Steamed Dumplings.

Steamed Dumplings (zhengjiao) are very popular, yet not often made at home. A food from ancient times, the Asian jiaozi variety are often eaten as a breakfast celebration of new years. I've made it often before and decided to revisit the dish, while trying a few new things.

For this recipe we will need:

Packaged wonton wrappers

Filling:

1 Pound ground pork

3 Green onions

1 Egg

3 Garlic cloves

3 Tablespoons of soy sauce

2 Tablespoons of sesame oil

3 Cups of Napa cabbage

4 Mushrooms

1/2 Teaspoon salt

1/2 Teaspoon of pepper

2 Teaspoons of sugar

1.5 Tablespoon ginger

Sauce:

4 Tablespoons soy

2 Tablespoons sesame oil

2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 Teaspoon sugar

1/4 Teaspoon salt

1/4 Teaspoon pepper

1 Tablespoon honey

2 Green onions

1 or 2 Cloves garlic

1/6 Teaspoon chili powder

Slurry:

Corn starch

Water

One of the new things I tried was to salt the cabbage leaves and dry them for 30 minutes prior to making the filling, it seemed to make them easier to work with.

The next step is to lightly fry the mushrooms, garlic and onions for the filling in the pan, to take some of the raw bite out of them.

Now we want to add the egg and the pork to a bowl.

Lets add the 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, 3 tablespoons of soy sauce and 2 teaspoons of sugar, I heard that its best to mix the filling with chopsticks, it seems to be true.

We should add and mix in the tablespoon and a half of  ginger.

Mix in the 2 tablespoons of sesame oil

Once the vegetables look slightly bruised and a little tan we should start to dice and add them.

The smaller the better, obviously we don't want to try and make dumplings with large chunks of garlic and onion floating about.

Give that a nice even mix.

Once our cabbage is ready we will shred it finely.

Add 3 cups of this to the filling mix.

Our filling mix is ready!

Now its time to begin making the dumplings!

We will need to seal the dumplings, and for that we will need to create a slurry out of corn starch and water.

Now we will add some corn starch to a bowl then mix in an equal amount of water, mix with a fork, which behaves like a miniature whisk and gives a better consistency faster.

The steps we will be repeating are as follows:

Place a wrapper on a plate and wet 2 adjacent edges with the slurry

Add a bit of the filling to the middle.

Fold it in half and seal.

We can create a large amount of dumplings with this recipe, we also have the option to make some dumplings now, and save the meat filing, wrappers and slurry for use later.

We will need to add as much water to a pan as we can, without touching the bottom of the steamer. It is better to begin boiling and steaming the water before we add anything else.

If you put the dumplings in as it is, the dough will expand into the holes and tear when you remove them, to avoid this we will be placing some of our cabbage leaves down as a shield.

This will allow us to remove our dumplings once they are done.

We will let the dumplings steam for 15-20 minutes.

Its possible to remove them by sliding the leaves off of the steamer. Remember to use fresh leaves with each batch! the leaves tend to degrade as the dumplings cook.

The sauce:

Hoisin sauce

We can use the same trick to mellow the 2 green onion and 1.5 cloves of garlic as we did for the filling.

we will  begin by adding 4 tablespoons of soy sauce to a bowl, mincing and adding the garlic.

Chop and add the green onion, by slicing horizontally, we can get beautiful rings.

we will add and mix the rings, then we will add 2 tablespoons of sesame oil, and 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon of honey, 1/6 teaspoon chili powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon of pepper and 1 teaspoon of sugar. Once we mix these ingredients together, we will have our hoisin sauce

The end product comes out rather well!

The water from steaming can be drunk to dispel some of the ill feelings you might gain from overeating.

Afterthoughts:

The recipe makes a lot of filling, but it is all right because its easy to store and will be really easy to make later, maybe I can experiment with other methods of cooking such as pan frying them.

The actual final result was delicious! Drying the cabbage worked really well, frying the ingredients a little before adding them also seemed to help, and the big change I loved was the cabbage leaves keeping the dumplings from tearing and sticking to the holes in the steamer, as usually happens.