Chinese Jiaozi Dumpling 白菜豬肉餃子

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)

And if you're not too sure about your dumpling wrapping skills, check out our new How to Wrap a Chinese Jiaozi Dumpling video!  It's short and sweet and too the point, just showing you how to fold the darn things.  There is a hilarious (to me at least!) back story to this dumpling video. I asked my little girl to hold the camera that day as my two floury hands were needed for dumpling wrapping.  Sure enough, my little girl decided, unprompted, to add her own little voiceover to the video.  If you listen real carefully you can hear me trying not to bust out laughing in the background!

Chinese Jiaozi Dumpling  Recipe   白菜豬肉餃子

(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:

Mix pork, salt, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine, sugar, white pepper, and water in large mixing bowl.  Stir in one direction for a couple of minutes until the pork mixture stops looking like separated pork pieces and more like a paste.  Add flour and egg white and mix in.  Add the cabbage and stir in one direction until thoroughly mixed, fluffy and smooth. Prepare working area with dumpling wrappers (keep covered until use), a small bowl of water, pork mixture, and a clean plate for placing of wrapped dumplings.  For each jiaozi, take one dumpling skin and place one scant tablespoon  in middle.  Keeping your fingers dry as possible wrap the jiaozi, (see our video above!)  Once wrapped you can eat right away by cooking in boiling water for 9 minutes.   Any jiaozi you don't eat right away should be immediately frozen.  What we do is line a shelf in the freezer with ceramic wrap and then place the jiaozi on top.  Once completely frozen place into zip lock bags.  These should keep about a month in the freezer, if they last that long.  To cook frozen jiaozi, boil for 10 minutes, stirring in the beginning to prevent sticking to the bottom of the pot.   Either cooked from frozen or fresh, scoop out with strainer and serve hot with small dipping plates with either soy sauce or vinegar or a combination of them both.  Hope you like our Chinese Jiaozi Recipe! Tip: For napa cabbage pork potstickers, check out our Potsticker Pork Dumplings 鍋貼 post!
Tip: For further photo instructions on dumpling wrapping, see our post on How to Fold a Chinese Dumpling!

More Porkish Delights at The Hong Kong Cookery:

Chinese Steamed Pork Patty with Dried Anchovies 小銀魚蒸肉餅

Chinese Baked Pork Chop Rice 焗豬扒飯

Lion's Head Meatball 紅燒獅子頭

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