How to Make Fried Pork and Cabbage Dumplings With Homemade Wrappers
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Of all the foods off the A1 through A24 section of your local Chinese takeout menu, fried dumplings (that's Peking ravioli to you Bostonians) are perhaps the ones that benefit most from some home treatment. Unless you're really lucky, takeout dumplings are thick-skinned and greasy, any crunch having left them in the long steamy bike ride from the kitchen to your door.
Made with fresh wrappers and eaten straight out of the wok (or frying pan, of you prefer), they rank up there with burgers and mapo tofu as World's Awesome Foodstuff. The perfect fried dumpling should have a golden brown, ultra-crisp fried bottom, with a skin that's springy and chewy, but never tough or doughy.
The fillings can vary by taste, but my favorite combination is pork and cabbage.Nice fatty pork keeps things moist, while cabbage acts much in the way that breadcrumbs work in meatloaf or meatballs: it physically impedes the pork muscly proteins from binding too tightly with each other, ensuring that the filling stays tender without shrinking. How many times have you bitten into a restaurant dumpling only to find a big empty sack of skin with a tiny meat nugget hiding out in the corner? That won't happen with these.
The hardest part of making dumplings at home is forming and rolling out the dough, and it's really not that hard. The dough is made by adding boiling water to flour, which means that the proteins in the flour that usually form a stretchy gluten matrix are already partially cooked before kneading beings. This severely limits gluten formation, which makes the dough a lot more like a paste than a stretchy bread dough. The malleable stuff is very easy to roll out (you have to let it cool first) into even, thin shapes. After steaming or boiling, it becomes slightly translucent, with a pleasant springiness that'll put store-bought wrappers to shame.
No comments:
Post a Comment