Pork Dumplings, Yum Yum

While visiting with my sister-in-law recently for Chinese New Year, she made me and my husband amazing pork dumplings. I was so in love with their flavour that I had to attempt to make them myself when I returned home. This same sister-in-law bought me and my husband a Chinese cookbook some years ago. This book, she says has real authentic Chinese recipes – The Food of China by Murdoch books. So of course, when I wanted a dumpling recipe, this was the book I went to. The pork dumpling recipe was called JIAOZI and even in this traditional book, they suggested buying the pastry.

I followed this recipe:

100g Dutch cabbage shredded

500g minced pork

20g fresh chives chopped

2½ tbsp light soy sauce

1 tbsp sherry

1 tbsp finely grated ginger

2 tbsp toasted sesame oil

1 tbsp cornflour

I fried the cabbage for 5 minutes until soft, then mixed all the ingredients together. Make the dumplings close to the time they are to be cooked, as they go soggy if left standing too long. You can, however, make up the filling a day or a few hours ahead of time. Place a tsp of filling onto the pastry, wet the edges of the pastry and fold it over in half, use your thumb and index finger to form small pleats along the sealed edge.

There are numerous ways to cook dumpling, put them in soup, steam, fry, boil or cook them in an airfryer. I couldn’t decide which one would be best, so I cooked them three different ways. Firstly, I cooked some in the airfryer; once the dumplings are made, spray them with cooking oil and place in a preheated airfryer for 5 minutes, if they look too dry after the 5 minutes, respray them and return to the airfryer for 5 more minutes. The second option I tested was boiling them for 10 minutes. Lastly, I shallow fried them for 3 minutes until the base browns up, then I added boiling water to the frying pan and boiled for 7 minutes. The airfryer dumplings turned out much too crispy and the meat had dried up. I didn’t add more spray oil after the initial 5 minutes of cooking, the idea of an airfryer is to reduce the amount of fat used, so I wasn’t keen on adding lots of fat. With the boiling method the meat stayed nice and juicing and flavoursome, however, the last method was my favourite. Shallow frying them, then boiling them, was how my sister in law cooked them for us for Chinese New Year, and this I recommend as the best method to yield dumplings that are a little crispy, with very flavoursome pork filling.

Pork dumplings, yum yum.