Aotearoa and Australia · Volume 02, The Ration, the Milk Bar and the Bush Table

Dim sim

Melbourne

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: Hands on 30 minutes · Waiting 30 minutes

Researched: Researched from 167 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

William Chen Wing Young invented the modern Australian dim sim in Melbourne's Chinatown in 1945, adapting Cantonese siu mai for mass factory production and Anglo-Australian taste. His daughter Elizabeth Chong, a professional Chinese-Australian chef and broadcaster, is the direct, named, in-tradition source for both the recipe's origin and its name: "They called it a dim sim because in my dialect we don't say dim sum, we say dim sim." The larger "South Melbourne dim sim," the format most Australians actually recognise, carries a second, independent 1949 lineage through Ken Cheng, who began selling them from a trolley at Caulfield Racecourse before relocating to South Melbourne Market.

by Melbourne

Chinese migration to Australia's goldfields began with the 1851 gold discovery, most arrivals from Guangdong province; many who didn't strike gold became market gardeners or ran cookshops feeding diggers of every background, one of the earliest documented Chinese restaurants opened by John Alloo at Ballarat in 1854. This chapter keeps that gold-rush layer firmly separate from the dish most associated with Chinese-Australian food today, because dim sim is not gold-rush food: it was invented in Melbourne's Chinatown in 1945, a full ninety years later, by William Chen Wing Young, a Chinese-Australian entrepreneur born in Wahgunyah, Victoria, in 1896, whose family originated in Guangdong. His daughter, the well-known Chinese-Australian chef and broadcaster Elizabeth Chong, is the named, in-tradition source for the story: her father "noticed Australians were especially fond of the Cantonese siu mai," adapted the recipe for mass factory production, and named the result plainly, in her own words, "because in my dialect we don't say dim sum, we say dim sim." Chen Wing Young was also known as the "chicken roll king" for a separate line of business, the direct ancestor of the (chicken-free) Chiko Roll that Frank McEncroe would later build into its own icon, one Chinese-Australian entrepreneur's innovation rippling into two unrelated national snack foods. The larger "South Melbourne dim sim" carries a second, independent lineage: Ken Cheng began selling steamed dim sims from a trolley at Caulfield Racecourse in 1949 before relocating to South Melbourne Market, where the style still bears the market's name.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Elizabeth Chong's own sieu mai, published via SBS's The Cook Up with Adam Liaw. Yields 30 pieces. About 30 minutes, plus 30 minutes chilling.

Ingredients

30 wonton wrappers, 7.5 cm square
125 g fresh green prawns, peeled, deveined, finely chopped
155 g fatty pork mince
½ cup water chestnuts, diced
½ cup canned bamboo shoots, drained and diced
½ cup spring onion, diced, mainly white part
½ cup celery, diced
2 tsp table salt
¼ tsp white pepper
1 tsp fresh ginger, grated

Method

Combine the prawn and pork with the water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, spring onion and celery.
Add the table salt, white pepper and fresh ginger and pound the mixture until smooth; chill 30 minutes.
Round off the wrapper corners; fill each with a tablespoon of the mixture, gather the sides and pleat the top; pack the filling firm with a butter knife so it stands proud of the wrapper, and flatten the base so the dumpling stands upright.
Steam over boiling water for 15 to 20 minutes.

Notes

Dipping sauce: soy sauce to sesame oil, roughly two parts to one.

Commercial dim sim as sold in Australia today typically scales this into a larger, denser, more cabbage-forward parcel than Chong's own delicate original.

What a modern chef changes

This chapter's own technique work; no fine-dining precedent for dim sim was found in this research.

Rung 5

Method

Hand-chop the prawn rather than processing it, exactly as Chong's own recipe specifies, for a genuinely different, less pastelike texture than a food processor gives.
Steam over a controlled, thermometer-checked heat rather than a rolling boil, for a more even set through the filling.
Finish the dipping sauce with a native touch, a drop of finger lime vesicles through the soy and sesame, a small, honest addition rather than a claim that any restaurant does this.

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