Street Dim Sums in Shanghai-Guotie

This is a picture of Guotie that is also known as the pan-fried dumplings. This is also one of the most popular foods in Shanghai. People often have them for a good breakfast.

Many people know Chinese dumplings but few of them know Guotie. Someone just think that if you fry the dumplings, they become Guotie. Actually, they are wrong. Guotie , a characteristic food of Shanghai, is different from dumplings from the north part of China. People can use hundreds of materials to make the stuffing of dumplings, no matter meats, fishes and vegetables and they care about the flavor of the stuffing and whether the materials are fresh. However, Guotie is always made of meat, sometimes, with a few of vegetable. People not only care about the flavor of the stuffing but also the process of cuisine very much. They should make sure that the bottom of Guotie should be a little burnt but not too much, the meat inside should be cooked and the other side of the Guotie is neither too hard nor too soft. The most important criterion to decide whether a Guotie is good is that there should be meat fluid in it. When you bite a Guotie, the first thing you can taste should be the extremely delicious hot meat fluid. You drink all of it and then begin to eat the whole Guotie. Therefore, if you have a Guotie that is very dry in some places, that must not be an orthodox Guotie.