Asian Dumpling Tips

Are Gluten Free Chinese Steamed Bao Possible?

Ever since I succeeded in making decent tasting gluten free pot stickers, I’ve been curious about making gluten free bao (Chinese steamed buns). I’d read about a Filipino technique of making their siopao from rice flour, but the recipes posted online were not well received. But if the Filipino rice flour bao did work, the dough would provide an answer for cooks obsessed with conquering super white steamed bao. My inquiring mind wanted to know.

I perused the ingredient labels of gluten free bread at my local health food store and Whole Foods, and noticed that rice flour was often one of the main ingredients. That was a plus. Then I reread the Bob’s Red Mill information on their website and the label for their all-purpose baking flour. The company said that you can use the flour blend of garbanzo bean flour, potato starch, tapioca starch, white sorghum flour, and fava bean flour – along with some xantham gum for good slimy measure to replicate the texture of wheat flour gluten. Another plus. The commercial gluten free breads I’d studied also contained xantham gum (a natural carbohydrate derived from bacteria). Seemed like a theme here.

Lumpia Tips from a Pro -- Washington Post Article

Filipino chefs are cooking up a storm in the nation's capitol, including Cristeta Comerford, who is also the first female chef at the White house! Today, I learned about Feli Orinion. the executive housekeeper at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, an esteemed international law firm with offices in Washington, D.C. Chef Orinion can roll 200 to 300 lumpia at a time, according to Bonnie Benwick's story in the Washington Post Food section.  Shazam -- that's a lot of rolling. The post included a how-to video on rolling lumpia, a must-have at practically everyFilipino event I've been invited to! 

Also included in Benwick's piece was Marvin Gapultos, the man behind the Burnt Lumpia blog. Marvin was one of the first people to try out recipes from Asian Dumplings, making Shanghai lumpia skins from scratch to make lumpia. He detailed the process and his experience on Burnt Lumpia. And now, he got to tell a bit of his experience to a print reporter Benwick! Read Washington Cooks: Feli Orinion and her Philippine Specialties for lumpia techniques, tips, and Marvin's insights.

T o see homemade lumpia by Marvin and others, check out the Asian Dumplings Flickr pool.

How to Make Steamed Chinese Bao White?

As absurd as that headline may sound to you, it’s a question many home cooks ask. What is the Chinese secret to getting their buns so snowy white? It’s like how is Wonder Bread produced? In Asia, there’s the notion – just like there used to be in much of the developed western world – that white colored food reflects modern progress, purity, and civility. (If you want more on this, read Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad and note what she says about the use of white sauce on page 91.) I have done a fair number of experiments, as a previous post on The Trick to Making Bao described, but I’d not gotten down to the nitty gritty. Here they are:

Does adding vinegar to bao dough make it whiter? Sorry. No. I’ve read of that trick in a number of Chinese American recipes and have tried it out, but the vinegar doesn’t do anything to the color. I suspect that the deal with adding the vinegar has to do with developing gluten in the dough. In order to get white bao, many Chinese American cooks use low-gluten (low-protein), bleached cake flour for their bao dough; cake flour is milled from soft wheat and has 8 to 10% gluten/protein. To make up for the flour’s lack of gluten a touch of vinegar is added to result in more chewy dough.

Tips on How to Have a Dumpling Party (and not work hard)

It may not surprise you to know that I involve Asian dumplings in a fair amount of my entertaining and social activities. People come over to my house and they get dumplings. I go to parties or pot-luck dinners and I bring dumplings. Let’s just say that I like to share dumplings with others. Spreading the dumpling love also prevents me from getting the dumpling belly – a physical condition brought on by over consumption.

However, you can have your Asian dumplings and eat them too – that is, you don’t have to work too hard to keep the flow of dumplings going. They can be labor intensive but with a little strategic planning and a flexible approach, dumplings can be a no sweat effort and lots of fun. Here are a few tips to keep in your back pocket:

Gluten-Free Pot Stickers Recipe

A number of people have asked me about gluten-free Asian dumplings, including Shauna of the popular Glutenfreegirl blog. It’s funny because when I planned the Asian Dumplings recipe collection, I designed it so that about half of the recipes were based on dough rendered from readily available all-purpose flour from the supermarket. My goal was to inspire people to use regular supermarket ingredients and some old-fashioned Asian know-how to make authentic dumplings. There are many rice-based dumpling recipes in Asian Dumplings, but the gluten-free and celiac disease queries got me thinking about how I could make more of my recipes accessible to people who are allergic to wheat gluten.

I headed to my health food market last week and scanned the flour aisle. Then I went to Whole Foods and did the same. What I discovered was Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Baking Flour, made from a mixture of various kinds of bean flour and starches. With the addition of some xantham gum, a natural food additive that creates viscosity and flexibility in the dough, the dumpling wrappers functioned fine. 

Corn Husks and Banana Leaves Make Perfect Parcels

  

For lunch today, I enjoyed a seemingly unusual combination plate of Mexican chicken tamale and Indonesian lemper ayam (sticky rice and spicy chicken wrapped in banana leaf). I had both in the freezer and without much thought, I thawed and steamed them together. The tamale came from Mr. Cruz, a family friend who has up until the recent past gifted my parents his family’s homemade tamales for Christmas. The lemper ayam were leftover from recipe developing that I did a long time back; I actually can’t recall when I made them (maybe – gulp – a year ago) but can safely report that they refreshed to 85% of their original selves. It was a sensational lunch that delivered me to warmer climes, and I forgot, for a short while, that it was around 40 degrees outside.

If you’re a Saveur magazine reader, you may have read a short story in the December 2009 issue about Mr. Cruz’s tamales. They were what got me making Asian leaf-wrapped parcels for our Christmas gatherings. (Both are leaf-wrapped, have carby insides and spicy fillings, and cooked by steam. They’re members of the global dumpling family.) When Mr. Cruz learned that I was writing about him for Saveur, he was so touched that he made a special batch of tamales on Thanksgiving Day and brought them over to my parents’ house. Tamales are part of the Nochebuena (Chrismas Eve) tradition but since Mr. Cruz plans to spend that holiday in Mexico, he created a new tradition of tamales for El Dia de Gracias. Below is a photo of Mr. Cruz that my Dad snapped for the artist rendering in the magazine piece:

Before I left my folk’s house, I packed half a dozen of Mr. Cruz’s tamales in a plastic bag. Back in Santa Cruz, I tucked them away in the freezer for days like today, when it’s cold outside and I want to savor something steamy and satisfying. Dumplings surely fit the bill. So go crazy this holiday season and throw some Asian dumplings into your gifting routine. The recipients will love your generosity.

For more information:

• Try the sweet  Thai banana and sticky rice packets recipe (kao tom padt) from the article. Note that it’s different from the one in Asian Dumplings as the editors decided to omit the black beans.
• Enter Saveur’s Asian Dumplings Contest to win a FREE copy of my cookbook.
• Tips on how to use banana leaves

Chairman Mao’s Red-Cooked Pork Belly Recipe (Hong Shao Rou)

Since I had to buy a sizable piece of pork belly for the Japanese braised cha shu, I went hog wild and cooked pork belly Chinese style. If you noticed in the Japanese pork belly recipe, it’s simmered in a classic Chinese method called red cooking in which soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar are combined to flavor and color the meat a deep mahogany. The Japanese borrowed the Chinese simmering technique but for some reason called it cha shu, though they never roasted the pork. Go figure. Chinese red cooking produced remarkably rich meat that doesn’t taste fatty. You end up gobbling pork belly but don’t mind it. Actually you want to eat more of it. Chinese red-cooked pork belly is perfect for slicing and stuffing into steamed rolls, just like its Japanese counterpart. Or, just have it with rice for a sumptuous meal.

When I set out to prepare red-cooked pork belly, I looked in a number of my favorite Chinese cookbooks and settled upon Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe in Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, which focuses on Hunan cooking. Fuchsia relates how red-cooked pork in Hunan is practically unseparable from Chairman Mao Zedong, who loved it, ate lots of it, and requested it from his personal chefs in Beijing. The folks from Shaoshan village where Mao was from even declared red-cooked pork to be a health food that also kept your mind sharp. I suppose that in times of hunger, which China had plenty of in its past, a chunk of well flavored fatty pork would be both luxurious and nutritious.