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.

Potsticker Pork Dumplings 鍋貼

Yum, yum, yum, yum.  We love potstickers!  You can't eat just one of these little beauties and there's nothing quite like whipping up a couple dozen potstickers to keep in your freezer for, you know, those times when you're gripped with terrible tummy hungry grumbles!  

Would you believe that I can eat a whole dinner plateful of these pan fried potsticker pork dumplings in one go!  And when I was a skinny little chinese girl I could polish off two dinner platefuls!  (Seriously, I tell no lie:  I ate a lot then!)  

But, to be honest, to this day, well actually to yesterday, I have never been quite satisfied with my homemade potsticker pork dumplings.  Yes I know, it's a common dish, a chinese comfort dish even, and everyone and their Chinese mother can make them.  But before yesterday my potstickers have always been a little teensy bit disappointing to me. You know...not perfect, not eat and die from eating this yummy food kind of thing.  

So I experimented:  more fat, less fat, more ginger, less ginger, more mixing, less mixing... Ah! The little quibbles that make cooking at lifetime of fun and frustration.  

So anyways, finally, finally, I think that yesterday I made family cooking history and made a batch of very very yummy potsticker pork dumplings that disappeared faster than I could say "Perfect!"  At last!