Asian Dumpling Tips

Asian Dumplings among Top 100 Cookbooks of Past 25 Years!

It’s been kind of an amazing year full of fantastic developments in my food writing career. Along with the Asian Tofu book release, both of my earlier works were selected by Cooking Light for their Top 100 Cookbooks of the Last 25 Years awards. (The awards are in celebration of the magazine’s 25th anniversary.) Each month, the editors thematically reveal their picks.

The March issue has the fourth installment of the series, and the editors chose seven works for the Asian cookbook category. I was blown away to see the above photo with Asian Dumplings and Into the Vietnamese Kitchen in the stack along with Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Madhur Jaffrey’s At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, Hiroko Shimbo’s The Japanese Kitchen, and Eileen Yin Fei Lo’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. Not only do I respect these authors (I have used their works for years) but I am also lucky to count most of them as friends. Wow.

Read more about the awards on Viet World Kitchen. Thanks for your dumpling interest!

Asian Market Shopper -- just released!

Finding and selecting Asian ingredients can be a test of endurance. I’ve had readers, friends, chefs, and little Asian ladies tell me how confusing Asian markets and ingredients can be. My conversations with cooks and shoppers seeded the Asian Market Shopper (AMS) app, a nifty new multimedia resource that helps you understand, navigate, and use Asian ingredients.

I’ve been working with San Francisco-based Chronicle Books to develop this app for about a year. It’s been a lot of fun and a real learning experience, combined with a few beads of sweat and drops of tears. Finally, it’s here!

Chronicle Books is launching the AMS this week. In this initial rollout, the app is for Apple products -– iPhone, iTouch, iPads. The Android version will come later.

I’m extremely delighted to have this information in a mobile format. Who can remember the characters for wheat starch, good soy sauce brands, or how to find quality dried mushroom? Or what their foreign names are? The AMS is a shopping buddy for you at the market. As a handy problem solver, it helps you to explore and understand Asian ingredients for your cooking needs.

For more details, take a read of this post on the Asian Market Shopper app on Viet World Kitchen!

Does Crab Rangoon Deserve to be an Asian Dumpling Classic?

You may have had these creamy filled wonton “puffs” at Chinese restaurants and didn’t know exactly what you were eating.  Called Crab Rangoon, the wontons are an American classic, an ersatz food invented at Trader Vic’s, the uber San Francisco Bay Area Polynesian-themed restaurant; Trader Vic’s was among the leaders of the tiki-bar/restaurant movement that’s making a comeback today. Crab Rangoon was supposedly based on a Burmese recipe but there’s no proof of that. (Rangoon is also known as Yangon, the former capital of Burma, which is now called Myanmar.)

I’ve not seen a fried dumpling filled with cream cheese in Southeast Asia. Have you?

Crab Rangoon was served in America beginning in perhaps the early 1950s, and since then, it has worked its way onto many Chinese-American restaurant menus as an appetizer item. My Asian friends who grew up in Middle America remember making and eating lots of crab Rangoon. Hsiao-Ching Chou, the former editor of the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s food section, once mentioned the countless crab Rangoons that she prepared at her family’s restaurant in the Midwest. A few weeks ago, I met Monica, a Chinese-American financier who grew up in Wichita, Kansas. When it came to ordering off the Chinese takeout menu for dinner, she swooned at the mention of “fried cream cheese puffs.”

“Oh yum, crab Rangoon,” she said wistfully, dropping all pretensions of being a sophisticated Manhattanite. “I lovvve them.”

When I got home, I looked through my cookbook collection and discovered that I happened to have a copy of the 1968 Trader Vic’s Pacific Island Cookbook by owner Vic Bergeron.  The fast-paced work is filled with recipes from exotic locales, including many in Asia in addition to wild Mexico, Texas, and bohemian San Francisco where Bergeron built his burgeoning empire. Nowadays, such a book would be politically incorrect because it mashes cultures and cuisines up.  Indian recipes are stuck in the Southeast Asia chapter, for example. But the Trader Vic’s cookbook served its purpose to introduce post-war America to the ingredients, flavors, and cooking techniques of ethnic—kind of – cuisines. It was a different era.

Below is a photo of the actual recipe from the Trader Vic's cookbook. Read it and see how it reflects the 1960s:

Over fifty years later, the popularity of crab Rangoon in America has not waned. Whenever my parents go to the Indian gambling casinos, they eat at Asian buffets and guess what is among the selection? When I met Cady, a non-Asian 15 year old, we talked dumplings as they were among her favorite foods. When I mentioned the Asian Dumplings cookbook, she said, “Do you have crab Rangoon in there?”

“No I don’t. They’re not part of the classic Asian repertoire of dumplings,” I responded. But months later, after considering my various friends acquaintances who  have experienced crab Rangoon in positive and negative ways, maybe crab Rangoon deserves entry into pantheon of Asian dumplings. 

What are your experiences and thoughts about crab Rangoon? Thumbs up or down? Why?

Related link: Crab Rangoon Recipe

Chinese Daikon Radish Cakes Recipe (Luo Bo Gao)

Thanks to Wai Chu’s recipe in The Dumpling cookbook, I’ve now gotten my fix of daikon radish cakes. If you’re unfamiliar with luóbo gāo (lok bok gow in Cantonese,  蘿蔔糕) they’re a mainstay on Cantonese dim sum menus. Recall the crisp seared pieces of slightly soft whitish cakes that look like a deck of playing cards but don’t taste like them whatsoever. That’s what these are. The ones at dim sum rarely are cooked as crisp as I like them. The crispier they’re fried, the better the contrast between the exterior and interior.

Whenever I make daikon radish cakes at home, I’m guaranteed of a nice supply of the cake to fry up whenever I please. The cake, which is first steamed and then fried, keeps in the fridge for about a week. Once you’ve made daikon radish cakes yourself, you’ll also look at the ones at dim sum houses with new eyes! I can eat luóbo gāo (“lu-oh bu-oh gow”) all year long, but Wai and his co-author Connie Lovatt slotted it in October in The Dumpling cookbook, which I reviewed last week. I don’t know if that’s why I was jonesing for the cakes but now I have them! They’re also a favorite during Chinese New Year time so I’ll be making the again come February when Lunar New Year falls on Valentine's Day.

Book Review: The Dumpling – A Seasonal Guide

When I was in New York last week, I had the great pleasure to meet and work with Wai Hon Chu, the co-author of The Dumpling (William Morrow, 2009). I’d heard about Wai’s book last year and was eager to find out what his international coverage of dumplings would be like. I’m always looking for good resources to add to my library and culinary understanding. Turns out that Wai often teaches classes and assists at the Bowery Whole Foods Culinary Center in New York – where I taught last Saturday, October 31. So in between prepping and conducting the class, we geeked out on dumplings, discussing technique, ingredients and the writing process.

Wai and his writing partner, Connie Lovatt, worked many years on this collection that spans the globe to capture the world of dumplings. It was a difficult task as they had to come up with cohesive definition of dumpling. For my Asian Dumplings cookbook, I spent a fair time researching and defining Asia and Asian dumplings, but how do you unify Alsatian matzo balls and Nigerian moyin moyin with Japanese mochi, Korean mandu, and Tibetan momos? Wai flipped his book over and pointed to the back of the jacket to this definition:

Almost Meatless Pork and Vegetable Pot Stickers Recipe

Asian dumplings are generally not meaty affairs. Even when a dumpling is filled with pork and Chinese/garlic chives (a classic northern Chinese approach), the quantity of pork used is stretched over a lot of dumplings. Eating eight of such kinds of jiaozi dumplings would never be like eating a steak! Because of limited resources and large populations, the Asian diet is one built on consuming little meat. There just isn’t much to go around. Without doubt, things are different nowadays in urban centers in Asia and in countries such as the United States where we have a relatively plentiful supply of food. In well-off countries like America, there’s a growing movement to cut back on meat consumption for health and ecological reasons. In the long run, it’s better for our bodies and planet if we consume less meat.

But just because you’re trying to cut back on eating meat, it doesn’t mean that you have to suffer through eating bland food. These pot stickers filled with a savory vegetable-and-bit-of-meat filling prove just that. The recipe comes from Almost Meatless, a terrific new cookbook by Tara Desmond and Joy Manning. Tara and Joy held a virtual potluck party today and as a guest, I brought these dumplings, prepared from recipe in their cookbook. They named their preparation “Pork Pot stickers” but it’s the vegetable combination that steals the show. The dumplings are scrumptious and I have to admit that there wasn't much left before I 'officially' go to the potluck by publishing this post! To graze on all the contributions, visit their sites: Crumbsonmykeyboard.com and Whatiweightoday.com