There are two environments that I do not like to cook in, a very hot one and a very cold one. No one wants to work in the sticky summers in a stuffy kitchen nor a freezing kitchen. My kitchen right now is chilly if there isn't at least one burner running. Even if I do have all four burners on, the kitchen still isn't as cozy as under the covers. What can I say, the draft manages to get in the house. So my mother decides that on one chilly night that we'll just settle for dumplings for dinner. Everyone pitches in and everyone gets a full stomach afterwards. You can put anything in dumplings and the basic filling has ground meat and scallions. It is really up to you because I have replaced scallions with chives.
Daikon Pork and Shrimp Dumplings
- 1 1/2 - 2 lb ground pork
- 1/2 cup xia pi (dried baby shrimp)
- 1 large daikon
- 4-5 stalks of scallion
- 1 - 2 eggs
- cooking wine
- soy sauce
- salt
- sugar
- sesame oil
- 2 packs of dumpling skins
2. In a large bowl, prep the ground pork by adding cooking wine, soy sauce, salt, and sugar. I use salt as the main flavor to marinate the pork and add a smaller amount of soy sauce to give fragrance. Give it a good mix.
3. Before you add the now washed xia pi into the pork mixture, give the xia pi a good squeeze to remove excess water. Don't squeeze so hard that all the flavor in the shrimp disappears.
4. Peel and shred the daikon into a separate bowl. Salt the daikon and let it sit for ten minutes. You'll see that the daikon begins to shrink and half the bowl is filled with water. Daikon is a moisture heavy vegetable.
5. Squeeze the water out of the daikon and add it to the large bowl with the pork mixture. Set the salty daikon water aside.
6. Dice the scallions and add it into the large bowl. Add in the eggs and sesame oil. Start mixing until all ingredients have incorporated well. If you see that your pork filling is too watery instead of being more gluten-like, add corn starch to thicken it. As you mix the pork, you are creating texture.
7. Now that you're done making the filling, set up a station to start folding the dumplings. You need some water to seal the dumplings and a plate to hold them after you fold them.
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| I decided to have a bit of fun and folded the dumplings like har gow. |
8. Remember that salty daikon water you set aside? Pour that into a large pot along with some water and set it to a boil. Once the water boils, add in the dumplings. Cook in batches if you have to and make sure to maintain a constant temperature. If it's too hot, the dumpling skins will break apart. Check on them once in a while to make sure they don't "explode". Cook them for fifteen minutes with a lid over your pot. This however depends on the amount of filling you have in your dumpling.
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The water you have leftover for boiling the dumplings has become a kind of soup because it essentially contains the essence from the daikon and added salt. I don't want to waste it so I start adding ingredients to this "soup" like more shredded daikon and bring it to a quick boil. As for the dumplings, I either eat it with a soy sauce-Chinese vinegar-garlic mixture or with homemade chili sauce. Dumplings are an important dish eaten during Chinese lunar new years especially in northern traditions because it's shaped like a sycee. It's a very family oriented dish because usually everyone pitches in to work and the main purpose of lunar new year is to reunite with family.
Dumplings are very satisfying and they're very easy to make. It just takes a lot of time to make them. When I make them on my own from scratch, they pretty much take up most of my day. If you want to eat well you gotta make them yourself, that's my motto.
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