Chinese dumplings (revisited recipe!)

I have always been very fond of dumplings. Since my trip to Japan, and subsequent oriental cooking lessons, I realized the enormity of existing types of dumplings and the difference between them all. Unfortunately, they are not really the easiest and fastest thing to prepare! Their preparation is long and tedious, and just the tiniest error is enough to throw away a day in the Kitchen! The recipe to which I am referring specifically is the Dim-sum recipe which uses up to 3 different flours in the same dough, each with a different peculiarity and characteristic to give the dumplings their particular aspect. The original recipe offered to me by a Chinese cook during a recent cooking class I took, is long, laborious and difficult. I did it at home several times and it has often been a pain more than a pleasure! Despite loving this dish I am clearly not at all precise and delicate as Chinese hands can be especially not in the kitchen!

Since my aim in the kitchen is to take something complicated and make it easy and accessible to everyone without too many ingredients and without wasting too much time, I decided to revisit this recipe (and in this I hope not to offend anyone!), Thus making it possible for anyone to quickly and easily have a taste of the famous Chinese ravioli at home!

Doses for 4 people

INGREDIENTs for the dough

- 125 g of plain flour - 125 g of wheat flour - 150 ml water - 1 teaspoon of salt

INGREDIENTs for the filling

500 g of mince meat (the best is pork but chicken, turkey or beef are fine) - 2 teaspoons of baking powder - 4 teaspoons sugar - 8 teaspoons soy sauce (light) - 4 teaspoons of sesame oil - half a teaspoon of white pepper - 4-5 slices of dried shiitake mushrooms (Chinese) - Dried radish

EQUIPMENTS

- Rolling pin

- Rounded Cutter (or a glass / bowl with a diameter of about 5-7 cm is fine)

- Kitchen scale

- Measuring spoons

PROCEDURE

PROCEDURE for the filling

First we prepare the filling for the dumplings. (For this recipe, using the shiitake mushrooms is a must. They are absolutely tasty and only the smell will take you immediately to Asia. Personally, just opening the package seems to me to have been recapulted in Tokyo to my favorite ravioli restaurant par excellence! You can find them in any Chinese grocery store or online!) 1) Soak 4-5 slices of dried shiitake mushrooms for at least 5 minutes with boiling water to rehydrate them. 2) In the meantime, mix all the other precisely weighed ingredients together: minced meat, baking soda, salt, oil, soy sauce, dried radish, sugar and pepper and mix well.

3) After 5 minutes, drain and chop the mushrooms as finely as possible. After that add them to the meat mixture and mix well. The filling is ready!

PROCEDURE for the dough

Let's start now to prepare the dumplings dough. 4) Weigh and mix the two flours together, after which add the water and continue to knead until a homogeneous and smooth dough is obtained (about 5 minutes of processing). 5) At this point divide the dough into 4 blocks. Keep the first block that we will start working on immediately, while the other three, wrap them in wrapping film and leave them aside (at room temperature). The purpose of doing this is not to let it take air and thus make the dough go dry. If the dough dries it will become hard and difficult (if not impossible) to work.

6) Sprinkle the work surface with some flour and start rolling out the block of dough with a rolling pin. We will have to obtain a lasagna-like sheet, very thin, as thin as possible.

Reach a thickness of the dough of about 0.1-0.2 mm (the finer the better!).   7) At this point with the round pasta cutter or simply a glass with a diameter of about 5-7 cm, (I used a glass since I do not not have anything else!) Cut the dough into round circles. once finished, take all the leftover dough, knead it and make more rounded shape sheets.

8) Once you have obtained all the dough circles from the first block of dough, immediately start filling them to form the dumplings. Only after having finished making all the dumplings with the first dough block, start working on the second block, so the dough will not dry out.

HOW TO FILL THE DUMPLINGS 9) Take a round shape dough and hold it like a tacos!

At this point we need to keep in mind two important things: a) We want the dumplings to be well filled so that with each bite we will have an explosion of flavor . b) We do not want to fill them too much or we could up with breaking the dough which is very thin

10) Fill each dumpling with a tea spoon of seasoning, putting the filling in the center of the "tacos", leaving the internal edges of the tacos clean from meat sauce (try to handle the edges with clean fingers and not those dirty with meat)

11) Close the edges of the "tacos" by pressing them together firmly against each other to form a closed half-moon dumpling. it is important that the two flaps are tightly joined and closed, they must almost seem like a single piece of dough.

12) Now based on the cooking you want to do, you can either leave them in this shape if you want to steam them or, if you want to pan fried them, it would be ideal to model them so as to make them "standing". By this I mean that we should close the edges of the dumpling towards each other. Once this is done, we will take the "lying down" dumpling, turn it on the long side of the half moon (the closed part of the taco to be clear), and we will place it on our work surface to flatten its base. This will maximize the exposure of the dumpling to the pan during cooking, creating that crunchy part typical of the panfried dumplings!

13) Fill all the dumplings

14) repeat with the other dough block, always proceding one at a time

We will now have approximately 25 dumplings!

STEAMED COOKING

you will need a steamer of any type.

1) put water to boil in the steamer/ POD

2) cover the steamer shelfs with the appropriate grasing paper (it has holes to let the steam pass), or if you will use the wooden steamer like me, it is equipped with a light cotton cloth

3) put the dumplings well spaced from each other

4) leave for at least 10 minutes (if using a multi-story steamer, reverse the two shelves after 5 minutes)

PAN FRIED COOKING

1) Put a spoon of vegetable oil in a non-sticky pan and heat it up 2) lay all the dumplings "standing", making sure that they do not tip over, to form the bottom crispy layer.

3) Check the dumplings every 2-3 minutes until the bottom is well darkened and brown, almost burnt (see photo).

4) at this point add a glass of cold water and cook for another 5-6 minutes with a lid on

5) Cooking time is approximately 10 minutes, however your dumplings will be ready when they have taken the shape and the "wrinkles" typical of the ravioli and will be almost translucent (they will not become totally translucent since the translucency is given by the mix of flours we did not put. Having put some plain flour, we made the dough thicker therefore they will only be partially translucent).

Serve and eat them immediately with soy sauce and wasabi as you wish!

This is my final result. And yours?

SUGGESTIONS

if you want, once prepared, the dumplings can be frozen! -The filling can also be made with vegetable for a vegan option mixing Pak choi, green beans, carrots, tofu, bamboo shoots, baby corn as you wish. Just finely chop all the raw ingredients, and mix with a spoonful of flour (do not put the other ingredients we put into the meaty fillings such as baking soda, oil and soy sauce).

-You can make a filling with 50% meat and 50% shrimp or totally shrimp. If you choose a stuffing with only shrimpS, add only mushrooms, finely chopped shrimp and a teaspoon of flour!

Enjoy!