MAKING DUMPLINGS FROM SCRATCH

1. INTRODUCTION TO MAKING DUMPLINGS: Hey everyone, it's Christina, and I will be showing you in these lessons how to make dumplings from start to finish. Lesson 1 is going to start off with the dough for the wrappers. Traditionally, there is a hot water dough and a cold water dough for the dumplings. I will show you guys what types of dough to use for what types of dumplings. Then in Lesson 2, I'm going to show you the proper and traditional way of how to roll out dumpling wrappers so that the center is a little bit thicker than the edges. In Lesson 3, I'll be showing you a couple of different ways of how to fold those dumplings so that they are nice and pretty for whoever you're going to be cooking it for. Now in Lesson 4, we're going to talk about the couple of different ways to cook the dumplings, and sometimes that's going to be dumpling dependent and sometimes it's just really the types of texture that you want. In Lesson 5, I'm going to show you a really easy mushroom dumpling recipe that we are going to pan fry and it's going to be nice and delicious. I hope you guys all join me. 2. LESSON 1 MAKING THE DOUGH: Hey guys, so welcome to the first lesson of dumpling making and that is making a basic dumpling wrapper dough. There are traditionally two types. It's going to be a hot water dough made with boiling water or a cold water dough that is made with room temperature water, depending on what texture and how you plan on cooking your dumplings is how you determine between which types of doughs that you guys want to make. Hope you guys will join me. The first dough is going to be your cold water or room temperature water dough and this dough is really good for boiled dumplings because the wrappers are thicker so that it can withstand heat and all of the agitation from the boiling better, and it's also a good dough for when you want your dumplings to have a thicker and more breadier exterior. The magic formula to dumping wrapper dough is always about one cup of water to two and a half cups of all-purpose flour. You can either knead it by hand, which will take a little bit longer. But I'm also going to show it to you on a machine as well. The way that I do it is I always pour enough water so that I'll have one to two tablespoons of water left in my cup. In that way, depending on your environment, whether it's a little bit wetter or a little bit drier, you can adjust. Now in terms of consistency, you want to get it into a flaky dry state first and then add a little bit of water at a time just to bring the dough together. This is supposed to be a drier type of dough so that when you go and pleat it later, the dough will hold its structure. I did want to show all of these stages in real time because when you knead it by hand, you do have to devote a good six to seven minutes into really stretching out that dough and working that gluten so that the dumpling wrappers will have a good shape and will have a nice form to it. Right around six to seven minutes until you roll it into a smooth ball and from then you can actually work with it immediately without resting. With cold water dough, you are not going to be able to roll out the wrappers as thinly as you do with hot water doughs. Again, this is going to be good for dumplings which require a thicker skin or something that you want, a more bready texture too. With your hot water dough, the ratio is going to be about the same. One cup of boiling water with two and a half cups of all-purpose flour. Sometimes, I'll add in a little bit of salt to that but I will start the mixer on low first and carefully pour in my boiling water. Again, reserving that one to two tablespoons depending on if I need it later. Once a dough does get to that flaky stage, I will just use my hands and touch it and try to squeeze the dough together to see if it will need a little bit more water or maybe no water at all. Once that's decided, I'll turn the mixer speed up to medium, have it knead for right around three to four minutes until a smooth ball is formed. Sometimes the ball doesn't come together exactly you'll just have to knead it for one to two minutes on a wooden board until it gets into a smooth ball. For hot water doughs, like I said earlier, they are really good for rolling out really thin wrappers. This is particularly beneficial for pan fried dumplings, something that you might not want to be too bready or too thick. I'll be showing you guys how to roll out dumpling wrappers in the next episode and just before somebody asks, sometimes I will mix a hot water dough with a cold water dough. Doing that half half to kind of get a medium thickness wrapper. These guys are feasible, but they end up getting a little wetter and a little bit softer when they are thawed. I do think it is best if you make it fresh. 3. LESSON 2 ROLLING DUMPLING DOUGH: Welcome back, everyone. In Lesson 2, we are going to learn how to properly roll a dumpling wrapper, and this is traditionally done with a shorter type of wooden roller. Instead of rolling the rolling pin up vertically and horizontally, like we do in most Western techniques, traditional techniques are actually done by rotating the dumpling wrapper, and rolling little bits as you go so that you can ensure that the dumpling wrapper maintains a circular shape. What's more is that with this technique, you roll the edges out a bit thinner than the center so that the center is substantial enough to support a wetter filling, while the thinner outside makes it easier to crimp and make designs with your dumplings. You can actually use the dough immediately after you finish kneading it. A good trick that a lot of dumpling makers use is to just poke a hole in the middle of the dough and stretch it out into this long doughnut. In that way, it's a lot easier to get it into one even log, rather than just rolling it from one large mass of dough. Now, we mentioned last time that the recipe for the dough was one cup of water to 2.5 cups of all-purpose flour. That produces right around 24 dumpling wrappers. The benefit of rolling this into a log first and then cutting cross-sections of the dough is that you essentially have a circular pieces already. You might have to adjust it a little bit with your hands, but then afterwards, just press down with your palms, and you end up with circular disks. My tip for rolling out these dumpling wrappers is first you can dust them with a little bit of flour and roll them out into right around 3-4 inch disks first. Then the final stage is, it might take a little bit of practice, but using that wooden rolling pin, and just concentrating on probably the outer half-inch, and rolling the edges to be thinner than the center of the dumpling wrapper. In that way, the thicker center is going to be able to support a filling that might be a little bit wet, and it gives that dumpling a little bit more structure. We'll be covering a couple of different ways of how to fold your dumplings in the next class, but that is it for the rolling for now. 4. LESSON 3 FOLDING DUMPLINGS: Welcome to lesson three, everyone and I will be showing you three ways of how to wrap your dumplings to make them nice and pretty for whoever you'll be serving it to. The first two techniques are super easy and they are meant to mimic gold nuggets which symbolized fortune and luck to a family. Now the third technique involved pleading, and yes, that can take a little bit of practice, but once you get that under your belt, you will be able to make a tone of dumplings in no time. This first shape is your basic crescent shape and you just fold it in half like a crescent moon and just have the dumpling join in that middle bit first. Then a cool trick that I have learned is you essentially fold the edge first and then that makes a pocket where when you press down in the middle, it naturally forms the pleads for you just like this. If you want your dumpling to look even more intricate, more elaborate, you just form and press more pleads into them. This next shape is more of a circular ingot and a good tip to get the edges to stick together is to just rub them with a little bit of water first. For this particular shape, you want to close off all of the edges so that it forms a crescent moon. Then what you do is you essentially join the arms together. The inside of one edge sticks to the outside of the other edge. This third folding technique will require a little bit of practice, but it is definitely a showstopper. You want to start off by filling the dumpling, I'd say pretty full, It gives it a better shape. Then what you want to do is to make small pleads while using your other hand to rotate the dumpling. You want each of the pleads to be around the same size. I'd say here it's right around a quarter of an inch or a little bit less. But the more pleads that you have, the more intricate this will look. You can see that I'm using the thumb on my left hand to squish down the fillings so that the right hand will have some room to continue pleading. Right, as you get to the end is, it can get a little bit difficult. You can either close off that whole completely or you continue rotating and you just continue grabbing little bits of dough, rotate and scrap bits of dough. What that will do is create this little mouth for you, which you can see into the filling of, and that's how you get something like this. Let's see this one more time now. Two really good tips here is to make sure that you are using homemade wrappers because the store bought ones end up being a little too dry deplete. Then two is to not overuse flower because you do want a little bit of tackiness to the dough, and that will help with the pleading. Just continue rotating and pressing down with the other thumb. Once you get it to the full circle, just grab little bits off of the top of the dumpling to form that opening. In the next video, I will talk about three ways to cook dumplings. I'll see you guys next time for that one. 5. LESSON 4 COOKING YOUR DUMPLINGS: Hey everyone, welcome to lesson 4. In this lesson, I will be showing you three different ways of cooking your dumplings. First one, there's going to be boiling, then steaming, and then pan frying. Really how you cook them is going to be dependent on what types of dumplings that you're making, what kinds of dough you are using, as well as the texture of how you want your dumplings. The first method that we will discuss is boiling your dumplings and that is very typical of Beijing style dumplings that require a thicker dough. You are going to be using that cold water dough that we learned in lesson 1. The technique that you use is you want to first bring a pot of water up to a boil and then throw in a couple of dumplings, just making sure to not overcrowd the pot, put the lid back on and bring this mixture up to a boil. Now, because a lot of us will be cooking meat fillings, you want to make sure that the centers are cooked. A technique for this is to put in a half a cup of just normal room temperature water, put a lid back on this and then bring this guy back up to a boil and once that is done, these guys are ready to go. When it comes to steaming your dumplings, I either like to put it on a non-stick sheet like this, put it on parchment paper, or brushed the steamer with a little bit of oil first and that way the rappers don't get ruined if they do happen to stick to the surface. Now, for any steamed dumpling, you're just looking at 10-12 minutes on high heat for it to steam. You will see that there is going to be a color change when they are all good to go. With steam dumplings, you can use either the thinner wrappers or the thicker ones. Now for pan fried dumplings, which I'm sure are everyone's favorite. There's a couple of different techniques of doing this. One is actually to steam them first and then fry them over medium to medium high in a little bit of oil. I'm typically a little bit lazy and I like to do a two-step in one. What I end up doing is frying the dumplings for right around 2-3 minutes until the bottoms get golden brown. Be careful because they do brown pretty easily, so you want to watch out for that, and then what I end up doing is carefully because there is oil in the pan, putting just a couple tablespoons of water right in and then putting a cover right over that. Then that way you are using this steam to cook the rest of the dumplings and that should take no more than 2-3 minutes. Afterwards, take off the cover, and then carefully, you want to just pan fry it for another two minutes or so, so that the bottoms get crunchy again. Anyways guys, for our final lesson, I will be showing you how to make a super simple but super savory and delicious mushroom dumplings. Be sure to check that lesson out. 6. LESSON 5 MUSHROOM DUMPLING RECIPE: Hi everyone, welcome to lesson 5, your final lesson. At this point, you guys should all be dumpling aficionados. So I'm going to show you a super easy recipe of how to make pan fried mushroom dumplings. The filling is only a couple of ingredients, so it's nice and simple, but it's still super flavorful and super savory as well. Hopefully with all of the lessons, you guys can go on and create dumplings with whatever fillings that you want and customize it to your tastes and preferences. So I'm starting off by making a hot water dough first because I want to be pan frying these dumplings. I'm using right around one cup of flour and a little less than a half a cup of boiling water. I'm actually using chopsticks here so that I don't get my fingers burnt in the process. So same way that we had really been doing it before. You want to get it into a crumbly mixture first just bring it together, if you need a little bit more water add it. But in general, it is a fairly dry dough and you just want to knead it for six to seven minutes until you get a fairly smooth ball of dough. Now we're going to quickly be doing that mushroom filling. So I have about a half a cup of pact shiitake mushrooms that I've chopped up and you can use whatever mushrooms that you have. I'm just frying it over medium to medium high heat in a little bit of oil, just to get it nice and fragrant. After that, I'm going to add one tablespoon of minced garlic and right around one teaspoon of soy sauce. That is going to make this filling nice and savory. Now, towards the end of this, if you do find that you want it to be a little bit more salty, definitely adjust it to your taste. Once you have fried this up for one to two minutes, turn off the heat, add in three tablespoons of a very finely chopped scallions and then drizzle in one teaspoon of sesame oil and it will all be nice and fragrant. You guys remember this from lesson 2? We have it in that log shape. It's already circular, so I'm just potting everything down and then using that technique to roll it out into a disk where the outer half inch is a bit thinner than the center of the wrapper. So I'm filling this one up pretty good. Two teaspoons of filling. I actually put in a little bit of water so that it would help seal it better. I'm using that pleading technique, which is super easy. Remember that if you want the design to be a bit more intricate, you can just add in more pleats, but this is a very easy way of getting that traditional dumpling shape. So I'm doing that mixed method of pan frying, but then adding in a little bit of water to cook all of the dumplings through. So I have just a light layer of oil on the bottom, and then over medium to medium high heat. I'm going to first brown the bottoms of these until they turn a nice like healthy golden brown before I add in a little bit of water, and then put on the cover to cook this all the way through. So that was around two to three minutes and you'll know when they're done because the dough actually changes color, and they start puffing up a little bit. So I'm taking off the lid and I'm having the rest of the water evaporate, and frying these guys for right around another two minutes or so, so that the crispy bottoms start coming back, and you can definitely just flip them over and, check to make sure that they are the color, and the crispiness that you want.