Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [42]
Peanut oil, for frying
1. In a large bowl, combine all the filling ingredients and mix well.
2. Fry a tablespoon of the mixture in a small skillet. Taste for seasoning. Add a bit more of anything you think it needs—salt, sesame oil, red pepper flakes.
3. Set up a dumpling wrapping station with the wrappers, the filling, a small bowl of water, and a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or dusted with flour.
4. Into the middle of each wrapper put about 2 teaspoons filling and, with your fingertips, daub the edges of the wrapper with a bit of water and fold into a half-moon. Pinch and pleat the wrappers. Place on the cookie sheet and repeat 60 to 80 times.
5. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Drop in about 20 pot stickers and cook for 5 to 7 minutes. Scoop out the pot stickers, drain briefly, and place on a clean cookie sheet. Repeat with the remaining pot stickers.
6. Heat 1 tablespoon of peanut oil in a large skillet. When it’s sizzling, add about 10 of the pot stickers. Cook on one side until the skin begins to brown and “thicken.” Flip. Cook on the other side. Repeat with remaining dumplings. Serve immediately.
Makes 60 to 80 pot stickers
DUMPLING WRAPPERS
I made dumplings using store-bought wrappers for years until my friend Lisa, who is as fascinated with Chinese cooking as I am, told me that she made her own wrappers and that they were better than any bought wrapper. Right she was. I was horrified both by how hard it is to make dumpling wrappers and by how much better they are. These wrappers are thick and tender. I have never found a commercial dumpling wrapper that is both thick and tender; thick wrappers are usually rubbery and tender wrappers tend to be thin. If I have to choose between thick and rubbery and thin and tender, I choose thin and tender. But of course I’d rather have thick and tender—and homemade. At least if someone else makes them.
Make it or buy it? Buy it.
Hassle: Truly a pain in the ass
Cost comparison: You’ll pay about $1.00 to make these, slightly under $2.00 to buy an equivalent number of commercial dumpling skins.
4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling
½ teaspoon kosher salt
2 cups boiling water
1. Whisk together the flour and salt in a big bowl. Gradually add the boiling water, stirring constantly. (Lisa uses chopsticks, but you can use a mixer for this.) Knead for 5 minutes until you have a tender white dough.
2. Cover with a clean, damp dish towel and let sit for at least 20 minutes and up to 3 hours.
3. Divide the dough into four pieces. Roll one portion into a long snake, about 1 inch thick. Cut the snake into ½-inch segments.
4. On a very large floured surface, with a rolling pin, roll each segment of dough into a rough 3-inch circle.
5. Repeat with the remaining dough. Now you are ready for the joy of stuffing all your wrappers.
Makes 1¾ pounds of dough, about 80 wrappers
SASHIMI
It’s a good thing sashimi is expensive, because otherwise we would eat a lot more of it and there would be even fewer maguro in the sea. This did not deter me from trying to undercut our local sushi bar that, like half the Japanese restaurants in America, is called Samurai. How hard could it be to slice raw fish and fan it out on a plate?
At the farmers’ market one morning I bought a piece of “sashimi-grade” albacore and a piece of “sashimi-grade” ono. Sashimi grade—which suggests the fish is safe to eat raw—does not appear to be an actively policed designation of the FDA, more like a judgment call made by the fishmonger who may know what he’s doing or may not. This fishmonger was charging $15.00 per pound that day, and the two fillets together cost $12.90. Spread out on my cutting board, it looked like a lot of vulnerable, pearlescent fish. I sliced it against the grain into plump, velvety tongues such as I have consumed many times at Samurai. I had to trim away a few raggedy bits of sinew and skin, but there was still a lot of sashimi—eighteen fat slices in all, for which I estimated I would