Jiaozi
Or:
David Makes Another Attempt at Authenticity.
Jiaozi are Chinese dumplings, basically. Wikipedia tells me that since I boiled these instead of steamed them, they'd be called shujiao, but I like the bounciness of how 'jiaozi' sounds.
Sure, we do some Chinese cooking in my house. We steam vegetables (in the microwave) and we do various stir-fried things in the two woks that we've got. But our Chinese repertoire is pretty much limited to two or three main dishes. It's not that we're ignorant, or anything (I think.) - one of the first cooking shows I ever watched in the house was Martin Yan's Yan Can Cook, but I can't remember the last time we deviated from any of the one or two recipes we liked from his A Wok For All Seasons cookbook. I wanted to do something new. I might pick up that cookbook and make something random later on, too, but that's another entry.
Now, I always wanted to make bao. That's how this started. I said "let's go to Chinatown and get some dim sum! I've always wanted to try bao!" And my dad said "Oh, your mother doesn't like dim sum." I asked my mother about this, and she got furious: "I'm not the one that hates dim sum! That's your dad! I like dim sum fine."
So that had settled nothing. And I've still never had dim sum. I think Dad is the one that doesn't like dim sum. For a gourmet, he is awfully picky.
Anyway. In true David style, I declined to actually access a cookbook. Because to be honest before I started writing this entry I'd forgotten about Yan, and how he Can Cook. I promise to really use a cookbook. But I actually managed to dead-reckon pretty well, with the help of a few internet recipes, which I tend not to trust very much at all. They're those sort of fishy-looking internet recipe databases that are massive and it's difficult to sort out the actual content from the advertising and there's lots of pop-ups.
Well, I see those sites as post-apocalyptic wastelands. Let me explain, using a future sort of like Mad Max's as an analogy: if The Food Network or Epicurious.com or The Splendid Table are cities, whole chunks of civilization that have been relatively preserved. Or maybe it's more like Judge Dredd - those sites are the big rolling cities, and outside them is the huge radioactive wasteland, where retired Judges go for the Long Walk. Anyway, in these radioactive wastelands there are oases - little pearls of arable land with sweet fruits to offer a weary traveler.
It is from these fruits that I pounded out a recipe. Overwrought analogies aside, here is my departure from Real Chinese Jiaozi:
I used chicken. So there. We didn't have any pork in the house that I wanted to use. We didn't have ground-up-anything and I didn't want to throw any pork chops in the food processor. Sue me. I'm sure there are real jiaozi that are made with chicken.
I decided to be badass and make my own dough, which is just a little bit of flour, water, and salt. It's really nothing. I hesitate to give proportions, here - it's by feel. Start with flour and salt and add the water slowly until you think it's the right consistency - it should ball up neatly. Just keep working it if it gives you trouble, or add more flour. You can't screw this up.
Anyway, for this specific instance, I used 3 cups of flour, about a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and a cup-and-a-quarter of cold (important!) water. Make the dough, ball it up, cover it up, and let it sit for about a half-hour while you prepare the filling.
We had/have an abundance of frozen chicken breasts in the house. I don't know how we managed to collect them all, but I assure we have in excess of five or six pounds of them, accrued over the past coupla months of not having used all of the chicken fresh out of the package - my parents wrap them in press 'n' seal wrap and huck them in the freezer. It's great! But we have loads of chicken and lately, I've been trying to clean out the freezer and do unspeakably crazy things with that chicken. (But that's another show.)
So I hucked about a pound and a half of mostly-thawed, cubed chicken breast into my food processor - and believe you me, that is a wonderful thing. I love this food processor. It is probably something I ought to stay far away from, because a food processor exacerbates in me a sense of wildness, of mad abandon, of mad science. I am master of a set of whirring blades! Blades that REND FLESH. Do you understand the appeal of that? Can you? I hope you can. But back to the bladeless world of the mundane.
Now. You can't very well make good dumplings with just ground chicken. We must needs have flavoring (yes!), and this comes in the form of three liquids: rice wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil. You need a lot of sesame oil, I used 5 tablespoons. I suppose you could use less, but you'd have to compensate, I feel, with other oil. I'll test this assumption. 5 tablespoons of sesame oil, 2 of rice wine, 3 of soy sauce. Mix that into the ground chicken (which is really more of a chickeny paste, isn't it, if you grind it in the food processor rather than in a meat grinder).
Now for the other fun stuff - chop ye up some celery, some garlic, some shallots, some green onion, and some ginger. How much is up to you, but the celery's for body and the green onion's for color and everything else is for flavor. I love lots of garlic and ginger, but you can do this however you want. Really, you'll know what's right.
A good way to know if you've got a good mix is to see how visually diverse your filling is:
This is fine. It might be able to stand a little more celery, even, but if your green flecks are few and far between, use something like this as a minimum benchmark.
Now the fun part. I did this wrong the first time (I've made these twice, now), so learn well from me, and know that you should use a rolling pin, or a rolling-pin equivalent.
Roll your dough into little rounds, and flatten them so that they make circles with approximate diameters of three inches apiece. But it's hard to explain in words. So watch this guy's form, the first young gentleman who's got the rolling pin. The idea is to keep the edges relatively thin and keep the center of your jiaozi wrapper thick. And make sure to flour EVERYTHING. The cutting board you're working on, the rolling pin - everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceP-iF3sQj0
Of course, if you're too busy for making your own dough, you can use pre-made wonton skins.
... Wuss.
Anyway, you may use chopsticks to deposit your payload of filling on the dough if you like - but I used a little disher, here pictured in the lower-left corner.
It's an ice-cream scoop! Basically. But a smallish one. If you don't have one, you can use a melon baller, or God forbid, a spoon.
It takes a big man to admit his mistakes. I'm huge:
Mistake 1. The first time I did this, I rolled them out by hand. This doesn't get them to the thinness you want. Don't do it.
Mistake 2. So I hadn't really studied the proper way to fold them - now I think I have a better idea, but the first batch of them came out sort of like this:
I was imagining bao, I think, because I just sort of twisted them together at the top.
Cute. Serviceable. Not correct, though.
And the problem with those was that they had way too much dough. The dough was so thick! It was like munching through a field of wheat to reach the hamburger someone had hidden in the center. Hey, the dough sort of tastes nice, but it's a neutral nice that doesn't need to hit you in the mouth with massive quantity. It is the vehicle rather than the food, I think.
So place a little dollop of filling in the center of a jiaozi-round. Wet the edges with a finger dipped in water, fold it across and crimp. Don't bring it all up in the center and twist. Well, you can if you want. Who am I to say you can't?
You want to cook these in boiling water for about two to three minutes - first they'll sink and then they'll float, and that tells you, I think, that the filling's cooked - but you really want that dough to cook through. I'd say four minutes maximum to be safe. Remove from the pot with a spider (that's a utensil! I promise.) and reserve it in the sink in a colander or something. When you wanna serve 'em, run hot water through 'em and shake!
You can see how the first batch turned out - thick, lumpy, and irresponsible-looking.
On the plate:
They were tasty and robust, but as I said, maybe a bit too robust. Dad said "Reduce the dough to about a quarter of what it is and these wouldn't be such a chore to eat". I mean, we were both exaggerating, but something had to be done.
I had to fix it!
So I revisited the recipe, rolled out the dough with a rolling pin instead of by hand, and I got these:
They look less like brains! And they were a lot thinner, too. It made me happy.
Jack came over to help me make that batch, and when I was finally done with everything it was after midnight. Jack went home, and I stayed up cleaning the hideous mess we'd made.
And you will have a mess. There will be flour everywhere. I don't think you can make these right without a huge mess.
Well, it just so happens that in the months I've spent at school this year, i managed to become some kind of compulsive kitchen-cleaner. Only the kitchen or food-related messes. I don't feel compelled to clean the bathroom, for example, or to vacuum the carpet. But if there's food out on the table, or something sticky's on the counter, I'm like "beep must clean beep engaging cleanliness protocol beep acquiring sponge beep".
I might want to see a doctor. But we need the eggs. * ... What? **
But yeah. You enjoy those jiaozi. And happy cleaning. (Behold our weary Hero in his brand new Viyella robe!) I do look sort of resigned, don't I?
* There's an old joke that goes:
"A woman goes to her doctor, says 'Doctor! Doctor! My husband thinks he's a chicken!' Doctor goes, 'how long has he been like this?' and she says 'about eight months'. Doctor goes, 'Eight months? Why didn't you come see me sooner?' Woman says, 'well, we needed the eggs'."
** So I like mixing my metaphors.
David Makes Another Attempt at Authenticity.
Jiaozi are Chinese dumplings, basically. Wikipedia tells me that since I boiled these instead of steamed them, they'd be called shujiao, but I like the bounciness of how 'jiaozi' sounds.
Sure, we do some Chinese cooking in my house. We steam vegetables (in the microwave) and we do various stir-fried things in the two woks that we've got. But our Chinese repertoire is pretty much limited to two or three main dishes. It's not that we're ignorant, or anything (I think.) - one of the first cooking shows I ever watched in the house was Martin Yan's Yan Can Cook, but I can't remember the last time we deviated from any of the one or two recipes we liked from his A Wok For All Seasons cookbook. I wanted to do something new. I might pick up that cookbook and make something random later on, too, but that's another entry.
Now, I always wanted to make bao. That's how this started. I said "let's go to Chinatown and get some dim sum! I've always wanted to try bao!" And my dad said "Oh, your mother doesn't like dim sum." I asked my mother about this, and she got furious: "I'm not the one that hates dim sum! That's your dad! I like dim sum fine."
So that had settled nothing. And I've still never had dim sum. I think Dad is the one that doesn't like dim sum. For a gourmet, he is awfully picky.
Anyway. In true David style, I declined to actually access a cookbook. Because to be honest before I started writing this entry I'd forgotten about Yan, and how he Can Cook. I promise to really use a cookbook. But I actually managed to dead-reckon pretty well, with the help of a few internet recipes, which I tend not to trust very much at all. They're those sort of fishy-looking internet recipe databases that are massive and it's difficult to sort out the actual content from the advertising and there's lots of pop-ups.
Well, I see those sites as post-apocalyptic wastelands. Let me explain, using a future sort of like Mad Max's as an analogy: if The Food Network or Epicurious.com or The Splendid Table are cities, whole chunks of civilization that have been relatively preserved. Or maybe it's more like Judge Dredd - those sites are the big rolling cities, and outside them is the huge radioactive wasteland, where retired Judges go for the Long Walk. Anyway, in these radioactive wastelands there are oases - little pearls of arable land with sweet fruits to offer a weary traveler.
It is from these fruits that I pounded out a recipe. Overwrought analogies aside, here is my departure from Real Chinese Jiaozi:
I used chicken. So there. We didn't have any pork in the house that I wanted to use. We didn't have ground-up-anything and I didn't want to throw any pork chops in the food processor. Sue me. I'm sure there are real jiaozi that are made with chicken.
I decided to be badass and make my own dough, which is just a little bit of flour, water, and salt. It's really nothing. I hesitate to give proportions, here - it's by feel. Start with flour and salt and add the water slowly until you think it's the right consistency - it should ball up neatly. Just keep working it if it gives you trouble, or add more flour. You can't screw this up.
Anyway, for this specific instance, I used 3 cups of flour, about a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and a cup-and-a-quarter of cold (important!) water. Make the dough, ball it up, cover it up, and let it sit for about a half-hour while you prepare the filling.
We had/have an abundance of frozen chicken breasts in the house. I don't know how we managed to collect them all, but I assure we have in excess of five or six pounds of them, accrued over the past coupla months of not having used all of the chicken fresh out of the package - my parents wrap them in press 'n' seal wrap and huck them in the freezer. It's great! But we have loads of chicken and lately, I've been trying to clean out the freezer and do unspeakably crazy things with that chicken. (But that's another show.)
So I hucked about a pound and a half of mostly-thawed, cubed chicken breast into my food processor - and believe you me, that is a wonderful thing. I love this food processor. It is probably something I ought to stay far away from, because a food processor exacerbates in me a sense of wildness, of mad abandon, of mad science. I am master of a set of whirring blades! Blades that REND FLESH. Do you understand the appeal of that? Can you? I hope you can. But back to the bladeless world of the mundane.
Now. You can't very well make good dumplings with just ground chicken. We must needs have flavoring (yes!), and this comes in the form of three liquids: rice wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil. You need a lot of sesame oil, I used 5 tablespoons. I suppose you could use less, but you'd have to compensate, I feel, with other oil. I'll test this assumption. 5 tablespoons of sesame oil, 2 of rice wine, 3 of soy sauce. Mix that into the ground chicken (which is really more of a chickeny paste, isn't it, if you grind it in the food processor rather than in a meat grinder).
Now for the other fun stuff - chop ye up some celery, some garlic, some shallots, some green onion, and some ginger. How much is up to you, but the celery's for body and the green onion's for color and everything else is for flavor. I love lots of garlic and ginger, but you can do this however you want. Really, you'll know what's right.
A good way to know if you've got a good mix is to see how visually diverse your filling is:
This is fine. It might be able to stand a little more celery, even, but if your green flecks are few and far between, use something like this as a minimum benchmark.
Now the fun part. I did this wrong the first time (I've made these twice, now), so learn well from me, and know that you should use a rolling pin, or a rolling-pin equivalent.
Roll your dough into little rounds, and flatten them so that they make circles with approximate diameters of three inches apiece. But it's hard to explain in words. So watch this guy's form, the first young gentleman who's got the rolling pin. The idea is to keep the edges relatively thin and keep the center of your jiaozi wrapper thick. And make sure to flour EVERYTHING. The cutting board you're working on, the rolling pin - everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceP-iF3sQj0
Of course, if you're too busy for making your own dough, you can use pre-made wonton skins.
... Wuss.
Anyway, you may use chopsticks to deposit your payload of filling on the dough if you like - but I used a little disher, here pictured in the lower-left corner.
It's an ice-cream scoop! Basically. But a smallish one. If you don't have one, you can use a melon baller, or God forbid, a spoon.
It takes a big man to admit his mistakes. I'm huge:
Mistake 1. The first time I did this, I rolled them out by hand. This doesn't get them to the thinness you want. Don't do it.
Mistake 2. So I hadn't really studied the proper way to fold them - now I think I have a better idea, but the first batch of them came out sort of like this:
I was imagining bao, I think, because I just sort of twisted them together at the top.
Cute. Serviceable. Not correct, though.
And the problem with those was that they had way too much dough. The dough was so thick! It was like munching through a field of wheat to reach the hamburger someone had hidden in the center. Hey, the dough sort of tastes nice, but it's a neutral nice that doesn't need to hit you in the mouth with massive quantity. It is the vehicle rather than the food, I think.
So place a little dollop of filling in the center of a jiaozi-round. Wet the edges with a finger dipped in water, fold it across and crimp. Don't bring it all up in the center and twist. Well, you can if you want. Who am I to say you can't?
You want to cook these in boiling water for about two to three minutes - first they'll sink and then they'll float, and that tells you, I think, that the filling's cooked - but you really want that dough to cook through. I'd say four minutes maximum to be safe. Remove from the pot with a spider (that's a utensil! I promise.) and reserve it in the sink in a colander or something. When you wanna serve 'em, run hot water through 'em and shake!
You can see how the first batch turned out - thick, lumpy, and irresponsible-looking.
On the plate:
They were tasty and robust, but as I said, maybe a bit too robust. Dad said "Reduce the dough to about a quarter of what it is and these wouldn't be such a chore to eat". I mean, we were both exaggerating, but something had to be done.
I had to fix it!
So I revisited the recipe, rolled out the dough with a rolling pin instead of by hand, and I got these:
They look less like brains! And they were a lot thinner, too. It made me happy.
Jack came over to help me make that batch, and when I was finally done with everything it was after midnight. Jack went home, and I stayed up cleaning the hideous mess we'd made.
And you will have a mess. There will be flour everywhere. I don't think you can make these right without a huge mess.
Well, it just so happens that in the months I've spent at school this year, i managed to become some kind of compulsive kitchen-cleaner. Only the kitchen or food-related messes. I don't feel compelled to clean the bathroom, for example, or to vacuum the carpet. But if there's food out on the table, or something sticky's on the counter, I'm like "beep must clean beep engaging cleanliness protocol beep acquiring sponge beep".
I might want to see a doctor. But we need the eggs. * ... What? **
But yeah. You enjoy those jiaozi. And happy cleaning. (Behold our weary Hero in his brand new Viyella robe!) I do look sort of resigned, don't I?
* There's an old joke that goes:
"A woman goes to her doctor, says 'Doctor! Doctor! My husband thinks he's a chicken!' Doctor goes, 'how long has he been like this?' and she says 'about eight months'. Doctor goes, 'Eight months? Why didn't you come see me sooner?' Woman says, 'well, we needed the eggs'."
** So I like mixing my metaphors.