Cheung fun (rice noodle rolls) is the one dim sum dish that does not travel. It wants eating within a minute or two of leaving the steamer, while the sheet is still slippery and only just holding itself together. Ten minutes in a takeaway box and it has firmed into something else entirely. Unless you live near a good Cantonese place and eat it standing there, you have probably never had it at its best.
This is a steam drawer, and the drawer is the whole trick. Pour a thin rice batter across the tray, slide it in, and a minute or two later pull it out and scrape the set sheet into a roll. Doing the same thing over a domestic pan means lifting a hot, flexing tray out of a cloud of steam with two tea towels, which is why almost nobody makes cheung fun at home twice. Here you pull a handle.
Several drawers means you can run one while you pour the next, which is how you get a plate of rolls to the table together rather than one at a time going cold. Electric heat raises steam quickly and leaves the hob free.
The same trays handle steamed rice cakes, turnip cake, liangpi (cold hand-cut wheat-starch noodles) and the thin sheets for lasagne-style rice rolls. Batter is rice flour, cornflour or wheat starch, and water, which is the other quiet advantage: the ingredients are cheap and every one of them is on a British supermarket shelf.
Specifications
| Type | Electric steam drawer, large capacity |
| Format | Multiple pull-out drawers |
| Shipping & warranty | Ships from our UK warehouse | 1-year warranty |
About the control panel
The labels on this steamer are in Chinese. That is normal for an appliance built for the Chinese market, and unavoidable here, because nothing in a Western kitchen shop does this job. We are photographing this model's panel so we can publish a full English button map here. Until it is up, message us and we will send you the English guide before you order.
