Food

Food I cook with the occasional recipe

Golden Meat Boats

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Chinese dumplings were supposedly made in the shape of traditional gold ingots, but I don’t see the resemblance so much.

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imagine all the seas this ship has sailed

Anyway, my sister and I made some pork and curry dumplings a few weeks back. This is the only dish I know how to make without a recipe. That in itself is pretty cool because cooking and I don’t agree with each other. Below is a rough recipe and instructions on how to wrap those meat ingots.

 

Supplies

a food processor (bigger is faster)

a large mixing bowl

a little bowl of water

a large plate or pan

a pot of boiling water

 

Ingredients

(marvel at my mastery of communication)

half a head of a large Taiwanese cabbage (or 2-3 bags’ worth of shredded cabbage. I usually buy a couple bags of prepackaged coleslaw mix.)

5-10 stalks of green onion (depends on your preference. I like a lot of onion flavor, so I use eight or nine stalks.)

a package of ground pork (no idea about the weight, but it’s just a normal sized pack from grocery store’s meat section. Not Costco-sized.)

a couple slices of ginger (if you’re into that sort of thing)

two packages of dumpling wrappers (available at any Asian food store)

one egg

Instructions

(if you can really call them that)

 

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food-process the cabbage, green onion, and ginger.
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mix it all together. taking handfuls of cabbage mix, squeeze out as much water as possible over the kitchen sink.
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toss in a dash of salt with any spices you want (curry powder maybe?). incorporate defrosted pork. mix an egg in to hold everything together.
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defrost your dumpling wrappers
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now for the fun part! scoop a glob of filling (called liao in Chinese) onto one dumpling wrapper. dip your finger into a bowl of plain water and trace a wet trail along the edge of the wrapper (you can sort of see it on the far edge in the picture).
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pinch the wrapper together in the CENTER ONLY. notice how the sides are still open.

dumpling

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this part is kind of tricky. fold the right side as shown in the diagram above, with the flaps turned away from you. the second picture shows what it should look like after this step. make sure to pinch everything tightly so liao won’t fall out while the dumplings are cooking.
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repeat the folding process on the left side, flaps facing away.
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ta-da. if done correctly, the dumpling should be fat and cute like so. don’t worry if it’s ugly, though. it will still be delicious!
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keep going until you run out of liao and wrappers. ideally, this should happen at the same time.

Congrats. You’re now a certified dumpling master. The last step is cooking, which I sadly don’t have pictures for. Toss them in boiling water for 10ish minutes or until the wrapper looks soft and translucent. Alternatively, stand the dumplings up in a pan and fry them on medium heat until the bottoms are golden and crispy. Then add a 1/2 inch of water and cook covered.

Now you, too, can be a cool Asian.

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Golden Meat Boats