ShuMai Supreme

the mother of all shumai

In a quaint little Chinese coffee shop, tucked away in heart of Taiping town, a bunch of old guys make the best ShuMai on the planet.

ShuMai, if you've every eaten DimSum, is the signature dish for this evergreen Chinese cuisine. It is a small, bite-size steamed dumpling of shrimps, crab meat, pork, water chestnuts and other stuff, enveloped in a thin rice pastry and garnished with shrimp roe on top. In most DimSum restaurants around the world, ShuMai is served in a threesome of dumplings, in a saucer. However, in Kwan Kee Restaurant in Taiping they serve their ShuMais in twos. Because at Kwan Kee, they don't just sell ShuMais, the sell the Mother of all ShuMais!!!

Our ShuMai in Taiping, like most things from Taiping (*ahem*), are larger than life. Hehh! Actually, they're double the size of most ShuMais you get in Malaysia. With a generous helping of ingredients packed compactly in every dumpling, you get the springiest ShuMais in the world. And here at Kwan Kee their family recipe, an heirloom passed on from generation to generation, is a closely-guarded secret. Which is why the Kwan Kee ShuMai remain peerless in this little town of Taiping.

Mom brings the stuff from Taiping every time she visits. This time around, she brought a couple of thousands. However, since she is staying over at my uncle's this visit, I was not able to hoard the stuff all to myself. As a result my relatives, the ravenous wolves that they are, devoured everything in sight leaving only a measly three dumplings for me. Buttheads!

Perhaps it's time to go home to Taiping once again. :) And oh, if you're looking for the place, it's a few doors down from the Taiping Old Clock Tower along Jalan Kota, opposite the Guardian Pharmacy.