EVENT: Food That Takes Two
VENUE: Cara’s Apartment, Park Slope
PARTY SIZE: 2
TYPE: Interactive Valentine’s Day Dinner
TYPE: Interactive Valentine’s Day Dinner
MENU: Meat and Scallion Pot Stickers with Tangy Soy Sauce; Momofuku Pork Bo Ssam with White Rice, Butter Lettuce Leaves, and Ginger Scallion Sauce; Nothing for Dessert (Phoebe on this development: “Do I even know you anymore?”)
I began mooning over Andrea Nguyen’s cookbook, Asian Dumplings, before it came out. I’ve owned it since December 25th, and I’ve read it cover to cover several times. But I hadn’t cooked from it yet, and after hearing about all our readers’ Valentine’s Day cooking plans, I decided that the 14th was the ideal date for me, and a helping hand, to approach the dumpling book. Below is a slideshow of the meat and chive dumplings Alex and I rolled out, assembled, and pan-fried. All 32 of them made by hand, dough and everything. It only took a little more than an hour start to finish, but it was a really fun activity, and an easy one to do on the “dining room” table, since there’s no room for rolling in my small kitchen.
Because Andrea Nguyen’s directions and diagrams are so perfectly, accurately done, I didn’t think I could do justice to them by typing them up. So follow her steps in my photos, and then heed my recommendation and buy or borrow the book.
I’ll be posting about the Momofuku pork soon–for now, sate yourself on this pulled pork.
From my kitchen, dumplings and all, to yours,
Cara, THE QUARTER-LIFE COOK
**Slideshow**
the dough is made with boiling water
dumpling dough comes out of the food processor crumbly and resembling playdough
kneading
setting aside the warm dough in a plastic bag lets the gluten develop
the makings of the meat-scallion filling
meat and scallion filling
cutting the dough into dumpling wrapper size
each piece is flattened in a pool of flour
stacks of pressed dough
the initial flattening of the disks
rolling each circle out into a thin, 3 1/2″ dumpling wrapper
piles of wrappers
assembled dumplings, pleated and everything
crowded into the pot
finished potstickers
going for a dunk in the tangy soy dipping sauce
Photography by Alex
Originally posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Big Girls, Global Kitchens: A Dumpling Slideshow