Have you ever helped to prepare Chinese New Year eve’s reunion dinner? Or is it usually done by your grandma or mum?
Good news – it doesn’t matter what’s your level of skills in the kitchen! Chef Cheng shows us how easy and fast it is to prepare amazing dumplings. And the best part of making your own dumplings is that you can eat as many fresh and delicious dumplings as you want at low cost.
Rolling out the dumpling skin
Ingredients are simple – just 500g plain flour and 65g water is needed!
Fillings mix
If you are going for the traditional type, pork, prawns and chives are the main ingredients. Chinese usually use pork because they find it more delicious than other types of meat. Prawns are sometimes used to add another layer of flavour and texture.
Traditional wraps
There are three main types of traditional wraps, one with folds in one direction, the other with folds on both sides that comes to meet at the center and the last with wave-like folds (usually for boiling).
For the first two types of folds:
For boiled dumplings fold:
Modern wrap
Spice up your dumplings with colourful toppings – Chef Cheng used finely diced carrots, chives, mushrooms, egg whites and yolk. You can practically use any ingredients that you can think of!
Make a rainbow of colours!
Cooking methods
There are three primary cooking methods – boil, steam and pan-fry.
If boiling, bring a pot of water to boil then drop the dumplings in. Common mistake new cooks make is to remove the dumplings when they float to the surface. But they are not yet ready! Pro tip from chef: add in about 3 tablespoon of room temperature water at 3 different points to avoid overcooking.
If you’re steaming, make sure flour is mixed with water in a 1:1 ratio so the skin won’t dry out.
For pan-fry, heat up a layer of oil on non-stick pan. When ready, put in the dumplings. Once the bottom is brown and crusted, pour in a bit of water and cover with a lid to steam the top and insides.
So which is your favourite cooking method?
Sauce
What better condiment to go with dumplings than the classic black vinegar, chives and ginger slices mix? This is slightly acidic, sweet and spicy, a perfect complement to the dish.
And here we have these dumplings that look and taste equally as good. Share with us if you have tried our recipe!
On behalf of the Academy, we wish you a wonderful Chinese New Year, a year of auspiciousness, good health and prosperity
Interested to learn more amazingly delicious yet unbelievably simple dishes? Stay tuned for our EasyChefLab classes where we have many exciting programmes lined up for you this year! Visit our website to find out more
https://www.at-sunrice.com/easychef-programmes/