By Ellen L.Published: 2014-08-20
These little Chinese Jiaozi dumplings are the best thing to have around the house! You make these little beauties in one go, then freeze 'em right away. Then, whenever you're hungry for a bit of a snack, you just pull it out of the freezer and boil for ten minutes and wowsers! Tender, hot, juicy homemade dumplings to completely satisfy your hungry belly! We are making these a lot these days because it's a great go to snack for my little girl who always seems hungry these days (growing spurt!). And it makes me feel great to be able to offer a quick, easy to fix, homemade snack for her. We've been making these dumplings so much I've been tweaking the recipe to make various improvements. Well, I finally got the golden stamp of approval with this last batch when my little girl said that these were the best Chinese Jiaozi Dumpling ever!
The reason behind our tweaking of our Chinese Jiaozi Dumpling recipe was that we were never absolutely satisfied with the juiciness of our jiaozi. The best jiaozi is lusciously juicy, tasty and tender when you bite into it. So...what to tweak? More pork fat, more seasoning, more oil? Try, try and try again. We tweaked everything! And finally...I think that we got it! The main secret is in the ratio of the vegetable to the pork! If you get this ratio right you will find your ideal Jiaozi. Mind you this ratio will fluctuate depending on the vegetable that you use as each vegetable has it's own water weight.
After trying different vegetables in our jiaozi I think I like Chinese yellow chives and cabbages best. Some vegetables are hard to use because their water content is so high that your jiaozi get watery as you wrap them which is impossible to work with. Chinese yellow chives have a more pungent taste and aroma which is lovely. And the cabbage and pork combination is a food classic. I've been using cabbage more lately as it's easier to buy and because (yeah!) I can use my little electric chopper to chop up the cabbage! Total time saver! And it helps the texture of the final mix that the cabbage is chopped up pretty fine.
A point to note is that the ground pork should be quite fatty, ideally half fat. Lard is what makes things taste great and creates a luscious smooth mouth feel. Another point to note is that you really need to stir, stir and stir the pork cabbage mixture in one direction until it reaches a paste like consistency in order to get a fluffy, light filling. (See photo above)
(Prep time: 20 mins Cook time: 9 mins)
Ingredients
40-50
round dumpling wrappers
1/2 lb
ground pork, half fat (230 g)
2 cups
cabbage, finely chopped
1 1/2 tsp
salt
2 1/2 tbsp
light soy sauce
1 tsp
sesame oil
1 tsp
Shao Hsing rice wine
1 tbsp
sugar
2 tsp
white pepper
1 tbsp
water
1 tbsp
flour
1
egg white
Directions:
More Porkish Delights at The Hong Kong Cookery:
Oooh! These look delicious! I must try my hand at making them. Looking at this recipe, it seems similar to the potsticker pork dumpling you had posted a while back.. are these the same, but different names? Also, can the jiaozi be steamed instead of boiling them?
ReplyDeleteHey! This recipe is a tweak from the original potsticker recipe that we posted. You can use either one to make jiaozi but I'm liking this new recipe more as I like the taste and texture of cabbage, we've tweaked the taste to make it yummier and juicier, and it seems faster to make. You can steam jiaozi for 9 mins, (frozen steam 12 mins) on a plate in your steamer. Hope you like our new recipe! ~ellen
DeleteHi Ellen,
DeleteI finally had the opportunity to make the jiaozi this weekend and you were right, they are juicy. I like using a mix of soy sauce/ sesame oil as dipping sauce. I think I will try to incorporate some shrimp into the mixture next time.
Haven't try the potsticker pork dumplings yet, but that will be next...
Glad you liked our jiaozi recipe! Yum...soy sauce and sesame oil sounds good, must try it! ~ellen
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