Freshness is always a concern when buying foodie gifts to take back.

The bottom layer of the 640 g tin of 4-flavor cookie tin

But that meant neither Sandra or I could try the cookies on the spot since neither of us was willing to break open one of our tins for an onsite taste test. Jenny Bakery doesn’t offer samples either, which is too bad. I guess they felt successful enough and confident enough in word-of-mouth and internet fame not to need that kind of pull-marketing. And it worked. Based on their reputation for “crack cookies”, I bought them untasted in enough quantities (I also went back at a later date to pick up a couple more tins that I forgot I needed for gifts). There weren’t any lines while we were there but they did a pretty steady business.

Coffee Cookie on the left, Butter Cookie on the right

Flash forward a week later; I was back stateside and had opened my taste test tin to share with my family and finally got to try the cookies. First, let me say, they smelled heavenly. As in, you know these were made with butter, lotsa butter. Then probably more butter for good measure. Second, they were good cookies. But I’ll go out on a limb and brave the internet and Trip Advisor commentators’ wrath when I say I’m not sure I would really consider them out of this world. Don’t get me wrong; they were good. But I’ve had lots of good butter cookies and I don’t know that these stood out in any particular way. They were good butter cookies. Would I go back again next time I’m in Hong Kong? Probably not. Mostly because I’d already tried them, know what they taste like and would rather try something new or different. But they were not a standout like Laduree’s Sucre Plaisir or Levain Bakery’s cookies or Dominique Ansel’s DKA; all of which I would return to over and over again given the choice. These were just good butter cookies.

Super Fudgy Brownies

Super Fudgy Brownies - made August 19, 2017, adapted from The First Year Blog

This is one of those recipes where there’s truth in advertising. These brownies are super fudgy. Helped by the fact that they contain unsweetened chocolate more than cocoa and there’s relatively less flour compared to other recipes.

I’ve made countless brownies and tried dozens, if not hundreds, of recipes for various brownies. I have many brownie prejudices. I don’t like them cakey or “mousselike”, meaning too soft and mushy. But I do like them chewy, dense and fudgy with enough chocolate punch to make you weep. For that reason, I don’t usually care for brownie recipes that only use cocoa powder. True, cocoa will provide more chocolate flavor than from just melted baking chocolate. But the texture isn’t as good; it isn’t as dense and tends to have a more dry, cakey mouthfeel.

A good compromise to look for in a brownie recipe is one that uses unsweetened baking chocolate (and  sometimes bittersweet chocolate) that’s melted with the butter and a little cocoa powder sifted into the dry ingredients to amp up the chocolate flavor. The baking chocolate will give you the texture and the cocoa powder will deliver on the flavor.

As you can tell from the ingredients, this had a relatively large amount of baking chocolate in it compared to the cocoa and flour. That’s what helped live up to its name of “super fudgy”. With that much unsweetened chocolate, it’s also guaranteed to make a rich dark chocolate brownie, especially if you use the good cocoa, not the wimpy stuff. I kept this one plain to keep the focus on the fudgy texture but feel free to dress it up with add ins.

1 cup butter
6 ounces unsweetened chocolate
2 tablespoons cocoa powder, sift if lumpy
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line an 8 x 8" square baking pan with foil and lightly spray with nonstick cooking spray.
2. Melt butter and unsweetened chocolate together in the top half of a double boiler set over hot, not simmering, water. Whisk until melted and smooth. Let cool slightly.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together cocoa powder, flour and salt; set aside.
4. Beat eggs and granulated sugar until frothy. Add vanilla extract and combine until smooth. Add melted butter-chocolate mixture and mix until combined.
5. Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Pour batter into prepared pan and sprinkle top with chocolate chips. Bake 45-55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out with moist crumbs. Do not overbake. Cool completely before cutting and serving.

Brown Butter Cinnamon Crinkles

Brown Butter Cinnamon Crinkles - made dough August 19, 2017, adapted from Cookies and Cups

Is there anything better than browned butter? Probably but I can’t think of what that would be right now. Butter itself is the nectar of the gods. It powers all baked goods worth eating. Browned butter? A whole ‘nother level.

So I was predisposed to like this recipe for Brown Butter Cinnamon Crinkles from Cookies and Cups. It’s a fairly simple vanilla-butter-cinnamon cookie. The added little something-something was to roll the dough balls in powdered sugar before baking. Think of them as the vanilla version of chocolate crinkles. Because you roll them in powdered sugar before baking, they don’t quite have the velvety, melt-in-your-mouth texture that marks the typical Mexican Wedding Cake or the Buttery Tea Balls I like to make.

They tasted good though so I’m not quibbling. I advocate baking these just long enough to let the “crinkles” appear, meaning the cookies are no longer the smooth dough balls they started out as but have spread (slightly) and show the cracks in the powdered sugar coating. You also don’t want to roll the dough balls into the powdered sugar until right before you put these into the oven. Otherwise, the powdered sugar will just melt into the moistness of the dough.

When just the slightest bit underbaked, these have a great texture. If it had been a chocolate crinkle, I would’ve called it fudgelike. Since they were vanilla, maybe vanilla-fudge-like? Either way, they were delicious. If you want to amp up the cinnamon flavor, add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the powdered sugar before you roll the cookie dough balls in it. And I will again put in a plug for Penzey’s Vietnamese Cinnamon. Not affiliated with them but they have the best cinnamon ever. It’s the only one I ever use now.

10 tablespoons butter, melted and browned

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup confectioners' sugar

1. Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt; set aside.
2. Mix together granulated and brown sugars in the bowl of a standing electric mixer. Pour in cooled melted butter and mix to combine. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing briefly after each addition. Add vanilla extract and mix until smooth.
3. On low speed, add flour mixture, mixing until just combined. Cover and chill for at least 1 hour.
4. Portion into dough balls, cover and chill or freeze overnight or several hours.
5. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
6. Place confectioners' sugar in small shallow bowl. Roll dough balls in confectioners' sugar and evenly space on lined baking sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes or until cookies are set.