Quail Egg Siu Mai Dim Sum Dumpling 鵪鶉蛋燒賣

We continue with our Dim Sum series today with this classic Quail Egg Siu Mai dumpling 鵪鶉蛋燒賣.  It’s seldom offered in dim sum restaurants nowadays, not sure why cuz these are the most delightful and delicious little dumplings.  

The Quail Egg Siu Mai features the same fragrantly savoury pork and shrimp filling of its much better known cousin, the iconic Siu Mai 燒賣 dumpling, but it has the added lovely surprise of a perfectly cooked little egg wrapped inside.  I still remember my wonder and delight the first time I ate one of these, it was so perfect, the combination of the smooth slippery egg and the luscious juicy meat!

Vegetable & Mushroom Dumpling 蔬菜蘑菇餃

Hope that all our dear readers have had a most auspicious Chinese New Year!  We've been pretty quiet, just resting after the fierce study schedule we've been on to support my little girl's long and hard preparation for mid year exams.  It's crazy that the schools in HK have so many exams!  😵‍💫

So better late than never, here's our vegetarian offering for the Chinese New Year: a simple but really yummy vegetable dumpling!  It's a tradition to eat vegetarian on the first day of the new year to cleanse the body and spirit as well as to cleanse out the energy of the old year.

We like vegetable dumplings but have found that it's hard to find a really good one.  Recently, however, we tried a mushroom and vegetable dumpling at one of our local dumpling shops that was simple and yet so memorable and tasty.  I kept wanting to go back for more.  This is our version of that same yummilicious Vegetable and Mushroom Dumpling 蔬菜蘑菇餃.

Sui Mai - Chinese Steamed Dumpling 燒賣

We're getting serious about dim sum 點心!  What is dim sum?  It's the Cantonese version of tapas, small servings of savoury or sweet bite-sized delicacies, enjoyed with cups of fragrant tea during the ritual of morning tea, known as 'yum cha 飲茶'.

The sui mai 燒賣 is one of the most iconic of these Chinese dim sum treats.  It's certainly one of the most visually distinctive with its yellow skin and orange sprinkles on top.  Also a crowd favorite, so popular in fact that it has popped out of the dim sum restaurants and into a new life as a street food.  It's widely available at corner stores and convenience stores.  Sui mai has become the snack du jour!

These street level sui mai are quite delicious of course but they are very simplified forms of the original sui mai dim sum.  Today we’re going to make the traditional sui mai 燒賣 as served in the dim sum teahouses:  savory juicy morsels of pork and shrimp wrapped in a delicate skin and topped with that classic bit of orange roe.

How to Wrap a Wonton 餛飩包法

Today I'm going to show you how my dearest Grandma 奶奶 taught me to wrap a wonton.  On wonton making day my 奶奶 would always round up all us kids to help her.  First we would make homemade wonton wrappers.

The nifty pasta maker (I bought one recently and it's still unchanged after all this time!) would be clamped firmly to our dining table.  Us kids would fight for the chance to turn the crank on the pasta maker and watch the dough roll through again and again until at last it magically rolled out in thin shiny supple sheets.  Grams 奶奶 would then cut the dough sheets into squares with her big chopper knife and then she would have our extra (and small) hands to help wrap up plump snowy row after row of wontons.  It's easy once you done it once or twice.

There are other methods to wrap wonton but they all revolve around the most important rule of wonton wrapping: wrap it up snug and tight so that the wonton doesn't fall apart during boiling!  For myself, the wrapping I always use is the same one dearest grandma taught me all those years ago.

How to Wrap Jau Gok Peanut Puff Dumplings 炸油角包法

We just finished posting on how to make those delightful Chinese New Year's sweet treats, the Jau Gok Peanut Puff Dumpling, or 炸油角.  This little dumpling is really easy to make and easy to wrap as well if you use a dumpling press of some sort.  But...if you want to go all traditional and hard core and wrap by hand, the wrapping is a bit more tricky, so we decided to do a quick post on How to Wrap Jau Gok Peanut Puff Dumplings 炸油角 by hand.

Jau Gok Peanut Puff Dumpling 炸油角 / 炸角仔

This post is inspired by the stories that have come in from our dear readers that spoke of their fond memories of the making and eating of the traditional Chinese New Year Treat, Jau Gok Peanut Puff Dumpling, 油角 or 角仔, also known as Tim Gok or Gok Jai.  This sweet treat is especially made by grandmas and grandpas, mothers and fathers for the Chinese New Year festivities as snacks to munch on and to share with the many Chinese New Year guests expected.  

Another good reason to make and serve these crunchy munchies is that the distinctive shape of the Jau Gok is evocative of the gold ingots that the Chinese used for centuries as money.  So you could make and eat piles of golden ingots, what better way to start off the Year of the Monkey!?  

Chinese Boiled Jiaozi Dumpling 白菜豬肉餃子

These little Chinese Boiled Jiaozi dumplings 白菜豬肉餃子 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.  

I finally got the golden stamp of approval with this last batch when my little girl said that these were the best Chinese Boiled Jiaozi Dumpling ever!

Black Sesame Tang Yuan 黑芝麻湯圓

Tong Yuans are sexy.  If you've ever had a Tong Yuan you'll have to agree with me.  These Chinese sweet rice dumplings are smooth lusciously unctuous round balls of delightfully ricey gooeyness hiding a center of sublime sweetly fragrant filling just waiting to ooze out into your waiting mouth.

Now that I've totally grossed you out (and captured your attention!)  let me state that I stand by all that I have just written.  For it is all true, Tong Yuans, or 湯圓, are one of very few truly sexy chinese foods.  The excitement of the mysterious center filling, the senses awakened by the richness of the filling contrasting the simplicity of the rice dough, the delightfully perfect round fullness,  the absolute pleasure of the act of eating a tender, tasty, sexy Tong Yuan...

How to Fold a Chinese Dumpling 鍋貼包法

Published: 2013-10-06

While in the midst of writing my Chinese Potsticker Pork Dumpling 鍋貼 recipe, it occurred to me (and my mom reminded me) that some folks may not know how to fold the chinese dumpling.  There are many ways actually, some more complicated and some more simple.  

I will just show you the way that I usually make my chinese potsticker pork dumplings.  It looks hard at first but once you get the hang of it it's quite simple and, importantly, quite beautiful to look at and eat.