Mushroom Chinese Dumplings

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

We bought these beatiful oyster mushrooms (with a couple of trumpets) at Weaver’s Way Coop last week. 

We had some tenants many years ago from China, and they taught us how to make dumplings.  I was terrible at the rolling out of the dough into circles, so we long ago switched to bought dumpling wrappers, but even so, it’s a wonderful, cheap treat. 

For the filling, you can use pork (as we were taught), or veggies (as we use now, since we are now vegetarians).  Yan Heng and Qing were vague about amounts, so I will be, too!

Jiaozi (Gyoza) or Chinese Dumplings

Some mushrooms, oil, onion, ginger, soy sauce, an egg, some kind of greens (bok choy, kale, etc.) - dice, mix them all together, and then fill the wrappers. 

I’m afraid you’ll have to bear with the drawings I made in my cookbook for the next bit:

#1 Pinch top of wrapper together and push in from one side

#2 After pinching closed one flap, mash the other flap into the side of the dumpling.  Then repeat for the other side.

#3 The finished dumpling should be kind of like this (the little marks are pinch lines):

To cook them, boil up a bunch of water in a big pot, and put them in, many at a time (my recipe says 30, but I probably usually do half that at a time).  After the water boils again, add a cup or so of cold water.  Wait for it to boil, and add another cup of cold water.  When it boils again, take one out and test it.  This is all particularly important if your dumplings have raw pork in them, but it gets the veggie ones cooked nicely, too.

A couple of hints: 
--The more dumplings you wrap, the easier it gets.  When I started, the wrapping was the most overwhelming part, and now I’ve done it so often I think of it as the watch-TV-and-wrap-dumplings cozy part of the process.
--For the vegetarian version, I usually throw in some reconstituted TSP (textured soy protein) or okara (what remain after we make soy milk) to bind the mixture and give it a meaty texture.

Finally, I just wanted to note that dumplings in a restaurant cost about $1 per dumpling.  Half a pound of ground pork or a few mushrooms plus the rest of the very cheap mixture make about 60 dumplings.  We freeze the leftover ones (when there are any--think of it--as many dumplings as you want!) and M takes them for lunches.