Asian Dumpling Tips

Pan-Seared Egg Tofu "Scallops" with Sweet Chile Sauce Recipe

I went to a venerable dim sum restaurant in Los Angeles during the Christmas holiday. The dumplings were great but what really got me was a dish of fried egg tofu in sweet chile sauce. It was among the dim sum menu's small plate options. I had to make it once I got home. 

Get information on egg tofu and grab the recipe at Viet World Kitchen.

Crunchy Shrimp Balls Recipe

Asian dumplings often have strange names when translated into English. The first time I ordered these deep-fried shrimp balls at a dim sum restaurant, they carried the honoric title of “chef’s special balls.” Yes, I just used the word balls twice in one sentence. My husband and I giggled as we ordered the crisp little wonders, coated with crunchy ribbons of noodles and full of shrimpy goodness. 

It was probably the name but I’ve didn’t make chef’s special balls at home until earlier this week. Bee Yinn Low’s new Easy Chinese Recipes cookbook inspired me to do so with a recipe for “crunchy shrimp balls” which gave them a little more gravitas and got me over my giggles. For more information on Bee and a crunchy shrimp balls recipe, visit Viet World Kitchen for this post: Crunchy Shrimp Balls Recipe (aka Chef's Special Balls)

Recipes for little fried treats on this site:

• Modern Indian Chile Pea Puffs
• Classic Crab Rangoon Wonton
• Shanghai Dumpling King's Egg Puffs

 

 

Oyster Spring Rolls Recipe

This is such an interesting spring roll filling -- plump oysters, ground pork, bean sprouts, and lots of scallion. I've been wanting to make it for months but didn't have time  until the long Memorial Day weekend. No shucking needed as jarred oysters worked just fine! The filling is encased in Shanghai spring roll skins, which allows the rolls to fry up into a delightful crisp.  You can dip  it in Thai Sweet Chile Sauce or Comeback Sauce (pictured above, a mixture of mayo, ketchup, and black pepper).

For the full low down and recipe, head to Viet World Kitchen for the Oyster Spring Roll recipe post.

Giant Fried Jiaozi Dumplings Recipe

Chinese cooks excel at making interesting and tasty vegan dumplings. Here is a recipe that I made today from Beyond the Great Wall by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Filled with cellophane noodles, napa cabbage, shiitake and wood ear mushroom and pressed tofu, the Hunanese dumplings are deep fried to a crisp. (I tried shallow-frying them too!) They are enormous for dumplings as each one is about 7 to 8 inches long. You can make them smaller, if you like.

For details on these supersized Chinese dumplings, see the post on Viet World Kitchen.

Egg Custard Buns Recipe (Lai Wong Bao)

Don't be put off by the name of this sweet bao. Egg custard buns are not a body sculpting issue that you need to work off, well...unless you eat too many of them! I made a batch today to help a young woman satisfy her boyfriend's love for these steam filled buns. Who would think that leavened steam bao could help lovers?

As with the chicken and shiitake mushroom bun filling, this one was developed to be used with the basic yeast dough in Asian Dumplings. Add it to your repertoire for an unusually fun sweet dumpling treat!

The recipe for the egg custard bun filling is on Viet World Kitchen.

 

Steamed Chicken and Shiitake Mushroom Bun Recipe

I love the richness of chicken thigh and the savory depth of shiitake mushroom. Why not combine the umami goodness of both ingredients into a dumpling filling and stuff it in a Chinese steamed bun? I’ve had several renditions of such a steamed chicken bun, and the one that Slanted Door in San Francisco presents is among the best. You can get some from their Out the Door takeout operation at the Ferry Building.

Charles Phan and his crew have crafted a tasty filling that combines Vietnamese and Chinese traditions. There are shallots, fish sauce and oyster sauce. After all, Charles is ethnically Chinese Vietnamese.  It is appropriate for his food to reflect that heritage.

Below is my rendition of Slanted Door’s steamed chicken bun filling. It’s really great if you hand-chop the chicken into pieces the size of large peas. For details, see “Hand Chopping and Mincing Meat” in Asian Dumplings, page 158. It’s not as difficult as you may think! You're only talking a generous 1/3 pound of meat.

Crab Rangoon Recipe

So crab Rangoon has little to do with Asia itself but many of you have an affinity for the crispy deep-fried wontons filled with cream cheese. Your comments here and on Facebook made me think that yeah – crab Rangoon deserves to be in the pantheon of Asian dumplings. The thing is that most of what we’ve tasted inside the Chinese restaurant version of these wontons is cream cheese. As a lactose-intolerant Asian, I’m disappointed by such a fried morsel. Where’s the crabbiness? There’s not even fake Krab!

The world is full of tasty dumplings to eat so I don’t like to waste time or calories on bad ones.  If there’s a carb overload to be had, let’s make it really worth it, especially when deep-frying is involved. So here’s my crab Rangoon recipe. If you contrast it to the original recipe in the Trader Vic’s Pacific Island Cookbook, you’ll notice that my crab Rangoon recipe contains more crab. Trader Vic’s opted for a 1:1 ratio of cream cheese to crab meat. Let’s not fool around. We’ve been missing the crab for too many decades. Get good crab meat – the kind you’d  use in crab salad or crab cakes.

Also, I’m a sucker for black pepper with crab so there’s a nice amount in there, and fresh scallion too. But to keep the mid-century flavor, I opted to use garlic powder. I was out of A-1 sauce and found a worthy – if not better—substitute in Japanese Tonkatsu sauce, which I had around from making the Japanese takoyaki dumplings (octopus balls). You could use a drop of Worcestershire or black vinegar too. 

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