The best dumpling sauce was harder to find than I expected. For one thing, pretty much all dumpling sauce is delicious—what’s not to like about a combination of oil, ultra umami soy sauce, and other sweet and savory ingredients? Nothing, dammit! The other thing is that there are so many different types of dumplings—different fillings, different shapes and wrappers, different Asian cuisines—which means the best dumpling sauce can vary by variety. (Oh, and if you’re looking for the best dumplings, you should read our best frozen dumplings ranking before you even get into this list.)For this taste test, I tried to run the dumpling sauce gamut. Unlike most of our rankings, this one doesn’t have a “best of the best”—rather, you’ll find the best dumpling dipping sauce for different types of dumplings. And the dumpling sauce in the #1 spot was our team’s favorite. Do with that info what you will! Here are the best dumpling dipping sauces you can buy. (In case you were wondering, I tried all of these with Bibigo Korean-style chicken and vegetable mini wontons—they cook up great in the microwave!)
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- Weichuan Hot Dumpling Sauce
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Weichuan is a Chinese company headquartered right here in Southern California. They make loads of dumplings—gyoza, potstickers, buns—and this hot dumpling sauce is the perfect thing to pair with any of them. It’s a tasty mix of soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil. It’s very nutty and sesame oil forward, but it has a good amount of tang from the vinegar, too. My favorite aspect is the heat. You’ll take a bite of a dumpling dunked in this sauce and be like, huh, where’s the heat? But it sneaks up on you! It’s a simmering sort of heat, not a scorching sort of heat. The hot oil lingers on your lips as you eat and it’s wonderful. I will say this sauce and its not-hot partner are very salty. But if you don’t mind a lot of salt, this is some of the best dumpling sauce out there.
Credit: Merc / Amazon
- Sempio Soy Sauce for Dumpling
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A lot of dumpling sauces are pretty mysterious concoctions, but there’s no guessing game about what gives this one its signature flavor: ginger. You can smell it and you can taste it right away. It’s bright and lovely and goes very nicely with the vinegar and soy sauce. A lot of dumpling sauce just tastes like vinegar and soy sauce, but this one brings something different to the table. Namely, ginger. It’s bright and it’s bold and it’s very tart. The gingery tang makes it perfectly suited to fatty pork- or beef-stuffed dumplings. There’s a diagram of a happy little dumpling on the side of the bottle (along with some instructions in Korean that I can’t read), and I can say I definitely felt like a happy little dumpling after eating a dumpling dipped in this sauce.
Credit: Merc / Amazon
- Ajinomoto Gyoza Dipping Sauce
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On first taste, this dumpling sauce seems so standard. You taste soy sauce. You taste vinegar. But there’s more going on. There’s garlic and—the most important ingredient of them all—MSG! It really adds SO MUCH UMAMI. There’s already so much umami in soy sauce and vinegar, but the MSG takes things to the next level. It’s simple but complex, which I think makes this the best dumpling dipping sauce for veggie dumplings (which, let’s be honest, don’t tend to have as much savory flavor as meat dumplings). This dumpling sauce is made for gyoza, which certainly makes it the best gyoza dipping sauce, but I can’t imagine a dumpling this wouldn’t improve.
Credit: Merc / Amazon
- Dumpling Daughter Spicy Sweet Soy Secret Sauce
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When I tasted this sauce, I thought, “Wow, if I got this at a restaurant I would say, ‘This is a really good restaurant.” Welp, turns out Dumpling Daughter is a restaurant. More specifically, Dumpling Daughter is a small Massachusetts restaurant chain started by Nadia Liu Spellman, whose parents owned renowned Boston Chinese restaurant, Sally Ling’s. If you don’t live in the Boston area, I’m pleased to report that you can get their dumpling sauce on Amazon, and you definitely should. It’s unreal! It’s very sweet. I thought maybe it was made with plum sauce, but it’s just brown sugar, ground red pepper, soy sauce, vegetable oil, and spices. It’s so simple but it’s so complex. If you’re making buns, this is the sauce to buy. Really, if you’re making any Chinese style dumplings—siu mai, xiao long bao, what have ya—a drizzle of this is going to serve as an unreal complement to those savory, umami flavors. I think there’s a lot you can do with this stuff. Honestly, I would drizzle it on noodles too, it’s like chili crisp minus the crisp and also sweet. It rules, and it’s the best dumpling sauce according to the Sporked team.
Credit: Merc / Amazon
Best for Dumplings That Need Heat
Best for Pork Dumplings
Best Gyoza Sauce
Best for Buns
Other products we tried: Signature Select Dumpling Dipping Sauce, Dynasty Potsticker Sauce, Chung’s Asian Style Dipping Sauce
Thoughts? Questions? Complete disagreement? Leave a comment!