Gong Xi Fa Cai! Have Some Potstickers
February 14th, 2010 | View Comments
If I had to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life, it would be jiaozi, preferably the pan-fried variety that Americans know as potstickers. Good thing that’s true, since now I have about five dozen of them in my house.
We used to have marathon dumpling-making sessions when I was little. My family didn’t so much have a tidy assembly line, but a gather-’round-the-table free-for-all, children and adults lunging for the pot of filling whenever we needed it, churning out little folded dumplings that we set on washed styrofoam meat trays and froze. My family always did the two-pleat dumpling, pictured above. It’s not as pretty as the traditional rippled edge, but it’s much more efficient.
Some friends came over yesterday to celebrate Chinese New Year with our own marathon dumpling-making session. Fifteen dollars and about ten man-hours later, we had over 150 dumplings. We used the Wall Street Journal recipe as a base, tweaking the ingredients to use what we had available and using frozen wrappers instead of rolling our own.*
Potstickers
Adapted from The Wall Street Journal
Makes 150-180 dumplings
3 packages frozen gyoza/potsticker/jiaozi wrappers, thawed
Filling
4.5 lbs ground pork
1/2 medium-size napa cabbage, shredded
1 tablespoon ginger, grated
2 teaspoons garlic, minced
1 bunch scallions, finely chopped
2 T. cilantro, finely chopped
1 egg
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon sesame oil
3 teaspoons Kosher salt (1 teaspoon for preparing the cabbage, 2 teaspoons for the filling)
1/2 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
Dipping sauce
Soy sauce
Rice vinegar
Sesame oil (for a slightly spicy sauce, use hot sesame oil)
Combine the shredded cabbage with 1 t. salt in a large strainer set over the sink. Let sit for 10 minutes to draw out the water. Press the cabbage against the side of the strainer with your hands or a large spatula to squeeze out the excess water.
Put all ingredients for the filling in a large bowl and mix until just combined. Do not over-mix.
Place a spoonful of the filling onto the center of the dumpling wrapper and fold like this:
If you do it right, you’ll wind up with a flat-bottomed pouch that will stand up on its own. If you’re new to dumpling-making, start by using 1-1.5 teaspoons of filling in the center until you get the hang of folding. Experienced dumpling-folders can get about 1 T. of filling in the center and still make a neat dumpling.
Before you cook, combine dipping sauce ingredients to taste. I usually use about 2 T. of soy sauce, 1 t. of rice vinegar, and maybe a quarter teaspoon of hot sesame oil. This will make enough sauce for about 20 dumplings.
To pan-fry the dumplings, heat some oil in a nonstick pan over medium-high heat. When the pan is hot, place as many dumplings in the pan as will fit, leaving a small amount of space between each. Make sure the dumplings are standing up. Fill the pan with water so that the bottom quarter-inch of the dumplings are sitting in water. Cover the pan and cook until the water boils off. Uncover and let cook until the bottoms of the dumplings turn brown and crispy. Remove the dumplings from the pan and serve with the dipping sauce.
*I remember my mom tried to make the potsticker wrappers from scratch exactly once, when I was a kid. It ended with someone going out to the store for the frozen kind. My mom’s kitchen skills far exceed mine, and I totally suck at making dough-based things, so I’ve never tried to make the wrappers from scratch.
Yvonne posted this on February 14th, 2010 @ 8:32pm in Chinese | Permalink to "Gong Xi Fa Cai! Have Some Potstickers"
Likes to cook, eat, grow herbs, and collect kitchen gear in Houston, TX. 
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Hehe, cool. I’ve sit around the table with family making these things too. Oh, my sister just told me a useful tip the other day. If you are going to freeze the uncooked dumplings / potstickers, you should freeze them on a tray of some sort first. Then you can put them in bags. If you just put them into bags before freezing them, they will all just stick together.
Oh, and forgot to say: Happy new year!