Continuing through the Land of Plenty cookbook…

Today is just a quick post, but I get to gleefully delve into one of my favorite Chinese snacks, dumplings. There are roughly 22,632 ways you can prepare dumplings, but this preparation just happens to be the “Zhong” Crescent Dumplings. Fuschia says this is a traditional New Year’s dish in Northern China, but did you know you are allowed to make them whenever your little heart desires? It’s true.

I’ve made dumplings a few times in the past, always using the wonton and dumpling wrappers you can buy at most any grocery store. I plan on making my own dumpling dough soon, but I made these along with the Dan Dan noodles and using pre-made wrappers is a big time saver, and the taste/texture is great as far as I’m concerned. These wrappers are from Super H but you can usually get them near the refrigerated produce at any Kroger or Publix. I bought these frozen so you can stock up and just pop a package in the refrigerator earlier in the day when you need to use them, they defrost very quickly.

I don’t have many pictures, but here’s the quick run-down of preparing the dumplings:

First create the filling for your dumplings. I used almost 1lb of ground pork, 1 tbsp Shaoxing rice wine, 1 egg, salt and pepper, and almost one cup of water in which I had soaked a large piece of ginger. The filling was very paste-like, per the recipe.

Next, setup your dumpling prep station. Have your wrappers ready to go, your filling bowl next to that, a small bowl of water for sealing, and a plate to put the finished dumplings.

Lay the dumpling in your hand, add a tsp of filling, then seal the dumpling by dipping your finger in water, then run your finger around the edge, fold the dumpling over, and ensure a tight seal. If you fold the wrapper over and create some dimples you have the standard crescent shape. I did this with a few of them, but I also chose to try another folding method I saw here (pictured below).

Put the finished dumpling on your lightly floured plate (you may not need flour if they aren’t sticky). Repeat for what seems like eternity.

Now that you’ve finished folding a million dumplings, you are ready to cook. I’ve always cooked my dumplings in the pot sticker style, pan frying for a minute or two, then steaming them. This recipe calls to boil the dumplings, so I was interested to see how they would turn out.

Boil a pot of water, as soon as the water is close to a rolling boil, add as many dumplings as you can to your pot without overcrowding. As soon as the water reaches a rolling boil, pour in one cup of cold water. This keeps the water from boiling too hard, potentially breaking the dumpling. Repeat this boil/cold water step two more times. After the third cycle your dumplings should be done. Gently remove them from the water (a metal strainer works perfectly), shake off the excess water, then serve immediately with your dipping sauce.

What dipping sauce? A dipping sauce of aromatic soy sauce, chili oil, sesame oil, and crushed garlic is recommended. You can use regular soy sauce, but the cookbook has a recipe for the sweet, aromatic soy sauce which you can create ahead of time.

Creating the soy sauce is easy and it’s really tasty. Simmer 1/3 cup of soy sauce and 2/3 cup of water, add star anise, red chilies, ginger, Sichuan pepper, cinnamon bark, and 4 tbsp of brown sugar for about 20 minutes.

Strain the solids from the liquid, then you are left with a deeply aromatic and flavorful soy sauce. This stuff is worth the effort and you will have plenty leftover to use for a variety of dipping sauces.

With the dan dan noodles and dumplings I drank a bottle of 2005 Carl Schmitt-Wagner Longuicher Maximiner Herrenberg Riesling Spätlese. A sweeter wine like this goes nicely with the spicy Sichuan food.

It had a faded gold color with some aromas of sweet cantaloupe and orange cream. The wine coated my tongue well, it was not overly sweet, and it kind of had a “Sprite” effect going on. The finish was fairly long and tasty, ending with a frothy cream texture. It could use a bit more acidity for me but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was even better the next day.

The dumplings themselves were the best I’ve ever made. The texture was perfect, soft, and slightly sticky, not gummy or rubbery at all. The filling was fairly bland, but that’s what the dipping sauce is for. I could have happily eaten 20 of these things. Too bad I had to share. :-(

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Today I have another quick bite post, this time from my lunch with Aaron this past Saturday at Chef Liu on Buford Highway. I used to live over near here, and I was also recently nearby at Delicious Kabob, but I have never noticed the small restaurant in the middle of a strip mall parking lot. The restaurant itself is like a glorified shack/sun room. There is a sliding glass door, with two eating areas, each just having a handful of tables. You might not guess there is good food here when driving by.

Aaron has been on a mission to find Xia Long Bao (soup dumplings) since he recently discovered them at Joe’s Shanghai Restaurant in New York, claiming that the mixture of soup and dumpling is the shizz, like whoa. I’ve read about these in Bon Appetit so I was savvy to the dish, and it sounded pretty cool. A rich stock/soup is turn solid using plain jello, then put inside a dumpling and steamed, then when you eat it, you bite the dumpling to pierce the exterior, slurp out the soup, and eat the dumpling. It kind of makes me think of inside out won ton soup. Speaking of which, remember “Inside Out Boy”? Good show.

I have no baseline for comparison, but these Xia Long Bao were pretty tasty. There wasn’t a whole lot of soup, and Aaron said the same thing, but they are definitely worth a try. The dumpling itself was tasty, slightly chewy, with a nice sweet filling.

My favorite was the fried pork dumplings, basically what I know to be a pot sticker. They were served bottom side up, perfectly crispy, not burned at all, and not runny or soggy on top. Little known fact – I could eat pot stickers every day.

Above is a spicy cold noodle salad. I’m not sure of the type of noodle, but they were very doughy and filling. It tasted fresh and was a good side dish, but I couldn’t eat too much of it.

The shoddy picture above is the infamous leek pie. This was fantastic. Clear noodles, egg, leeks, maybe pork?, all fried up with some other fantastic flavors. We wish we had ordered more than one.

We also ordered a won ton soup, which was decent. The broth wasn’t too salty, which I like, and though it had seaweed and cilantro in it, it wasn’t all that flavorful. The actual dumplings in the soup were tasty though. We split all of this food and we definitely did not finish it all. Liu’s is a good value and I recommend heading over that way for a casual snack/meal.

Yelp: Chef Liu

I Heart Cuppycakes:  Pomegranate Cosmopolitan Cupcakes

Closet Cooking: Tacos al Pastor 

The Kitchen Sink: Mexican Meatball Soup with Rice & Cilantro

Hey, that tastes good!: Lamb Ragu with Polenta Triangles

Passionate Eater: Wanton Lust (step by step, how to fold wontons)

My roommate Aaron recently sent me some pictures from a dinner he cooked the other day, which he was understandably quite proud of. You must understand that 50% of Aaron’s cooked meals consist of canned soup, lean cuisine, or hot pockets. (Sorry Aaron, I have to state these facts to create the juxtaposition necessary to really hit home how impressive your meal really was). 

We’ve had a few guest bloggers before on this site, but  I wasn’t sent a write-up for this one. Presumably because it takes more than 5 minutes. Burn. Anyways, Aaron’s idea was that I could do a post every week or so with pictures sent in from the masses. Take a quick snap with your cell phone next time you have something notable while out to eat, or take a photo next time you’re in the kitchen, and maybe we can get enough to post them here every once in a while and show everyone what you’re eating. If this is lame, let me know and I’ll forward your thoughts on to Aaron. 

And with that, here is Aaron’s meal, and my witty comments. 

That’s my boy – great use of mise en place. 

Great color going on here. 

Pretty tuna from your Dekalb Farmer’s Market

Cookin’ it up. 

Crisping some wonton wrappers. 

Good presentation, the tuna looks like it is cooked just right, and you can kind of see that he is rocking a bottle of 2006 Bear’s Lair California Viognier. The wine is something a little different, and appears to be a great QPR. Way to go buddy.

Yesterday I continued to use the dumpling wrappers I used for yesterday’s wonton post, this time for my favorite ever….pot stickers. 

I did some research on the interwebz and below is the recipe I sort of created using many sources of inspiration. I guess that makes it somewhat original.

Pot Sticker Ingredients – Makes 30-35

•  1/2 cup Napa Cabbage, chopped
• 1/4 lb ground pork
• 1/4 lb shrimp, peeled, deveined, and chopped
• 1 stalk green onion, chopped
• 1 tbsp cilantro, chopped
• 1 tsp soy saunce
• 1 tsp ginger, minced
• 1/4 cup canned bamboo shoots
• 3/4 tsp corn starch
• Round dumpling wrappers
• Dipping sauce – 1 tsp garlic chili sauce, 1/4 cup soy sauce, 2 tsp sesame oil, 1/2 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp rice wine vineger

To start, place all of the filling ingredients in a mixing bowl, and toss to coat. Ensure that your cabbage has been drained of excess water. Using a tip from one site, I put the chopped cabbage in some cheese cloth with some salt and squeezed out the water. If you do not get the water out, your dumplings will be soggy on the inside. That’s also the reason for the corn starch – it acts as a binder and sucks up excess liquid. 

Once everything is mixed well, give it a few twirls in your food processor. 

Place roughly 1/2 to 3/4 tbsp of filling in each wonton, wet the edges with finger (I set up a bowl of water to dip my finger into), and seal it up. I have a picture of my ready-to-cook pot sticker at the top of this post. There are plenty of videos online showing you how to pinch/seal a pot sticker but I didn’t make the time to watch one yet. Don’t judge me. 

Then, heat 1-2 tbsp of canola oil in a pan which has a top to it. When it’s hot, but not smoking, add your pot stickers. If you crowd them, you will have sticking problems later. Let them cook in the oil for a couple of minutes while you go fill up a glass with 3/4 cup of hot water. 

Get your pan top ready, then pour in the water and quickly seal the pan with the top. Reduce the heat to medium and let them steam for 5 minutes or so. At 5 minutes, take the top off, let them cook for a minute or so more, then do your best to remove them from the pan. 

Here is how mine came out. 

Pros: The filling was great (the small amount of shrimp added great flavor), the pot stickers were satisfying, so overall I was happy with attempt #1
Cons: A few of them stuck and the dumplings tore open. Also, I would like them a little crispier on the bottom even though I steamed them. Maybe I need to play around with the amount of water I use and also the cooking time. They kind of came out more like Gyoza. 
Other:  The dipping sauce was just average. I am going to have to play around with the recipe and do some online research.

Correct, the above picture is not wonton soup. It is my attempt at bringing some wine back to life from the freezer. I recently read that you can have some success freezing wine you want to save, then you can thaw it out in some warm water. It was fairly successful, though it could just be my imagination but the wine seemed thinner. Maybe it was still too cold when I drank it. 

Back to the main topic – last night I tried to make wonton soup for the first time. Below are the ingredients, steps, and some shoddy pictures. That is all. 

Ingredients

Mix all of the seasoning ingredients (save some of the scallion) in a medium bowl, then let it hang out for 10-15 minutes. 

Here I started the broth. I simply heated the chicken broth, added a dash of sesame oil, a small amount of salt to taste, scallions, and 1 tbsp of garlic chili paste for some heat. I brought this to a light simmer while I started on the wontons. 

Here I have some Nosoya Round Wraps. You can buy these (or the square ones) at most grocery stores these days. You often find them near the packaged salads in the produce section, or near the hippy stuff like tofu and soysauge. They didn’t have the Won Ton wraps though, which Nosoya also makes. That would have been better because they are larger and you can create wonton in the traditional form – they kind of stand up straight with the filling in the bottom, sealed by a twist in the middle. 

These are also great to use for making homemade ravioli. 

Mine ended up looking more like a pot sticker. 

Once I had used up all the wonton filler, I cooked the wontons in a seperate pot of boiling water for 3 minutes or so, until they were all floating. 

Then I distributed the wontons into the serving bowls and ladeled the broth onto them. 

It was actually pretty good for my first attempt. The shrimp were crappy Kroger brand which had a meh taste, and I’m sure using homemade chicken broth would make a big difference. On the plus side, the consistency of the wonton was great, I like the cilantro a lot, and the chili sauce added some flavorful heat. Now that I know how to do this, I could do this very quickly for lunch or whenever. 

Now on to pot stickers….more on that tomorrow.