How We Cracked the Code on Vegan Soup Dumplings
They used to say it wasn’t possible to make a vegan soup dumpling that tastes authentic—we’ve proved them wrong. Take a peek at how we discovered the secret to making a good vegan soup dumpling and found a way to produce it for our friends following plant-based diets.
What Makes Soup Dumpling Vegetarian or Vegan?
You might be familiar with the classic soup dumpling recipe—succulent ground pork and a rich, gelatin-based umami broth, all nestled into a supple wrapper for the perfect package. However, aside from the wrapper, everything else we just mentioned includes animal products.
How We Made Them
The biggest challenge with making frozen vegan soup dumplings was adapting the original recipe to be completely vegan. We have our process of creating meat-based soup dumplings down to a science, but it wasn’t as simple as just putting vegan ingredients into our usual equipment.
It took a few tricks, a lot of brainstorming, plenty of experimenting, and lots of nighttime triple-shot espressos, but we finally cracked the code after years of testing.
Adapting the Flavors
As many vegans can attest, one of the biggest challenges in adapting non-vegan food to a plant-based recipe is trying to capture the essence of the original flavors. This can take a lot of experimentation for the aspiring vegan home chef, and plenty of trial and error.
Using jackfruit was a game-changer for this. For those who might be new to vegan food, green, unripe jackfruit has a meatlike texture and makes an excellent vehicle for different flavor profiles when you cook it. Because of the closeness of the flavor profile, jackfruit became our north star for replicating our xiao long bao (小笼包) for vegan taste buds.
Once we got over that hump, it became easier to get the umami base we were looking for. From there, we built on it with some of the usual ingredients—scallions, sesame oil, and mushroom powder, to name a few—all to create a proprietary vegan gelatin that would capture the flavor of the broth. However, there was still one more obstacle that we needed to address.
Adapting the Process
We needed a way to make our vegan soup dumplings at scale like we do with our other dumplings. This came with a few more headaches as we tried to master the ability to produce them in large batches.
Part of the issue was that some of the ingredients—such as the coconut oil we used for the filling—would get stuck in our machinery over time. Simply put, our equipment was not ready for that jelly.
However, to keep the production rolling, we made some slight tweaks to ensure that we could get the texture and flavor we were looking for without running the risk of breaking our equipment.
Authentic Vegan Soup Dumplings at Home
Soup dumplings take a lot of time and effort, and not everyone has the level of patience a grandma has to make them from scratch. Making them vegan is another obstacle altogether.
Getting a bag of our vegan soup dumplings frozen takes all the challenges out of the equation. You won’t have to try finding a restaurant that sells vegan soup dumplings, which is practically impossible for most people. We know—we’ve tried.
Similarly, you won’t have to worry about filling up your freezer with multiple boxes that only have a measly six soup dumplings each. Each bag of our vegan soup dumplings comes with 40 dumplings each, all with a lower storage profile that won’t force you to play Tetris with the contents of your freezer.
Even more, we’re offering these frozen vegan soup dumplings as part of a starter pack. We’ve included two bags for 80 xiao long bao in total, plus every member of our Sauce Trio for a more complete soup dumpling experience.