ISYS100 Food: Boiled Dumplings

Dumplings are essentially cooked balls of dough which can contain all different kinds of filling such as meat, fish and vegetables. Dumplings can also be cooked in many different ways such as boiled, steamed, fried and baked. Today we look at how to make a boiled Chinese pork dumplings.

Ingredients:

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or 1/2 teaspoon table salt)
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger (use microplane grater)
1/4 cup minced Chinese chives or green onions (white and green parts)
2/3 pound ground pork
1/8 teaspoon ground white pepper (or freshly ground black pepper)
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine (or dry sherry)
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 package frozen round dumpling wrappers (gyoza/potsticker wrappers), defrosted at room temperature for 30 minutes
for the slurry: 1 tablespoon cornstarch + 1/2 cup water

How to Make Filling:

To make the filling, put the cabbage in a food processor and process until cabbage is finely minced. Remove the cabbage to a large bowl and sprinkle with the salt. Let cabbage sit for 10 minutes. In the meantime, return the food processor bowl to the stand and add the ginger, chives, pork, pepper, soy sauce, rice wine and sesame oil. Pulse 4 times to mix the ingredients well. Set aside.
Use your hands to grab a handful of the cabbage and squeeze and discard the excess moisture out into the sink. You can also spoon all of the cabbage onto a cheesecloth and then squeeze all the water out. Place the dry cabbage back into the large bowl and add the pork mixture. Fold the cabbage into the pork mixture then mix and put a spoon of mix into a dumpling wrapper.

It should now look like this

Now to the dumpling:

Fold the dumpling from the top and bottom so the all the edges meet.
Note: make sure that there are no holes or the filling will leak and there are now air bubbles or the dumpling will break when boiled