Asian Dumpling Tips

Cold Udon Noodles (Zaru Udon)

An Asian Dumplings reader emailed last week asking what to serve with her dumplings. The first thing I thought of were noodles! Since you're becomingwell-versed in Asian doughy foods, how about making your own homemade udon noodles? They're fabulous and easy, requiring only 3 ingredients: flour, salt and water.

Boil them up, add a cool sauce and some garnishes and you have a great accompaniment to the pork and shrimp gyozas on page 41. Or, any of the other poached, fried and steamed dumpling from chapter 1 of Asian Dumplings.

Should you want to gild the lily, make Japanese pork belly buns and offer them as a prelude to the noodles.

I posted the cold udon noodle recipe on Vietworldkitchen.com.

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.

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.