Dumplings, whether steamed, boiled, or panfried, are a perfect food when it comes to the potential combinations of flavors and textures. One dough can carry you through any number of fillings and your favorite cooking method. I prefer my Spinach, Egg, and Shiitake Dumplings steamed. I like the traditional Pork and Chinese Cabbage Dumplings boiled or panfried. They’re best hot, but there have been plenty of times when I’ve eaten dumplings cold out of the refrigerator. They’re filling and portable, and assembling them is typically a communal activity that brings friends and families together. My earliest memory of dumpling making as an act of community is when my father was studying for his master’s degree in journalism and we were living in student housing for families. I was probably five or six years old at the time. It was a tiny apartment, but my parents moved the dinner table into the middle of the living room, and their friends gathered around to share dumpling-making duties. We didn’t have a proper dowel-style Chinese rolling pin, so my father somehow—I don’t recall his having a saw—cut off the end of our wooden broom handle. It was aqua blue and the perfect diameter. Broom handles nowadays are mostly plastic or aluminum, or have molded grips. It’d be pretty hard to cut a rolling pin out of that.
I learned how to make dumplings at my mother’s side. She would prepare the dough and roll out the wrappers. I would fill the dumplings and pinch them closed. When I was about sixteen or so, my father put me to test and said I had to demonstrate I could make dumplings from beginning to end all on my own. “How are you going to find a husband if you can’t make dumplings?” he said to me once. Even though I bristled at the thought of being a demure wife, it was a prescient statement: my husband fell for my strong sense of self, but when he bragged about me to his friends, he always talked about my pot stickers. For any gathering we hosted in our little apartment, he insisted that I make pot stickers, regardless of the menu. Even now, all these years later, he asks me if I’m going to make dumplings for dinner parties, especially when his side of the family comes over.
I have been on a mission for as long as I have been a food writer to convert dumpling eaters into dumpling makers, especially when it comes to the panfried dumplings that everyone knows as pot stickers. When I was fresh out of college and working at the Denver Post as a copyeditor on the night shift, my colleagues sometimes ordered Chinese takeout for dinner. They all fawned over the pot stickers, but I would look at the lifeless, greasy dumplings with mild contempt, mumbling to myself about how they tasted like shortcuts: cheap ingredients and poorly formed crust. The crispy crust is why these dumplings are called pot stickers, after all. One of my copy desk friends, undoubtedly tired of hearing me grumble, offered to introduce me to her famous pierogies if I would make my pot stickers for her. I willingly accepted, and thus began two decades of pot sticker proselytizing.
After three years in Denver, I moved to Seattle to serve as the food writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. That’s when my reputation became bound with pot stickers. I’d make them for friends and colleagues. I wrote about them and demonstrated them at various culinary events. Then I took the show on the road, so to speak, as a guest chef on a cruise to China. I remember traipsing around Shanghai in search of enough Chinese rolling pins to give to my students on the ship and finally finding them in bulk at, of all places, Carrefour, a French-owned supermarket chain. My pot stickers experienced their fifteen minutes of fame in a segment on Anthony Bourdain’s Travel Channel show No Reservations. He remembered my pot stickers from our previous encounter in Seattle and wanted to shoot a segment where he would come to my house for a pot sticker lesson. These days, I teach monthly classes on Chinese home cooking, and the pot sticker and soup dumpling classes always sell out far in advance.
Making Dumplings
Dumpling Dough is versatile and is used regardless of the filling or the cooking method. Make the dough, make one or more of the fillings, and proceed to fill and fold the dumplings, per the instructions below. You then can decide which cooking method you want to follow.
You could boil and panfry, for example, or panfry all the dumplings. It’s up to you. Finally, you can serve them with one or more dipping sauces .Filling Dumplings :
Roll out about 6 wrappers at a time per Dumpling Dough instructions. Fill each wrapper with about 1 heaping teaspoon of your filling of choice.
Folding Dumplings :
The simplest way to seal a dumpling is to fold the wrapper over the filling into a half-moon shape. Match the edges together and press as if you were sealing an envelope. There is no need to dab homemade wrappers with water. There is enough moisture in the dough that the edges will seal when pressed. Holding the sealed edge of the dumpling between your fingers, set it on its spine and gently wiggle it as you are pushing down so that the dumpling will stand up. Place the completed dumpling on a baking sheet dusted with flour or lined with parchment paper. Repeat with the remaining dumplings.
To learn how to pleat the dumplings, see the step-by-step photos (opposite page).
Storing Dumplings :
Once you have made all the dumplings, you can cook them immediately or freeze them. If you freeze them, place the baking sheet of dumplings in the freezer for about 30 minutes to harden enough so they don’t stick together. Then, transfer the dumplings to a ziplock bag and place them in the freezer to store for up to two or three weeks. You can cook them from frozen. Do not defrost or you will get a gooey mess. If you are cooking the dumplings immediately, proceed to any of the dumpling recipes in this chapter, and use the cooking methods found in Cooking Dumplings.
Cooking Dumplings :
You can use any combination of filling and cooking method for the dumplings. It all depends on what you crave.
My father loved to eat dumplings cooked every way. He was always the taste tester to see if the dumplings were cooked through. When boiling dumplings, my mom would scoop one dumpling out of the bubbling water, hand it to my father, and ask him, “Is it done?” He’d carefully take a bite of the dumpling and proclaim, “Yes, it’s done.” In the restaurant, we had this giant, thirty-inch commercial wok that easily accommodated the entire batch of dumplings at one time.
Steamed dumplings have the benefit of not getting waterlogged like the boiled dumplings. You can use a bamboo or metal steamer lined with blanched Chinese cabbage leaves or liners made of perforated parchment paper, which you can buy online or at Asian markets. You also can cut your own parchment circles and use a hole puncher or a skewer to make enough holes in the paper to let steam through.
Panfried dumplings, or pot stickers, seem to be a great equalizer. I don’t think I’ve met a person who doesn’t like pot stickers. Even burned pot stickers taste good—just ask my brother, who ate a plate of pot stickers I accidentally burned while attending to another matter. Even though I hid the burnt ones, my brother found them and ate them anyway. When we have extended family over for dinner, there never seems to be enough pot (guo) stickers (tie) to go around. Being able to make big batches of pot stickers is the reason I own a large nonstick skillet. The nonstick surface browns well and releases the dumplings more consistently. You also can use a cast-iron pan.
To Boil Dumplings :
In a large soup pot or stockpot over high heat, bring 4 quarts of water to a boil. Carefully add about half of the prepared dumplings, or only as many as your pot can accommodate without crowding. Return to a boil and then cook the dumplings for 4½ to 5 minutes. If you are cooking frozen dumplings, boil them for 1 to 2 minutes more. Keep an eye on the water as it may bubble over, and adjust the heat as necessary. The dumplings are done when they puff up. Remove the pot from the heat. Using a large slotted spoon or handled strainer, transfer the dumplings to a serving plate.
1 Comments
hmm
ReplyDelete