Gluten Savvy

Yum Cha — what Americans call Dim Sum — is risky for the gluten-intolerant. If you’ve never tried it before, it involves pre-prepared dishes on plates and in bamboo baskets being wheeled around a room and offered to patrons. As each server arrives, they tell you the name of each dish they have on their trolley — barbeque pork or steam bun, for example. Unless you speak fluent Mandarin or Cantonese, you’ve got a good chance no one will understand what you’re asking about.

However, I had a serious craving for prawn dumplings (and I know those are in rice noodles!), so armed with my Dim Sum pictorial guide that I picked up on a recent jaunt to the States, I ventured out to Dragon Boat Palace. Each page of my book had a photo of a dish, its name in Chinese characters and English, and a list of typical ingredients.

We settled in an ordered some fairly straightforward things to start with, mostly seafood dumplings in rice flour wrappings. The scallop and greens dumpling was probably the most exquisite although the mixed mushroom one comes a close second.

The hardest thing to communicate to the waiters was that I couldn’t have anything with soy sauce — because of the wheat content. We didn’t want them to misinterpret it as a soy allergy — I love my bean curd, and in fact I really wanted to have bean curd skin with vegetables, although we didn’t see it.

We managed to get an undertaking that the roast duck did not have soy sauce on it. That was pretty delicious. I’d check when you go, though, as recipes may change from day to day.

I needed to use the book twice. Once to decide I couldn’t have a dish when the waiter couldn’t tell me what was in it and once to point at the word ‘wheat’. I’d already used it at home to work out that my old favourite, sesame balls with red bean paste, were indeed made with rice flour although it’s hard to tell: the texture is very much like white bread at times.

Of course, the proof is in the days following, and I had no ill effects from my experience. However, with no gluten-free awareness obvious in the staff, I knew I was taking my digestion into my own hands.

Yum cha remains delicious but risky. What’s life without the occasional skerrick of danger, right? [Not recommended for the seriously allergic or for pregnant coeliacs!]

Dragon Boat Palace
149 Lonsdale Street
Melbourne, Australia

+61 3 9639 0888

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