Recipe: Potstickers
Apr. 28th, 2008 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaFirst, via Making Light, an interesting talk on Where do people find the time?. As Patrick Nielsen Hayden summarizes, it's about "gin, television, the 'cognitive surplus,' and the true answer to the annoying question in the title..." I nodded a lot, also: grinned. Video, worksafe.
Second, a recipe. Potstickers, or gyoza, or jiaozi, or pan-fried wonton things. Technically, gyoza/jiaozi are made with a different dough than wonton skins, but wonton skins are readily available to me, so I use them. I make no claim as to authenticity at all, but they taste good.
Potstickers/Gyoza/Jiaozi/Pan-Fried Wonton Things
This is one of those recipes that's mostly method.
Filling
* 1/2 lb ground meat (leaner is better)
* 1 egg
* 1/4 cup vegetables, chopped fine (bell peppers, water chestnuts, green onions, shredded carrots...)
* 1 tbsp soy sauce
* 1 tbsp sweetener (honey, brown sugar, maple syrup....)
* 1 clove garlic, peeled, smashed and minced
* 2-4 tbsp seasonings (hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, curry paste, fish sauce, mustard...)
Other Parts
* 40-50 wonton skins (usually available packaged in whatever refrigerator section also has the tofu, often in or near produce)
* Water
* vegetable oil or cooking spray
* 2 cups broth
For the curious, I used ground pork for my meat, honey for my sweetener, and for my seasonings: curry paste, crushed ginger, Thai fish sauce, mustard, and a little tomato paste. Because they were what was on hand. But it would be silly to tell you to go get red curry paste and Thai fish sauce to make this if you had teriyaki and red pepper flakes on hand, since they'd also make a good-tasting dumpling. If you're not comfortable mixing flavorings willy-nilly, stick to one or two things -- it'll taste good that way too.
In a bowl, mix all the filling ingredients until well-combined. Easiest way is to use your hands, if you're not squeamish about raw meat. If you want to be able to taste and see if you like the way you did the seasonings, you can do so by dropping a tablespoon of the meat mixutre in a hot frying pan (I usually use the same frying pan I'll be cooking them in), cooking it through, and tasting. A little fussy, but really the only way you can see what it will taste like if you're not sure.
Wash your hands! And then lay out some of the wonton wrappers on a flat surface. I use a cookie sheet. If your counters are clean and you don't mind cleaning them again after this, you can go straight onto the counter. Get a small cup or bowl and fill it with water.
For each dumpling, put a small amount -- say a teaspoon -- onto the wrapper. It's easiest if you don't put it quite in the middle; it should be centered side-to-side, but slightly offset front-to-back. At this point you get to decide how you want to fold 'em -- you can fold far corner to near corner or far edge to near edge, making a triangle in the first case or a rectangle in the second. Either way, dip a finger in your water and rub a little water along two adjacent, near-to-you sides of the wrapper. Then grab the far edge or corner, pull it over the filling, and seal by pressing along the dampened near edges. The water will have moistened some of the wrapper dough, so when you press firmly you can seal them. Try to press as much air out of the dumpling as you can before you complete the seal -- you should basically have wrapper pressed flat to wrapper except for a small lump of filling in the middle.
If you are feeling creative, you can do various exciting things with pressing and tucking the edges to give them a distinctive ruffled half-circle shape. You can also buy a press to do that for you; it's really cute. I have never got the hang of it, though, so my potstickers are just rectangles or triangles.
Hurrah. You have made one dumpling. Now repeat... a lot. But don't let the first few discourage you; I spent about three minutes each on the first two and despaired of getting dinner done that night, but by the fifth I was doing them at thirty seconds per, and even faster by the end. I made 20 dumplings in maybe ten minutes.
The recipe will make something on the order of 40-50 dumplings. That's enough for probably about four people. If you're feeding fewer than four, you can either make 'em all up and freeze the extras (flat on a tray, and then transfer to a bag once they're frozen), or just freeze the remaining filling mixture and make up more dumplings the next time you want them.
Now to cook. These little dumplings are quite multipurpose. You can steam them, you can cook them by submerging in boiling broth (a la won ton soup), you can deep-fry them. But I like to do a pan-fry with an almost dry pan, like this:
Put a frying pan on the stove over medium-high heat. It should be big enough to hold five or six of the dumplings without touching. (You can use a smaller pan than that, but you'll be frying dumplings forever.) You should also be able to cover it with a lid. This doesn't have to be a lid made for the pan, though. I usually use the much-larger lid off my largest soup pot -- it overlaps the edges of the frying pan, but the top of the pan is covered, so it works fine.
Just barely lube the pan up with oil - wipe-on-wipe-off is a good way to do it. Just enough that the dumplings don't glue themselves to the pan, not so much that you're actually frying them. A spray of something like Pam works great. The pan should get hot enough that a drop of water sizzles immediately on the surface, but not so hot that the drop of water splutters and leaps about.
Put the dumplings in the pan so that they're not touching -- as many as you can fit without touching -- and let cook over medium-high heat without touching or messing with them for two minutes. (If you're really afraid of burning, or if they start to smoke and you're afraid of setting off the smoke detector, you can turn the heat down to medium. I usually don't.) They may inflate like little balloons as the contents cook and steam. This is normal. At the end of two minutes, pour about a third of a cup of broth in and clap the lid on. It will hiss and seethe and steam like crazy; let it. It's finishing the cooking of the dumpligns by steaming, and also handily desticking them from the bottom of the pan for you. Let steam like that for another two minutes -- I usually do turn the heat down to medium or even med-low at this point to keep the pan from boiling immediately dry, though if it's pretty much dry by the end of two minutes that's fine.
When you remove the lid again, the dumplings should have the barely-translucent look of good pasta, and they should be brown on the bottom side where they sat on the pan but the light tan of cooked won-ton on top, with the shadow of the filling just visible through the skin. Pull them out, put them on a plate, and put them in a warm oven (ie, set to Warm or 170F or 200F or whatever the lowest setting on your oven is, just to keep them warm while you cook the rest). Repeat until you have no more dumplings.
Serve, with dipping sauce if you like (see below).
Dipping Sauce
There are a lot of ways to make a sauce. A simple mixture of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, and sesame oil (with a little green onion sprnkled on top, if you have it) tastes pretty darn good. So does practically any mixture of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, mirin, brown sugar, ginger, garlic, scallions and red pepper. So does ponzu -- mirin, soy sauce, and yuzu (though I cheat and use lemon, orange or grapefruit juice -- or a combination of those -- since yuzu is not readily available to me). Or you can make a 'sweet and sour' sauce by mixing vinegar (rice and cider work well) or lemon juice with fruit juice (pineapple and apricot work well) and soy sauce and thickening it with cornstarch.
I actually made my sauce this way: I took a cup of (cheap, very cheap) marmalade (it would be a total waste of good marmalade), and heated it over low heat until it melted. Then I strained out some of the pieces -- not all, but leaving them all in would have made it too thick to dip into -- and seasoned with a little soy sauce.
Other Options
Of course, you don't have to stuff it with a meat-egg mixture. I know good results can be got with mashed or blenderized tofu, especially when mixed with vegetables. I also know that a fruit and nut mixture makes a nice dessert dumpling, though you'd want to replace the broth with something appropriate to a sweet food -- fruit juice or white wine, maybe. Most fruit dumpling recipes I've seen cooked this way call for dried fruit as a significant component -- raisins, chopped dried apples or apricots, etc -- presumably to act as a binder to keep the filling from cooking down to applesauce (or peach sauce, or whatever) and subsequently making the dumpling fall apart. If you're trying to do an all-vegetable dumpling, without a tofu binder, you might need to add something sticky to it to hold it together, but that's just a theory. I may experiment one of these days.
Second, a recipe. Potstickers, or gyoza, or jiaozi, or pan-fried wonton things. Technically, gyoza/jiaozi are made with a different dough than wonton skins, but wonton skins are readily available to me, so I use them. I make no claim as to authenticity at all, but they taste good.
Potstickers/Gyoza/Jiaozi/Pan-Fried Wonton Things
This is one of those recipes that's mostly method.
Filling
* 1/2 lb ground meat (leaner is better)
* 1 egg
* 1/4 cup vegetables, chopped fine (bell peppers, water chestnuts, green onions, shredded carrots...)
* 1 tbsp soy sauce
* 1 tbsp sweetener (honey, brown sugar, maple syrup....)
* 1 clove garlic, peeled, smashed and minced
* 2-4 tbsp seasonings (hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, curry paste, fish sauce, mustard...)
Other Parts
* 40-50 wonton skins (usually available packaged in whatever refrigerator section also has the tofu, often in or near produce)
* Water
* vegetable oil or cooking spray
* 2 cups broth
For the curious, I used ground pork for my meat, honey for my sweetener, and for my seasonings: curry paste, crushed ginger, Thai fish sauce, mustard, and a little tomato paste. Because they were what was on hand. But it would be silly to tell you to go get red curry paste and Thai fish sauce to make this if you had teriyaki and red pepper flakes on hand, since they'd also make a good-tasting dumpling. If you're not comfortable mixing flavorings willy-nilly, stick to one or two things -- it'll taste good that way too.
In a bowl, mix all the filling ingredients until well-combined. Easiest way is to use your hands, if you're not squeamish about raw meat. If you want to be able to taste and see if you like the way you did the seasonings, you can do so by dropping a tablespoon of the meat mixutre in a hot frying pan (I usually use the same frying pan I'll be cooking them in), cooking it through, and tasting. A little fussy, but really the only way you can see what it will taste like if you're not sure.
Wash your hands! And then lay out some of the wonton wrappers on a flat surface. I use a cookie sheet. If your counters are clean and you don't mind cleaning them again after this, you can go straight onto the counter. Get a small cup or bowl and fill it with water.
For each dumpling, put a small amount -- say a teaspoon -- onto the wrapper. It's easiest if you don't put it quite in the middle; it should be centered side-to-side, but slightly offset front-to-back. At this point you get to decide how you want to fold 'em -- you can fold far corner to near corner or far edge to near edge, making a triangle in the first case or a rectangle in the second. Either way, dip a finger in your water and rub a little water along two adjacent, near-to-you sides of the wrapper. Then grab the far edge or corner, pull it over the filling, and seal by pressing along the dampened near edges. The water will have moistened some of the wrapper dough, so when you press firmly you can seal them. Try to press as much air out of the dumpling as you can before you complete the seal -- you should basically have wrapper pressed flat to wrapper except for a small lump of filling in the middle.
If you are feeling creative, you can do various exciting things with pressing and tucking the edges to give them a distinctive ruffled half-circle shape. You can also buy a press to do that for you; it's really cute. I have never got the hang of it, though, so my potstickers are just rectangles or triangles.
Hurrah. You have made one dumpling. Now repeat... a lot. But don't let the first few discourage you; I spent about three minutes each on the first two and despaired of getting dinner done that night, but by the fifth I was doing them at thirty seconds per, and even faster by the end. I made 20 dumplings in maybe ten minutes.
The recipe will make something on the order of 40-50 dumplings. That's enough for probably about four people. If you're feeding fewer than four, you can either make 'em all up and freeze the extras (flat on a tray, and then transfer to a bag once they're frozen), or just freeze the remaining filling mixture and make up more dumplings the next time you want them.
Now to cook. These little dumplings are quite multipurpose. You can steam them, you can cook them by submerging in boiling broth (a la won ton soup), you can deep-fry them. But I like to do a pan-fry with an almost dry pan, like this:
Put a frying pan on the stove over medium-high heat. It should be big enough to hold five or six of the dumplings without touching. (You can use a smaller pan than that, but you'll be frying dumplings forever.) You should also be able to cover it with a lid. This doesn't have to be a lid made for the pan, though. I usually use the much-larger lid off my largest soup pot -- it overlaps the edges of the frying pan, but the top of the pan is covered, so it works fine.
Just barely lube the pan up with oil - wipe-on-wipe-off is a good way to do it. Just enough that the dumplings don't glue themselves to the pan, not so much that you're actually frying them. A spray of something like Pam works great. The pan should get hot enough that a drop of water sizzles immediately on the surface, but not so hot that the drop of water splutters and leaps about.
Put the dumplings in the pan so that they're not touching -- as many as you can fit without touching -- and let cook over medium-high heat without touching or messing with them for two minutes. (If you're really afraid of burning, or if they start to smoke and you're afraid of setting off the smoke detector, you can turn the heat down to medium. I usually don't.) They may inflate like little balloons as the contents cook and steam. This is normal. At the end of two minutes, pour about a third of a cup of broth in and clap the lid on. It will hiss and seethe and steam like crazy; let it. It's finishing the cooking of the dumpligns by steaming, and also handily desticking them from the bottom of the pan for you. Let steam like that for another two minutes -- I usually do turn the heat down to medium or even med-low at this point to keep the pan from boiling immediately dry, though if it's pretty much dry by the end of two minutes that's fine.
When you remove the lid again, the dumplings should have the barely-translucent look of good pasta, and they should be brown on the bottom side where they sat on the pan but the light tan of cooked won-ton on top, with the shadow of the filling just visible through the skin. Pull them out, put them on a plate, and put them in a warm oven (ie, set to Warm or 170F or 200F or whatever the lowest setting on your oven is, just to keep them warm while you cook the rest). Repeat until you have no more dumplings.
Serve, with dipping sauce if you like (see below).
Dipping Sauce
There are a lot of ways to make a sauce. A simple mixture of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, and sesame oil (with a little green onion sprnkled on top, if you have it) tastes pretty darn good. So does practically any mixture of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, mirin, brown sugar, ginger, garlic, scallions and red pepper. So does ponzu -- mirin, soy sauce, and yuzu (though I cheat and use lemon, orange or grapefruit juice -- or a combination of those -- since yuzu is not readily available to me). Or you can make a 'sweet and sour' sauce by mixing vinegar (rice and cider work well) or lemon juice with fruit juice (pineapple and apricot work well) and soy sauce and thickening it with cornstarch.
I actually made my sauce this way: I took a cup of (cheap, very cheap) marmalade (it would be a total waste of good marmalade), and heated it over low heat until it melted. Then I strained out some of the pieces -- not all, but leaving them all in would have made it too thick to dip into -- and seasoned with a little soy sauce.
Other Options
Of course, you don't have to stuff it with a meat-egg mixture. I know good results can be got with mashed or blenderized tofu, especially when mixed with vegetables. I also know that a fruit and nut mixture makes a nice dessert dumpling, though you'd want to replace the broth with something appropriate to a sweet food -- fruit juice or white wine, maybe. Most fruit dumpling recipes I've seen cooked this way call for dried fruit as a significant component -- raisins, chopped dried apples or apricots, etc -- presumably to act as a binder to keep the filling from cooking down to applesauce (or peach sauce, or whatever) and subsequently making the dumpling fall apart. If you're trying to do an all-vegetable dumpling, without a tofu binder, you might need to add something sticky to it to hold it together, but that's just a theory. I may experiment one of these days.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 02:02 am (UTC)Have you tried ground turkey? I've substituted it for ground pork in several recipes with good results; I wonder whether it would work in potstickers.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 02:05 am (UTC)I haven't, and you know, I keep intending to try it because it's quite a bit healthier. Also, I love turkey. (I can't see why it wouldn't work. It's leaner than pork, but in something like this I doubt it'd make that much of a difference. Hmm, perhaps I'll pick some up and experiment next time I'm shopping.)