Dumpling Day

There has finally been a reprieve from this period of the depressing days (and daze) of winter with warmer weather finally arriving, coupled along with a longer stint of time off from work. Upon reflecting through this past while and trying to think of what to do with my time ahead during this brief holiday I realized three salient things to reckon with:

a. I haven’t been very proactive in being creative, or learning any new skill lately,

b. my aptitude for cooking has seriously suffered and declined: due to me giving more attention to dieting (Boo!), plus being less willing to shop for a long time, and just getting by with simple basics, and moreover,

c. I haven’t written anything meaningful in a long while since the pandemic arrived, or as it continues to give us all daily worries and woes. With all the measures of social distancing and isolation necessary, it’s a challenge to be a better communicator at all.

These last two years have been nothing that I want to really chronicle as they aren't the better ones in my life. I’ve been tuning away from, and dropping out of, social media more in general, quitting some platforms entirely. After dealing with so much bad news and negativity for a long time, I decided if I am to practice on keeping my writing skills up to par for relating anything, it’s this time more than ever when I’d want it to do so in a manner that’s positive, educational, and informative. Of the lettered things I listed earlier, I picked an activity to kill two of those birds with one stone, and to gather the wherewithal to write about it.

I don’t know if selecting my project came out of logic or instinct, or whether I was driven by a need for a sense of challenge, or a sense to seek comfort, which is strange, because those seem like forces that are actually quite antithetical to each other. The returning appetite is a reflection of that. If there is any food that perfectly represents the union of those two opposing drives, I would have to say that it would be some form of handmade, hand-filled dumpling. I played through my head as to when it is that I have to force myself to do the most radical overhauling and transforming of my kitchen space, by creating stations, and being meticulously conscious of detail and organization of my mise en place to make a particular sort of food item, like I'm strategizing for a big battle ahead. This seems to all go down during the very time-consuming activity of whenever I wrap and stuff things into individual bite-size morsels, be it perogies, cabbage rolls, or dim sum buns. I know a few tricks already, but I am still open to learning about more technical intricacies of the craft for quality and efficiency, and to learn a greater variety of recipes. I chose to focus on being a better dumpling maker and accepted this daunting challenge for something I think of as a perfect form of comfort food. For the sake of novelty from the source I used*, I selected more Asian styles of dough and fillings to experiment with. I don’t have many powered kitchen appliances to use, thus I had to do things at a hardcore basic level.

A useful kitchen hack: use chopsticks
for initial mixing of dough before kneading.
Two narrow pieces of wood are easier to
clean than almost any other utensil you have.

I didn’t use premade wrappers; I made the wrapping dough right from scratch as well. Through doing that, on top of acknowledging the opposing elements of challenge and comfort that dumplings represent, I discovered that there are other things with a yin/yang quality about them too in the making of them. The ideal hands for forming and crafting them, for instance. I’d have to say that the best hands for making the Chinese style dumplings would be smaller, but super strong for kneading and properly activating the gluten to make a sufficiently stiff and elastic dough (of the recipes I selected) and making it a uniform mass. It was really tiring. It’s like one has to have hands like some kind of Kung Fu Master who is endowed with some mystical power of being able to crush and pulverize a bag of pebbles into fine sand. At same time, assuming such an expert at this is a singular person, those same tough hands need to retain enough good fine motor skill, dexterity, and finesse in handling these little treasures later without squashing them as they are being filled, formed, and sealed. I can forgive myself easier should I screw things up at this introductory echelon of learning this science, since the same thing probably applies with this craft as with the rigorous sand disciplined tutelage for sushi-making for to reach some degree of being ‘acceptable’. That is, one can’t simply or fully learn this in minutes or hours; rather it probably requires months, if not years, of focused practice to achieve something approaching excellence, especially for someone beginning with hands as clumsy as mine.

Uniformity is important for making dumplings.
My instrument for exact measurement was simply my
 cleaver for sizing up my dough portions for these
Blood Orange Chicken Potstickers I made.
The dough is rolled cylindrically to the same
size in circumference as my cleaver handle,
chopped into morsels as wide as the end of my
cleaver handle, which are then rolled out into circles,
with the diameter being the same width as the
 broad flat edge of the end of my cleaver's blade.

I chose Asian style dumplings to make because they were an opportunity for utilizing the remainder of my strange and exotic collection of dried mushrooms and fungi I have acquired from previous trips to the ethnic food shops. I have such things because my most recent dietary kick is to be consuming more of this stuff to substitute for umami flavourings that I’ve been missing from my much cherished fatty meats. Dumplings are great in the sense that they are like sandwiches, in that there is a near infinite combination of stuff that can be packed into them. In fact, the freakier the ingredient is, the more likely I’d be inclined to roll it into a dumpling than to put it into a sandwich.

Sometimes I eat these freaky things called
"vegetables" once in a while. This stuff
I've whipped up in this pan is filling for
gyoza. The cabbage, carrots, black fungus,
onions, garlic, ginger, and spices in this
mixture, getting stuffed in the eggless dough
 wrappers I made even qualify this as "vegan" . . .
I could just about slap myself for doing this!
 

They are the perfect comfort food that is a balance of all cravings I get without being gluttonous: some carbs from a little dough instead of over-indulging in a huge slab of bread, or an overloading mass of pasta; any range of taste of savory, sweet, sour, salty, zesty, spicy, from saucy bits of protein all in one bite. Two or three is enough for a little meal that stays within moderation, which goes well with a cup of tea: at a moment when is one relegated to tune down and relax. I included a recipe of one of the three things I made for the day. It is one I constructed on my own, to simply use what I already had in my kitchen instead of running out to acquire more stuff. And, remarkably, if you can believe it, I had the good sense to write down the measurements I used.

Monkey Head Mushrooms, also known as Lion Mane Mushrooms,
called so because of the hairy textured surface
of the edible fruiting body of this fungus.

Pork and Monkey Head Mushroom Dim Sum Bun Filling

200 g     Minced (or ground) lean pork

175 g     Dried Monkey Head Mushrooms, finely chopped (about two large, dried mushrooms, soaked in water for a least 2 hours, then drain and squeeze out excess moisture), or use the same mass of some other favourable/available mushroom in your locale

1 Tbsp   Canola Oil

30 g        Fresh Ginger root, peeled, crushed and minced

½ cup    yellow onion, finely chopped

3 Tbsp   Sake (what I used, but one could use another dry, clear rice-based cooking wine, like Shaoxing wine, as well)

1 tsp      Sesame Oil

2 tsp      Cornstarch

1 Tbsp   Oyster Sauce

1 Tbsp   Soya Sauce

½ tsp     Table Salt

1/4 cup Scallions, finely chopped

In a bowl, mix together the chopped mushrooms and minced/ground pork thoroughly

In a non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat, add the canola oil, and then sauté the ginger and yellow onions; frying 1 minute to release their flavours into the oil

Add the pork and mushroom mix into the frying pan and cook until the pork is no longer pink. As this cooks, in a separate bowl, mix together the remaining ingredients except the scallions. Once the pork has cooked through, pour the sauce mix into the pan mixing well, and cook until the sauce has thickened.

Transfer the contents from the frying pan to a clean bowl; allow it to cool completely before mixing in the scallions. Mix thoroughly, and stuff into the prepared dim sum dough as soon as possible after it has cooled, or refrigerate for later use.

Here is a dim sum bun dough recipe I used to contain this stuff. Don’t worry, it’s not one of the tendon-snapping, hand crippling doughs that I used that day as I mentioned before. I suggest preparing this in advance of the filling recipe . . .

2 ½ cup All-purpose flour (unbleached)

3 tsp     Baking Powder

½ cup   Superfine sugar (I used icing sugar)

½ cup   Milk

1/3 cup Water

1/4 cup Canola oil

In a large bowl, sift together the first three dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix together, water, milk, and oil. Gradually combine the fluid mixture into the flour while mix that together. Once that is incorporated, turn into a dry floured surface, and knead until smooth for 1-2 minutes. If it appears dry and crumbly, wet your hands slightly; if it’s too sticky, dust with more flour. Once dough is even, wrap in plastic wrap and chill it in the fridge for 1 hour. Divide this mass into sixteen even balls of dough. Cover them with a damp cloth until they needed. This quantity yields enough to contain the quantity of filling listed above. After filling the buns (find/copy a how-to technique on You Tube, search filling bao buns) steam them for about 10 minutes until they expand and are done.

If there is any advice I would offer in terms of etiquette in eating dumplings, it would be this – if your host served you homemade, handcrafted dumplings, or other food served as bite-sized morsels: be they samosas, pupusas, empanadas, mandu, shumai, gyoza, homemade ravioli or tortellini, xiao long bao, piroshki, dolmades, or humble perogies, that obviously needed a great exertion and expense of time, patience, and skill to make, please take the special effort and consideration to chew it slowly and savour it. To thoughtlessly gulp and devour something in seconds that took considerably longer to fashion and form to completion would seem a bit insulting to the chef I’d say. 

*Dumplings = Love, by Liz Crain, published by Sasquatch Books, Seattle Washington USA.