The adventure was successful.
Basic recipe is from Andrea Nguyen’s Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More, p. 147.
Hanne wrote the author and found out a non-wheat dumpling wrapper recipe (so we could make this for a friend who is sensitive to wheat), which was the point of the exercise tonight – to prove out the wrapper recipe for our dumplings fest we plan for this weekend. The recipe uses tapioca starch (3/4 cup) and rice flour (1 cup), along with 2 T of oil and 2/3 cup of just-boiled water, and uses the method on p. 133 to make the wrappers.
Overall, the modified recipe performed quite well. I also enjoyed pressing the wrappers in our new tortilla press (which obtained on Monday from Lily’s Mexican Market in Columbia) and look forward to having the opportunity to use it later when making har gow (Chinese shrimp dumpling) wrappers.
Anyway, to photos and captions.
Cooking the filling. This is a pretty simple filling with pork, shallots, sugar, salt and black pepper. It’s overseasoned because it’s dumpling filling. The goal here is to get the chunks as small as possible. We’ll need to adjust the recipe for the filling too, avoiding shallots and black pepper.
These are two halves of the dough recipe, resting. They were mixed with just-boiled water, so the goal here is to get them to cool down and get the starch time to get uniformly wet. These are after kneading and are about to be covered with plastic wrap to rest for 5 minutes.
After rolling a lump above into a foot long cylinder, you cut it up into 12 pieces. This is one of the pieces.
You roll it between your hands to make sure the consistency is still like play-doh. If not, in any stage before you flatten to make the wrapper itself, you can add just a drop (at this stage – maybe wet a whole hand if it’s one of the half-recipe lumps) of water and knead it in. No real issue with overworking the dough because it has too little gluten. the worst that would happen is that it would dry out more.
After rolling it you flatten it to about 1/4″ thickness.
Then you put the 1/4″ thick round in the press. Note that not only have I plastic-wrapped (with purple plastic wrap, thank you) the working surfaces of the press, but the actual flattening is between two thicker pieces of plastic. Andrea Nguyen recommends cutting up a zip-loc bag to get this plastic and I agree. It’s just the right thickness to work with and ideal for peeling the wrapper off to your hand. I decided after I was done to dispose of the zip-loc halves because they get pretty oily, but you couple probably wash, save and re-use them at least once.
Press the wrapper until it’s about 2 1/2″ to 3″ in diameter. I found I did not have to use the lever, and that it was trivial to get a feel for how much pressure was required to get the right size.
Peel the top layer of zip-loc plastic off, lift the bottom layer out of the press and peel it off of the wrapper as the wrapper rests in your hand…
Viola! The idea is to get the wrapper in your hand so that where you’ll cup your fingers is in line with about the middle of the wrapper.
Fill with filling. This is perhaps a little too much filling, but you really have to get a feel for it yourself.
Cup your fingerse to make the basic crescent shape with the wrapper dough, carefully pinch the sides together. You need to get a feel for this too, but the goal, as with other dumplings (I’m thinking perogies here) is to seal the edges firmly without squeezing the combined dough layers too thinly. I guess my goal here is to make sure the crimped edge doesn’t get too much thinner than the rest of the wrapper. Also take this opportunity to make sure there are no cracks in the rest of the dumpling wrapper. We want to have an unbroken wrapper around the filling. Hull breaches are bad. They let the juices get out!
Dumplings! These were boiled for 6 minutes and then allowed to rest in warm water for 30 seconds. The alternate recipe here (given to Hanne by the author with this wheat-free recipe) is to steam for 8 minutes, which we will try later. We think steaming may make the wrappers more translucent. The cooked dumplings were soft and toothsome and the filling had some juices inside, which made for a ver tasty package.
Happy happy!
And I get to eat more for lunch tomorrow!