Asian Dumpling Tips

Shanghai Dumpling King’s Sugar Egg Puffs Recipe (Bai Tang Sha Weng)

These deep-fried puffed dumplings are one of the best things I’ve eaten in a long time. I tasted them on Saturday at Shanghai Dumpling King (3319 Balboa Street, between 34th and 35th) in the Outer Richmond  in San Francisco. My friend Linda and I went there for the Shanghai soup dumplings, which were stellar, but we came away with this ‘new’ discovery. Sugar egg puffs are an ethereal cross between a cream puff and doughnut. They are deep fried wonders and not greasy whatsoever.

The young waitress paraded the fried sugar egg puffs (misspelled on the menu as “suger egg puff” in the dessert section) around the small restaurant on a tray and we were instantly taken in. We didn’t want them with the savories, but as soon as we finished all the dumplings, Linda asked the waitress, “Can we get those things fresh and hot?” The waitress obliged and Linda nearly burnt her tongue as she bit into the crisp, steamy hot puff.

Korean Napa Cabbage Kimchi Recipe (Mak Kimchi)

One of my favorite vegetarian Asian dumplings is Korean kimchi mandu. I love them poached, pan-fried, steamed, and deep-fried. The punchy filling says, “I am Korean, not a knockoff of Chinese dumplings!” The key to making kimchi mandu well is to have aged,  very fragrant  (read: stinky) kimchi. The more mature the kimchi the better, my Korean friends say, because it gives mandu more gusto. Mandu filling tends to be fairly bland as it contains tofu and vegetables such as zucchini squash and bean sprouts. You need a little extra oomph for mandu, and good stinky kimchi is requisite.

Korean Pickled Jalapeno and Garlic Recipe

I love all the banchan sides served at the Korean table. In the realm of Korean dumplings (called mandu), banchan provide wonderful textural and flavor contrast to the soft chewy dough and savory filling. This simple pickle recipe embodies a Korean pickling method called jang-ajji in which the featured vegetable marinates in tangy sweet soy and vinegar. Traditionally, the raw vegetable steeps in the brine for weeks. I speed things up by bringing all the ingredients up to a boil and then turning the heat off. The crisp texture remains intact.

Korean cooks typically make either a chile pepper jang ajji or a garlic jang ajji. I like them both so I combined them into one. You can separate them if you’d like. The garlic mellows so it’s safe for date night!

Watermelon Radish and Cucumber Salad Recipe

I love radishes for their crisp texture and slight bite. Bring on Japanese daikon, Chinese luo buo, Korean moo, and one of my all-time favorites, the watermelon radish. It looks sad on the outside, mostly off white and often mottled, and resembles a turnip tinged with green at the shoulders and light pink at the root. But cut one open and the inner flesh is reddish and white, radiating toward the edge to become white and finishing as lime green. It’s a feast for your eyes. As for the flavor, watermelon radish has a marvelously sweet-bite, though it turns a bit bitter when growing conditions are hot. Watermelon radish is a Chinese heirloom variety that also goes by red meat radish, rose heart. In Mandarin, the radish is called shinrimei, which literally means “beauty in the heart.” (Note to Chinese speakers, the ‘shin’ is misspelled in English botanical terms, but it is really xin, meaning heart, as in dian xin/dim sum.)

Last week’s weather was cool so the watermelon radish that I picked up from Coke Farms at the farmer’s market were nicely sweet. Radishes are typically spring and winter crop but watermelon radishes can be cultivated year-round if the temperatures are moderate, like they are here in Santa Cruz.

First Amazon Review of Asian Dumplings

After a book is released, authors sit on pins and needles waiting for the reviews to come in.  I'm no different and this evening, I read the first review on Amazon.com. I was so moved -- okay bowled over -- by what Lucy Dashwood wrote:

I have no idea what made me buy this book as I had taken out several books on dumplings from the library last year and they were completely inadequate, confusing, uninspiring and poorly conceived. I couldn't even look inside this one to see what was in there, right? But, overcome with a desire for dumplings, I splurged.

The dumplings I have made from Andrea Nguyen's book have been frighteningly delicious. The information is clearly presented with good line drawings to show you how and lovely photos to show what you're supposed to end up with. The ingredient lists are all minimal and easily obtained. You will make no large investments in items you will use once. (Don't you hate that about some cookbooks?) There are so many to chose from, the only problem will be making up your mind which one tonight. The door to delectable dumplings is now open.

This is a wonderful book. Thank you, Ms Nguyen.

No, thank you, Ms. Dashwood. We've never met but I'm thrilled that you're making delectable dumplings at home!

Oh, how many stars did Lucy give the book?  5 stars

Bloggers Strut their Asian Dumplings Stuff

I’ve been immensely pleased with the feedback on Twitter and in the blogosphere from cooks who’ve test driven recipes from Asian Dumplings. Since the cookbook release on August 25, people have been diving in with gusto, trying out simple as well as advanced preparations.  Venture to the following food blogs to read up on their experience:

Burnt Lumpia: Marvin and his wife just had a baby but Marvin managed to carved out time to make Shanghai spring roll skins from scratch. He followed the recipe and video and then used the skins for deep-fried lumpia and turon.

Kitchen Musings: Veronica took on a graduate-student level challenge of making Shanghai soup dumplings (xiaolongbao) from scratch and succeeds wonderfully! Woo Hooo!

Rasa Malaysia: Bee Yinn Low jumped in with the Japanese gyoza recipe. As usual, her amazing photography does the dumpling justice.

I’m grinning ear to ear as I type this post. Thank you all!

Whether or not you're a blogger, do report back on your doughy efforts by posting comments on this site or uploading a photo to the Asian Dumplings page on Flickr. Say it loud and say it proud. 

Chilled Cucumber with Garlic Recipe

My friend Katie Sullivan Morford of Afghan Cooking Unveiled is a writer and mom to three beautiful girls. She recently asked me , "So if you’re planning on making a meal of Asian dumplings, what can you serve on the side?" A whole host of goodies was my response. This little cucumber salad is one that I frequently whip up. It’s crunchy, tangy, and has a garlicky bite that’s perfect alongside the chewy richness of dumplings such as pot stickers, poached water dumplings (jiaozi) and fried spring rolls. The cucumber provides nice textural contrast. Plus, it’s served cold so there’s a cooling effect as well.

I first ordered this dish as an accompaniment to Shanghai soup dumplings. The restaurant’s preparation was kind of crude in that they left the seeds in the cucumber and there was so much garlic that suffice it to say, I was glad that my husband and I had been together for decades! This isn’t quite a dish for first dates. At home, I researched the recipe in my library and came across a similar dish called “Smacked Cucumbers” in Fuschia Dunlop’s inspiring Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province. Her Hunan recipe called for whacking the cucumbers with the side of a heavy cleaver so as to open up the pores in the cucumbers and help them soak up the flavors. Interesting but not attractive is what I found out when I tried the technique. And the seeds were never removed in Dunlop’s recipe just like at the restaurant.

Weigh Your Options, Use a Kitchen Scale

Like many old-fashioned cooks, my mother has a personal approach to measuring her cooking ingredients. She scoops up flour with a particular ceramic rice bowl that she got free for buying above some dollar amount of groceries at the Asian market. A specific Chinese soup spoon is used for fish sauce and soy sauce. She reaches for a metal serving spoon to measure sugar and loves to use heaping spoonfuls of this and that. But ever since I was a kid, I remembered Mom keeping a scale in the kitchen too. In her written recipes, she often has weighted measurements in both kilos and pounds for meat and flour. I recently found out that she’s taken to weighing her reconstituted shiitake mushrooms too. “They come in many sizes and I want the food to be good every time,” she told me.

The lesson learned from growing up in my mother’s kitchen is that the scale never lies, and that it pays to be consistent in how you measure ingredients. Weighing ingredients may seem fussy to many home cooks but that’s what the professionals do. My friend Christophe Lillienfeld, a classically trained French pastry chef and cook since he was 14, loved to give me exact weighted measurements, such as 335 grams of flour, 45 grams of sugar, etc. Precision is important as you never know how you may weigh something from day to day.