Friday, March 2, 2012

Oh my dumplings!


Ever since my Chinese aunty introduced me to dumplings about 11 years ago, they have been one of my favourite foods. I made them for the very first time this week and I think I did a fairly good job (see photo above). I had googled a few recipes for ideas of what to put in them, and then made up my own recipe. Were they tasty? Im pleased to say they were!
My recipe is as follows:


Dumplings
Prawns - I didn't have a set amount for this, I just grabbed a few handfuls which equated to about 30 prawns (deveined etc). I was making enough dumplings for two people. I could have fed a third.
1 large spring onion, finely diced
1/2 tblspn fresh grated ginger (I love ginger, so was pretty generous with this)
1 tblspn light soy sauce
1 tblspn sesame oil
Dumpling wrappers


If you have a food processor use it to dice the spring onions. You want them to be quite fine. Dice the prawns - dont be too fussy as slightly bigger pieces are ok. I roughly chopped them, then threw them into the food processor and gave them a few one second pulses.
Mix all dumpling ingredients together in a bowl (minus the wrappers). It should smell delicious!


Place a dumpling wrapper in your hand and spoon a teaspoon of the mixture into the middle of the pastry. Wet your finger and run around the edge of the pastry. Fold in half onto itself, press edges together to seal the mixture inside, and crimp the edges. Repeat until you finish all of your mixture and/or wrappers.


Heat a frying pan with some oil and a dash of sesame oil. Once hot, place the dumplings in the pan and fry the bottoms for a few minutes. Next, add approx 1/4 cup of water - it may spit, so stand back! You don't want more than 1cm of water in the bottom of the pan. Place a lid on the frying pan and let the dumplings steam for about 6 minutes (hopefully all of the water should have evaporated by this stage).


Serve with dipping sauce (recipe below) - yum!


Dipping Sauce
2 tblspn light soy sauce
1 tblspn freshly grated ginger
1/2 tspn chilli flakes, or 1 fresh chilli
1 tspn palm sugar (brown sugar or castor sugar would be fine as well)


Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl.




Posted by Carina / Citta Design team.

2 comments:

  1. Oh...my husband and I just recently mage gyozas for a Japanese friend who was staying with us. Yours turned out much better than ours!! We had trouble getting the bottom crispy while steaming the whole dumpling.

    We used a nifty plastic shaping gizmo, to make the gyoza nice and neat, that I bought at Daiso (a kind of Japanese $2 shop - except everything is $2.80).

    Yum Yum!!

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  2. We know Daiso! Imogen (head designer) and I spent a fair bit of time in Daiso during our trip to Japan last year - its so cool! I might have to try and get my hands on the 'plastic shaping gizmo' thing you mentioned :)
    Did you fry the bottoms of the dumpling before steaming them? I alway give them a few extra crisping minutes once all the water has evaporated :)
    So yum!

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