The key to great dumplings

Northern style Dumplings! In this video we wanted to show you how to sort dumplings, from scratch, including the wrappers (one of the most underrated bits).

0:00 - The most underrated dumpling element.
0:43 - What makes a good dumpling wrapper?
2:08 - Which flour to use?
3:37 - High Level Overview
4:37 - Make the Autolyse, rest 20 minutes
5:03 - Make Ginger-Sichuan Peppercorn water
5:31 - Mince and Purge the Napa Cabbage
6:08 - Knead, rest 15 minutes
6:47 - Season and Mix Pork
7:39 - Divide the dough, roll out Wrappers
8:32 - Mix Pork and Napa Cabbage
8:55 - Wrap Dumplings
9:32 - Boil Dumplings
10:01 - What about our old dumpling video?

DUMPLING WRAPPERS

Ingredients:

If using Chinese or 00 flours: 300g flour, ¾ tsp salt, 150g water
If using Bob’s Red Mill AP: 305g flour, ¾ tsp salt, 140g water
If using King Arthur flour: 300g flour, ¾ tsp salt, 156g water

Process:

1. Make the autolyse. Combine the salt with the flour, slowly drizzle in the water while stirring. Once you have those scraggily bits, smush it all together into a ball. Rest for 20 minutes. Note that if using Chinese or 00 flour, you probably will not need this step.

2. Knead the dough for 10-15 minutes. You can also use a stand mixer on speed three. Rest for fifteen minutes.

3. Break the dough into four logs, then divide into 9-10g balls. Thoroughly flour, then smush into a disc.

4. Roll out the wrapper by rolling from the edge into the center, twisting the wrapper as you go. You should roll ~16 times to get something ~2.5 inches in diameter.

FILLING

Ingredients:

* Ginger-Sichuan peppercorn water: Sichuan peppercorns (花椒), ½ tbsp; ginger, ~1 inch smashed; 2/3 cup of hot, boiled water
* Napa cabbage (大白菜/娃娃菜), 300g
* Salt, to purge the napa: 1tsp
* Ground Pork belly 五花肉 (or pork leg/ham 后腿, or fatty pre-ground pork), 300g
* Seasoning for the pork: salt, 1 tsp; five spice (五香粉), 1 tsp; chicken bouillon powder (鸡粉), 1 tsp; cornstarch (生粉), 1 tsp; soy sauce (生抽), 1 tsp; liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tsp; ginger-Sichuan peppercorn water from above
* Oil to coat: Peanut oil (花生油), 2 tbsp; toasted sesame oil (麻油), 1 tsp -or- seasoned oil from below, ~1/4 cup

(Note: when using unseasoned oil, I tend to like going lighter on it. You can also add more oil if you prefer)

Process:

1. Steep the ginger and the Sichuan peppercorn with the hot, boiled water for ~30 minutes. Strain when cool.

2. Mince the napa, then mix with the salt. Let sit for 10-15 minutes. Squeeze out the liquid, then transfer to a tofu or cheesecloth to squeeze out even more. Set aside.

3. Mix the seasoning for the pork, then slowly drizzle in the ginger-Sichuan peppercorn water, stirring constantly. The water adding process should take about 3-5 minutes, the pork should feel slightly sticky in the end. Optionally ‘dat’ by slamming the mixture into the bowl 3-4 times to develop a little spring.

4. When the dumplings are *just* ready to wrap, mix together the cabbage and the pork mixture. Add the oil.

SEASONED OIL

This will make for a larger batch than you need for this recipe. Note that in the north they would usually use Dacong (大葱) - Allium fistulosum – for this oil, which we are substituting with scallion and white onion.

* Peanut oil, 1.5 cups
* Scallion, 100g
* Celery, preferably Chinese celery (芹菜), 50g
* Onion, ¼ medium
* Garlic, 4 cloves
* Ginger, ~1 inch
* Spices: cinnamon stick (桂皮), ½ stick; star anise (八角), 2; fennel seed (小茴香), ¼ tsp

1. Steep the spices in water for ~10 minutes before cooking. This will prevent the spices from scorching

2. Roughly mince the rest of the ingredients.

3. Slowly fry the minced aromatics and steeped spices in the oil over a medium flame. This will take a bit – around 20 minutes or so. You want the onion to be *every* so slightly starting to brown, but you want to stop before things get to the golden brown stage.

4. Dip everything into a bowl while still hot, then cover. Let it steep overnight.

5. Next day, strain out the spices and aromatics.

WRAPPING AND BOILING DUMPLINGS

For wrapping, refer to the video. When boiling, add the dumplings to a rolling boil, then cover. Once the water is at a boil once again, add ~½ cup of cool water. Allow the dumplings to get back up to a boil once again.

Traditionally, this is repeated two more times until the dumplings are done (3 times total). However, when using Bob’s Red Mill, we found that the dumplings ran the risk of getting slightly water logged. With the amount of filling we are using today, repeating once more (2 times total) was enough.

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Outro Music: คิดถึงคุณจัง by ธานินทร์ อินทรเทพ

[ChineseCookingDemystified]

IMPORTANT NOTE: Before we get into it, I know that “hydration” isn’t a term that *everyone* knows – and I forgot to scribble down the flour/water quantities in the video itself. If using King Arthur flour, use 300 grams of flour and 156 grams of water. 00 Flour – 300 grams of flour, 150 grams of water.

But right, as promised in the outro, a few thoughts on our previous work looking back. Originally, we were thinking of making a whole “Can you trust CCD?” video, but the more we put pen to paper, the more naval gazey the whole project ended up feeling. After all, this’s a cooking channel – most people just want a tasty recipe in the end.

So, recipe notes will be *after* the five year anniversary naval gazing:

1. Sometimes I like to say that there’s always a little Dunning-Kreuger at play whenever anyone starts a YouTube thing, but that partially might just be my projecting. Looking back, it’s kind of shocking that we had the confidence to share recipes, but then again we didn’t know how much that we didn’t know.

2. And yet, in spite of that, when we go back and analyze the recipes themselves, they’re… generally reasonably decent. I suppose in us-five-years-ago’s defense, we *did* always really really try to get things right, to share the dish as we felt it should be… which seemed to end up compensating for a lot of sins. I suppose it’s less in recipes and more in the “extra commentary” that I can kind of cringe at myself in that first year. To be a bit more concrete – in our Char Siu sauce recipe I used mianchi (ground bean paste) and Lo Shui (master stock) as the base of the sauce, which is a legit older method to make a very legit Char Siu sauce. The recipe itself is quite solid. But in the process, I also kind of ragged on Hoisin based Char Siu sauces, which are obviously also a proper approach as well. I just didn’t know it at the time.

3. But it’s a truism the more you learn about food and cooking, I think. When you get started, you start to learn some recipes and techniques that work, and you… religiously stick to them (or at least I did) – leading to a belief system centered around the idea that there’s *one* and only one ‘correct’ way to cook a dish. But as the years pass, you start to see that each ‘dish’ is really a *constellation* of different variations on a theme – and it’s those variants, those nooks and crannies, that’re some of the most fascinating.

4. In the middle of year two, there was another important change in the channel – I (Chris) stopped researching. Originally, when me and Steph switched back and forth with the cooking, when it was one of our ‘turns’, we’d do *everything* - research, testing, etc etc. Back then, when it was my turn to research, usually what I’d do is go hang out in the wholesale market and ask vendors how they’d cook XYZ. Cross reference that with a bunch of random recipes and recipe videos, cook it a few times, call it a day. It… wasn’t enough.

5. Why? There is simply no substitute for reading WIDELY. I’ve lived over here in China for over a decade – I can get by in Chinese – but I’ve never really been one of those ‘language guys’: my reading ability only really allows for *narrow* reading. So I can putz around, make a few searches, read some douban threads, and article here or there… but Steph – being a native speaker and all – can quickly consume entire books and magazines. This gives you a much, *much* better sense of the bigger picture.

6. The wider the knowledge base, the more you can cross reference – the more you can *contextualize* what someone local to a certain place might tell you about a certain dish. Let me give you an example. When we did our old Beijing Zhajiangmian video, I showed the final video to a buddy of mine from Beijing and he quickly retorted that it was ‘wrong’ because it didn’t have ‘enough toppings’, as when you got to a Zhajiangmian restaurant in Beijing the noodles are loaded with a veritable smorgasbord. So for a while, I had this nagging feeling that maybe our Zhajiangmian video just wasn’t quite right, that maybe we should toss a disclaimer on it… to which Steph would always say “trust me, the research was good”. It wasn’t until Laofangu dropped a homestyle Zhajiangmian video (which had similar toppings as ours) that my nerves were calmed. As it turns out, my friend’s family never really made Zhajiangmian at home, so his view was always colored by what he ate at restaurants.

7. That said, I think you should always, *always* take criticism from someone local to somewhere seriously because (1) you can always fuck up, and you can learn from that and (2) even if you didn’t fuck up and you just didn’t know the context, you can learn from that too. Let me give you another example. Two more videos that we were worried about were our Guizhou Laziji (spicy chicken) video and our Guizhou ciba (pounded chili paste) video, as our friends from Guiyang told us that neither was how it was done by their family. As it turns out, the Laziji that we did (where we added water to the braise) was a specific variant from Qinglong, and the ciba chili paste that we made was a more modern restaurant-focused variation that’s designed to be ready-used for stir fries. We never would have learned those things if we’d have just brushed aside those concerns.

8. That’s why – in spite of all the voices out there these days that are vociferously arguing against the notion of authenticity, in spite of what I just said above regarding dishes being constellations of ideas instead of platonic ideals – we still can’t hop aboard that ‘authenticity be damned’ train. It’s all too easy to use a critique of authenticity as a shield against your own shortcomings, your own gaps of knowledge.

Anyway, enough of that. Now for what you’re actually here for, some dumpling notes:

1. Another very legit method for making dumpling wrappers is to roll it out (often by passing it through a pasta maker) and using a glass to cut our the wrappers. We personally prefer the rolling method, but if you’re making a significant number of wrappers, the cutting method would definitely be a nice idea.

2. The hot water dough method you can see quite a bit around Jiangsu/Zhejiang. It’s is often used for making steamed dumplings, as it’s softer and the cold water wrappers can sometimes be at risk of drying out when steaming.

3. The oil quantity in the dumpling filling may seem less than some other recipes – this is because for the basic recipe in the video I was using uncooked peanut oil, and if using uncooked oil I personally prefer to go easier on the oil quantity. If using the seasoned oil that I mentioned in the description box, I’d up the oil quantity for ~1/4 cup. Or alternatively, feel free to add more oil according to your own tastes.

4. For more fillings, you can definitely check out our previous dumpling video. They’re definitely solid, though I was a bit overly paranoid on the hand-mincing/stirring front. Just… please forget anything we said about the wrapper.

Ok, that’s it for now. Apologies for the lack of videos recently, things are a little crazy with the upcoming move. We’ll be releasing one more video here in China (likely one week from today, before Dragon Boat Festival), then June 8th we’ll be moving down to Bangkok. Realistically, our next video after that likely won’t be until 6/27, though we’ll try to aim for 6/20.

[XiuHang]

Here's a bit of advice learned from years of Jiao Zi making with my father. You can make really good wrappers with almost any AP flour; instead of adjusting the hydration wait on a longer autolyze. My father learned that even pretty bad flour makes fine wrappers if you give it enough time for all of the flour to get hydrated.

[petersu]

My mom (from Northern China) makes the best northern style dumplings (jiao zi) that I've ever had (really!) and swears by Pillsbury AP flour for the wrappers. Just the right gluten level she says. The dough is as you do it here, but with just flour and water as far as I know. I worked for years, maybe decades, to come close to what she does once in a while.

[Maiasatara]

Always love your thorough research and delicious resulting recopies but I'm here for the kitty today. At 10:57 s/he gave Chris a slow "I love you" blink. So great. I'm hoping you have TWO pets and not sad news about the dog.

[woolfel]

I used KA all purpose to make hand pulled noodles and dumplings. It works fine and give you the QQ texture. I actually make the dough the night before and let it sit in the frig. That saves me time and lets the gluten develop.

[eleanorandersen]

Man, as a Philly girl myself it's always so pleasing to see you reference Philly food!

[WangGanChang]

our family have been making dumplings with gold medal for quite sometime now. it's similar to your steps, though it require a lot more knealing. It got simple once we got a kitchen aid mixer, we run it for three 5 minute intervals with about 5 minute of rest in between. The taste and texture is similar to what get in China, after my wife tinkered with water ratio a couple of times. The same method can also make a great xiaolongbao skin if you just add litter bit of yeast and sugar to the water mix as well.

[potatostarch-hi]

you guys are very methodical with it. and as someone who likes to know why we do a certain things in cooking. thanks.

[squaidsareus]

Secret technique that a lot of people miss for dumplings is turning the dough 90 degrees every time you cut it. My mom does this and you can see it in PangZai's dumpling tutorial at 6:26. This helps with getting a more round/evenly distributed wrapper instead of a compressed oval shape from the cutting.

[hattivat]

As someone from another dumpling-heavy nation (Poland) I have to say I am a bit shocked by the Chinese technique requiring you to individually roll every wrapper. Even my grandma would consider that an insane amount of work, our style is to just roll a huge sheet of dough and cut circular wrappers out of it using an inverted glass, optionally adjusting the resulting wrapper with your fingers when needed... It's so standard that grannies even use glass sizes as a sort of measurement of dumpling-making skill, a granny that can make good dumplings out of shot glass-sized wrappers is the queen of grannies.

[ouichtan]

As a Frenchman this hits home...
I feel like lots of people eat sandwiches as an "excuse" to indulge in a nice feeling.
A lot of French people eat sandwiches as an "excuse" to devour half a baguette 🤣🤣🤣

[jimmyyu]

That is so funny, it is exactly how my grandma used to make dumplings... 40+ years ago, that is. Brings back so much memories of me being a young boy helping her in the kitchen. Always make sure the dumplings rise 3 times, because no one wants to eat under-cooked pork. 👍👍

[frothyham]

11:06 is by far the most important part of the video, everyone make sure to watch.

[Koenigg]

The store bought wrappers definitely have their place! I much prefer pan fried dumplings using store bought wrappers than the hand made ones.

[summerwindom]

I’m not big on leaving comments so I hope that convey’s how high in esteem I hold the method as well as the recipe. These are hands down the best dumplings I’ve ever made!! The sichuan and ginger water is a revelation, This channel continues to raise my Chinese cooking game even with you guy having left China temporarily. Love this channel so much, I must become one of your patron supporters. Heading there now,

[hetism]

Yes, made it today! Used vegetarian mince since I don't eat meat. Really flavourful! Am thoroughly proud of my first dumpling experience. Thanks for the recipe and the explanation

[MichaelNatkin]

I think your approach to authenticity is smart, sensible, and balanced. Of course for almost all recipes there is no single way it is made. Families and restaurants have adapted over time. And cultures blend wildly. Ideas may start as dubious and end up recognized as genius (while others remain dubious: I'm looking at you, cheese dosa.) People move and adapt their dishes to produce and ingredients that are on hand, sometimes lessening a dish and othertimes creating masterpieces. At the same time, there *is* a core, a beating heart of a cuisine, at least at a moment in time, that deserves respect and that will repay your efforts to recreate and honor it accurately. To me, your work represents that approach well, while still acknowledging change and improvement.

[hollish]

This is one of the. most helpful videos ever! I want to make my own dumpling wrappers, but have not been happy with the recipes I have seen. Thank you so very much, especially for the flour suggestions. Being in the USA, both your recommendations are available.

[phoebehuang]

My family makes dumplings every time we're all together and we have never had to buy special flour. I've made wrappers on my own and just used normal store bought flour. It's definitely achievable without anything fancy. You just need to wait for the dough to rest for longer than 15 minutes. I suggest you check on the dough every so often. You can make it ahead of time.

[vettebodee]

I like the new Cutting board shots mixed in with the classic balcony.