pork and napa cabbage potstickers
As I mentioned before, winter break has given me a great opportunity to spend (even) more time than usual shopping for, thinking about, and making food. Weekday stuffed French toast was just the tip of the iceberg. After a long visit to Hong Kong Supermarket in Chinatown (long because: 1. I want to buy everything that looks remotely familiar, 2. there is a lot of negotiation with myself over how much I can really carry home on the subway, and 3. I can read only a few Chinese characters, so there is a lot of interesting logic that goes into figuring out “what is in this jar and is it what I think it is?”) I hauled home all kinds of Asian ingredients for things like homemade dashi, all kinds of noodle dishes (maybe this, this, and this?), recipes from the Momofuku cookbook, and homemade potstickers. By the way, there is also a jar of kimchi fermenting in a dark corner of my kitchen. We are fusing all kinds of cuisine together for the next couple weeks. Asian-inflected everything!
But back to the potstickers. The best ones have doughy and not-too-thin skin, in my opinion. To achieve this: you gotta make your own. With flour and water and rolling out each individual wrapper. Believe it or not I’ve come close to swearing off making my own wrappers after one exhausting attempt back in the summer of 2007. And even though I have all this time on my hands, I opted to stick to the packaged stuff and give myself a little more time to curl up on the couch with a book. As for the meat stuffed inside, I like the simple and reliable combination of pork and napa cabbage. Basic, satisfying, and omg did I really just eat 15 of these?
For the filling:
1/3 small head napa cabagge, finely chopped
1/2 pound ground pork
2 cloves garlic, minced
1-inch segment of ginger, peeled and minced
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon rice wine
a few pinches of white pepper
1 egg
Put napa cabbage in a bowl and sprinkle generously with salt. Let sit for about 30 minutes. Put salted cabbage in a clean dish towel, roll it up, and wring it out from both ends to squeeze all the water out. (Learned this tip from a Ming Tsai cookbook. Drawing liquid out of the vegetables prevents soggy filling that soaks right through the wrappers.)
Combine cabbage with remaining ingredients. Overwork the pork mixture (i.e. mix the shit out of it with clean hands) to the point where the meat soaks up all the egg and becomes more paste-y than granular or dripping with egg. This way, the filling holds together and you won’t have little meat crumbles falling in your dipping sauce when you double-dip.
To make potstickers (recipe above will give you somewhere between 25 and 35):
Put roughly 1 heaping teaspoon of pork mixture into a wrapper. You want the round kind (called dumpling wrappers or gyoza wrappers). Dip a finger in water and drag it over the inside edge of the dumpling wrapper, then pinch shut. You can make them pleated (like we did) or crimped or just sealed flat.
Heat oil in a large pan over medium-high heat. Add potstickers in one layer, with the sealed edges sticking up. Let them brown for a few minutes, then add about 1/2 cup of water to the pan. Tip from my mom: add a tiny bit of sesame oil to the water. Cover immediately to avoid messy and painful grease splatters, lower heat, and let steam until most of the water is gone. If the water disappears too quickly, add a bit more. Uncover and let the dumplings crisp up again. Serve with…
Dipping sauce: Combine soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, hot chili sauce (I like Yank Sing’s chili pepper sauce or that bright red chili-garlic sauce with seeds), and shredded ginger, to taste.
