Chinese Dumplings / Potstickers ( Daring Cooks Challenge)

Yikees! I almost missed the reveal date for the Daring Cooks Challenge.  My laptops power cable had been unfortunatley torutered to death by my ever inquisitive daughter. All my post material and photographs are usually in my laptop. I finally managed to drag myslef out to go shopping for a power adapter which will hopefully survive my daugters facination of plugging and un-plugging the cable.

And now for the actual challenge.  This has been a fun  one. Aditya enjoyed it the most. He loved making the dumplings and eating them.  It seems he needs a dumpling fix at least once a week now since we first made them. His pleating technique still needs to improve, but he is getting there:). The picture below includes the ones he pleated.

The first time I made them, I made them with a ground chicken filling. The second time round. I had to come up with some quick filling ideas as Aditya refused to eat dinner if they were not dumplings. I had a spinach and tofu curry on hand which I used. I also made an egg and tomato filling and took those to work. They were received pretty well. So now I have some nice vegetarian filling options for when I have guests over. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the dumpling cross sections.

For the original recipe visit Jen’s blog –  Use Real Butter. Below is my version of it.

Ingredients

Dough

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup warm water
• flour for worksurface

Note: you will want to double this for the amount of filling listed.

Chicken Filling

• 1 lb ground chicken
• 3 stalks green onions, minced
• 1/4 cup  mushrooms, minced ( I used button mushrooms)
• 2 tbsp  ginger garlic paste
• 3 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp  oil

Method

Filling

• Mix all ingredients together and refrigerate untill needed.

Dough

• Place the flour in the work bowl of a food processor.
• Run the processor and pour the warm water in until incorporated.  Use 1/2 cup water first and add the rest in small batches as needed.
• Pour the contents into a sturdy bowl or onto a work surface and knead until uniform and smooth. The dough should be firm and silky to the touch and not sticky. the dough is now ready to be filled.

Dumplings

• Take half a golf ball size of dough and roll it out into a circle.
• Put a heaped teaspoon of filling and pleat it as per directions in Jen’s post.
• Repeat with the rest of the dough.
• to pan fry the dumplings, add about 2 tbsp of oil in the bottom of a pan
• When hot add the dumplings. When the dumplings begin to brown in the underside add about 1/2 cup of water and immediately put a lid on the pan. This steams and cooks the dumpling.
• Open the lid after a few minutes and let the water evaporate. Serve hot with a dipping sauce.

I made a spicy dipping sauce.

Spicy Dipping Sauce

Ingredients

dipping sauce

• 4 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp red chilli sauce
• 1 tbsp horse raddish mustard
• 1/2 tsp ginger garlic paste.

Mix all together and serve with dumplings.

Notes

• As I mentioned earlier in the post I also made a spinach and tofu filled version of the dumplings and a egg and tomato filled version. I will be blogging later about the spinach and tofu curry. the egg and tomato was a mix of eggs, tomato, ginger garlic paste, soy sauce and also added cinnamon stick and cloves for seasoning.
• This post has been done in a hurry so Jen’s blog would be the best place to go for all the details on how to make them.
• My dumplings were a little too big, so maybe a smaller quantity of dough might be better to get smaller dumplings.