My recent trip to Taiwan made me appreciate the simple Chinese 餃子, known in English as a dumpling. A staple of home-cooked asian cuisine, they’re usually made using a flour wrap around a savory filling. Common fillings include pork, chicken, shrimp, accompanied by some form of vegetable but honestly you can fill them with whatever you like. I’ve seen kimchi, sweet potato, and even foie gras soup dumplings at Benu in SF. This post will talk about a specific kind of dumplings: 水餃, boiled dumplings.

I’ve settled on two flavors of dumplings to make this time; one anchored with shrimp and another more classic chicken flavor. To make both, I used 1 large egg white per about 2 cups of filling, which is why you’ll see the egg included as an ingredient on both.

For the chicken flavor, I accompanied ground chicken with cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, onions, scallions, garlic. This one was fairly simple. Stir fried the fragrant ingredients together and then once it cooled down, mixed it in with the other ingredients. + Rice wine, soy sauce, white pepper, sesame oil.

Chicken Ingredients

For the shrimp flavor, I decided to get a little more creative using flavors and ingredients I’m partial to. While I used tiger prawns as the base, I also added dried shrimp, tobiko, and Taiwanese leeks. I re-hydrated the dried shrimp slightly, fried them, then finely chopped the crunchy fried bits up and mixed it in with the rest of the ingredients. The intention was to create a crunchy umami flavor with each bite of the dumplings. Tobiko was added to strengthen that crunchy umami sensation.

Shrimp Ingredients

Wrapping the dumplings was laborious but a good exercise in dexterity. After eating, it was obvious that wrapping was the bottleneck both in time and taste. Though I had become faster with each dumpling wrapped, I gradually decreased the amount of filling within each flour wrap to make the process easier. Adding too little filling led to a dumpling less flavorful, but too much filling created a dumpling that was hard to wrap. It’s a careful balance that will come with practice I guess.

Hand Wrapping 1

Hand Wrapping 2

Hand Wrapping 3

Yum, look at all the dumplings that took fucking forever to wrap (like this blog post that took fucking forever to write).

Sitting Wrapped

After wrapping, you just boil the dumplings - boil water and put it in, simple shit.

Dropping

Boiling

Ended up being delicious! The shrimp one was unique and turned out extremely well, I’ll definitely play with more variations next time. Also, don’t forget to lightly salt your dumpling fillings.

Chopstick Dumpling

Chopstick Bitten Dumpling

Learnings

  1. Don’t use too much veggies to meat ratio, it ruins the taste and texture.

  2. Make sure to salt your filling. I forgot to salt my filling at first and the dumplings were a bit bland. It’s still delicious if you dip it in soy sauce, so this might be a matter of personal preference and how salty you want your dumplings to be.

  3. Budget time to wrap this shit. It takes a long time.

  4. Make sure to sprinkle flour on surfaces where you place wrapped dumplings and on top of wrapped dumplings after you’ve placed them. This prevents them from sticking together and ruining your dumpling skins.

  5. Stir your dumplings in the pot shortly after putting them in. You don’t want any sticking to the pot initially and then breaking.

Ingredients

Chicken dumplings

1     lb ground chicken
1     cup cabbage
1/2   cup fresh shiitake mushrooms
1/3   cup finely chopped onions
4     clove garlic, minced
3     teaspoon sesame oil
3     teaspoon rice wine
2     teaspoon sugar
1/2   tablespoon salt
?     white pepper to taste
1     egg white per 2 cups of filling

Shrimp dumplings

1     cup Shrimp
1/2   cup Leek
1/3   cup dried shrimp, fried and minced
1     tablespoon tobiko
1     teaspoon shaoxing wine
1     teaspoon sugar
1/2   tablespoon soy sauce
1/2   tablespoon melted butter
1     egg white per 2 cups of filling