Heavenly handmade mooncakes (3)

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Chef Lai inspects the cakes carefully and sometimes “redoes” three cakes among 10 because the decorative lines are the crust are not clear enough.

He insists on perfection.

“Mooncakes represent family reunion and bring happiness. No matter how hard the work is, I consider making mooncakes a way of expressing happiness,” says chef Yip.

He believes that dedication determines the quality and flavor.

Hard to continue

Consumers snap up these special mooncakes because handmade cakes are rare. No more than 10 places in Shanghai offer handmade mooncakes.

Lack of dim sum chefs is part of the reason.

“If I had been born into a wealthy family and well educated, I would not have become a dim sum chef,” says chef Lai.

His son shows a keen interest in making dim sum, but the father is strongly opposed.

“Being a dim sum chef is too hard,” he says.

Compared with the prospects of Western pastry chefs, the future of Chinese dim sum chefs is less promising, although the professional skills of the two are similar.

In the West, chefs and pastry chefs enjoy nearly equal status and both can become executive chefs, food and beverage directors and even higher. Both can open their own restaurants or bakeries, publish their recipes and even become celebrity TV chefs.

However, a dim sum chef always plays a subordinate role in a Chinese kitchen, generally subordinate to a cook.

Dim sum chefs are not even called chefs by customers but shifu, a respectful form of address generally used for people engaged in specialized trade.

“It’s nearly impossible for a dim sum chef promoted to executive chef in a hotel,” says a hotel insider, declining to be quoted by name.

It is also difficult to find any store or restaurant selling nothing but dim sum in China.

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