Ting Momo: Tibetan Cloud-Shaped Bread Buns

It took me a few tries to get these right and they're absolutely worth it.  The first time I made the dough too wet and held it overnight, ending up with shapeless blobs.  The second time I forgot to dip them in the turmeric sauce before steaming, and they were good, but not as good as the third time when I got them right.

The dough is a simple mix of water, sugar, yeast, whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour and baking powder.  No fat or salt.  After the bulk rise, I cut the dough into strips and bundled them, four at a time, into little knots.  They don't have to be perfect and it's okay if they break in places - just reshape them and they'll be fine.  I dunked each one in a glaze of olive oil, turmeric and salt.  They don't need a second rise, but it doesn't hurt to give them a short rest while the water comes to a boil.  Pop them in the steamer for fifteen minutes.  That's it.

The turmeric glaze seeped into all of the little nooks in these delicious clouds, providing unexpected bursts of flavor in an otherwise bland bun.

Dampfnudeln: Milk-Steamed Buns with Prune Sauce

So this is a new vehicle for butter I hadn't heard of.  First off I have never seen a bread recipe with so little water.  For two cups of flour (9 oz) the recipe called for just a quarter-cup of water and the rest of the liquid came from eggs and butter.  And if that wasn't enough, the buns are cooked in a bath of milk and more butter.  Still not enough?  Okay, there's a pat of butter in the sauce.

If you like butter, these are awesome.  They're soft, rich, a little sweet, and a little puddinglike around the edges.  They expanded so much while steaming that I had to improvise a new lid for my skillet - an inverted Pyrex bowl.  I think the recipe called for too much milk for the steam-bath because I had to pour some off at the end; it was supposed to all evaporate.  Maybe my skillet had a smaller surface area than the one the authors used because I also had trouble fitting all of the dumplings in.  Since I used two cups of milk this time, next time I'd start with just one and add more liquid if it cooked off too quickly.

Speaking of which, the recipe said not to let the milk boil, but my stove just can't maintain a low enough temperature for that.  I don't think the dumplings minded too much.  It might make sense to get a wok ring one of these days, but it's not like I do this all that often.

Since I already made the vanilla custard sauce to go with the chocolate steamed pudding, I made the prune sauce (also included with this recipe) this time.  Made from prunes simmered with water, cinnamon, orange juice and a little sugar, it had just the right amount of sweetness to complement these buttery dumplings.

Chestnut Gnocchi with Walnut Sauce

I'd never heard of chestnut flour until now.  It is, as the authors described it, bittersweet, and I think also responsible for turning the gnocchi sort of purple.

I started this recipe Wednesday or Thursday morning, peeling and pureeing boiled walnuts.  The peeling was the most cumbersome part of the recipe.  The walnut paste, mixed with garlic, parmesan and a simple bechamel, made a very rich sauce.  I accidentally added too much salt so I tempered it with a little sugar (not in the recipe).  I also dropped some on the floor more than once and the cats have been so interested in that corner of the kitchen today.

The dumpling dough was made from boiled russet potatoes mashed with chestnut flour, regular flour, water and salt, mooshed into little fingertip-sized lumps, then boiled in salted water for four minutes.  Mine might have been a bit soft because I accidentally added too much water.  Yes - the accidents were caused by me halving the recipe and occasionally forgetting.  I do that a lot.

I tried texturing the gnocchi with the tines of a fork, but they lost their shape while cooking.

Gnocchi are exactly the sort of thing I would never make on a voluntary basis, which is why I'm glad I forced myself to try every recipe in this book.  They were delicious.

Spoon-dropped semolina dumplings

These came out differently than I expected.  I didn't quite end up with distinct dumplings so much as a fluffy indistinguishable mass.  The recipe said they would sink down when I dropped the dough by spoonfuls into the boiling water, but they just bobbed there like little sponges, falling apart like undercooked pancakes whenever I tried to flip them.  The dough is made with milk, butter, semolina, salt, and egg yolks, folded together with softly-beaten egg whites.  I think I might have beaten the egg whites too long because the dough was just too fluffy.

These ended up more like spoon bread, I think.  The dominant flavor was definitely butter, and you won't hear me complain about that.

Nuo Mi Juan: Steamed Bread with Fried Rice: There are Oversized Maggots in my Steamer

I have no idea how these were supposed to look because I'd never heard of them and apparently neither has Google.  I'm more accustomed to having this kind of dough in bun form, but it was an adventure to make into loaves as well.

The dough itself is soft, sweet and shiny after steaming.  The filling is sticky rice fried with seasoned pork, dried shrimp, scallions and soy sauce.

This recipe sent me outside of my normal food zone to find the dried shrimp.  I hadn't actually been to an Asian market around Providence yet, which is odd because I love them so.  I guess that's an indication of how boring my cooking has gotten over the past year and a half.  I went to Asiana in East Providence over my lunch break; it has a substantial selection for such a small building but is a little pricey.

Dried shrimp is one of those ingredients that seems like it's going to be disgusting by itself - like anchovies or fish sauce - but makes anything around it taste better.  If I looked for it I could detect a fishy flavor.  

I did not attempt to find la chang, the traditional Chinese sausage, mainly because I wanted to use naturally-raised meat without preservatives.  I made a substitute with 1.5 lb ground pork, 28g sugar, 12g soy sauce, 10g rice wine, 1/4 tsp cinnamon and 20 drops of liquid smoke.  I'm sure the texture wasn't anywhere near authentic, and I don't even know what it was supposed to taste like, but Stephen loved it.

And yes, they really do look like adorable oversized maggots.  Only delicious.

Kluski Slaskie: Polish Potato Dumplings with Mushroom Sauce

This recipe is more about the mushroom sauce than the dumplings.  The sauce is made with dried porcini mushrooms, fresh bellas, onion, butter, salt and pepper.  The dumplings are made from boiled russet potatoes mixed with flour, salt and beaten egg.

The whole thing took two hours from start to finish.  I could have made the sauce in advance to save time at dinner.  I learned that dried porcini mushrooms, while soaking, smell exactly like dog food.  I was so worried the sauce would end up tasting like dog food.  Fortunately that smell cooked out after I added the butter and onions, leaving behind a rich delicious sauce. 

As I learned with the kroppkakor, it's very important to use russet potatoes in the dough.  They were nice and starchy and the dough was perfectly manageable after I added the minimum amount of flour.  I probably could have used even less.

This recipe is very simple, just has three time-consuming steps: rehydrating the mushrooms, simmering the sauce and boiling the potatoes.  They're very cute but a little heavy for our taste.

Kroppkakor: The Dumplings that are as Fun to Say as they are to Eat

But not so much fun to make the first time around, as it turned out.  

I started making the dough the night before.  Little did I know that starchy old russet potatoes are the key to the texture of the dough and I - thinking a potato is a potato when it comes down to it - used reds.  So I cooked and mashed half and grated the other half in the food processor, squeezing out the extra liquid.  After I mixed in the right amount of flour, and then twice the amount of flour, I had a bowl of sticky mush.  And then, since the dough was made with half raw potatoes, I ended up with a bowl of horrifyingly gray sticky mush the next day when I went to assemble the dumplings.

The filling was easy and delicious - just minced ham, onions and allspice browned in butter.

The recipe says to roll the dough into a 12-inch log and then slice it into eight pieces.  Wasn't happening.  I sort of shaped it into a gloppy slug on a heavily floured board, and with the help of lots more flour squished the filling into the middles of eight limp blobs.  The dough was so soft I was certain the dumplings would disintegrate as soon as I dropped them in the boiling water, but they actually kept their shape.  

The second hardest part about the recipe was finding lingonberry jam for serving.  I know Ikea sells it by the bucketful but didn't feel like driving 45 minutes.  The third place I looked - the big Whole Foods on North Main in Providence - does carry it.  It reminds me of cranberry sauce but without the bitter edge.  It makes for a delicious combination of savory and sweet.

A traditional English pudding

Pudding is one of those etymological oddities that means something very different in the UK and the US.  On this side of the pond it's sort of a sweet goop that usually comes from a boxed mix or a plastic cup. In the United Kingdom it can mean anything from a savory sausage to a heavy spiced cake splashed with brandy and set on fire.

This recipe uses a thick breadcrumb-based batter (so it's a bit like bread pudding) that gets steamed in a bowl for two hours.  The breadcrumbs are mixed with flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk, butter and Ghirardelli 60% dark chocolate chips.  Next time I might add a little vanilla and cinnamon.

I baked a loaf of whole wheat bread on Sunday, then ground it into breadcrumbs on Wednesday night by pushing it through the grating wheel on the food processor.  After making the breadcrumbs, the rest of the recipe was a piece of cake (or pudding?)!

The most fun part was assembling the pudding basin setup.  I scooped the batter into a buttered quart-size glass bowl and put a circle of parchment on top.  Then I covered that with a square of damp cloth and tied it securely under the lip of the bowl.  I picked up the hanging corners of the cloth and tied them over the top so that my glass batter bowl now had an adorable little handle.  The handle is for lifting the bowl into and out of the boiling water.

The recipe says to steam the pudding for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours - I left it in for two hours.  It was rather light, tasty and a little dry.  Enter the vanilla custard sauce!  I nicked the sauce recipe from a different dumpling recipe in this chapter (Milk-Steamed Buns with Vanilla Custard Sauce - stay tuned) it complements the chocolate pudding terrifically.  The sauce in the picture is caramel-colored because it is made with Rapadura instead of refined sugar.  Rapadura has a lovely caramel flavor too.

I wonder how this would turn out if I borrowed a bread pudding technique and let the batter sit overnight to let the dry bread absorb more moisture.  In that case I think I'd increase the milk.  Cheers!

Jiao Zi - Potstickers with Chicken and Mushrooms

The last couple of nights I made these chicken potstickers for dinner.  I decided to take on the last (most difficult) recipe of February because (a) I had chicken (b) it's the New Year holiday and (c) I wanted to test my limits.

Potstickers are indeed tricky.  The longest step of the process was actually mincing the chicken.  We have a great new vendor at the farmers’ market who sells fresh chicken parts so I don't have to use the whole bird at once.  The rest of the filling was a breeze.  I used canned water chestnuts and discovered that while I don’t really care for their metally flavor, the empty can was just the right size to cut out the dumpling rounds.  The recipe calls for what seemed to be an alarming amount of sesame oil (1 Tb) but it didn’t overwhelm the other ingredients.  It really complemented the earthiness of the dried shiitakes.  Yum.

The dough was the real challenge.  Most recipes for potstickers involve going to the store and buying pre-made dumpling wrappers.  Making dumpling dough from scratch, however, is a careful balance between too-sticky and too-dry - capturing the oft-elusive ratio of water and flour that varies with ambient humidity, when the wheat was harvested, and the price of tea in China.

After developing the gluten to the point that the dough was still a bit sticky but pulled away from my hands, rolling it and assembling the dumplings was a breeze.  I'm not convinced that you really need a circular cookie cutter to make these.  They could be any shape as long as you crimp the edges together.  I assembled fourteen on Sunday, six on Monday morning and six for Monday dinner.  The first two batches went immediately into the freezer.  Having a stash of homemade dumplings in the freezer makes me feel rich indeed.

True to their name, these dumplings have the remarkable ability to stick to any cooking surface.  The first batch I fried in palm oil and then steamed.  Even though they stuck to the pan in places, it didn't destroy them.  It was messy and oily but delicious.  I tried cooking them in the steamer basket; they stuck to that too.  Then I steamed them on bits of waxed paper and they even stuck to the waxed paper!  In the future, I think I'll stick with the fry-start because I liked the texture best.

Year of the Dumpling

Today I begin a year-long quest for myself and this blog. It's all about pushing the limits of my kitchen comfort zone.  Lately my cooking has been so uninteresting I'd feel sheepish blogging about it, hence only six posts last year (five of which occurred before Valentine's Day). So to shake things up, this year I am going to cook through a cookbook.

I chose "The Dumpling: A Seasonal Guide" by Wai Hon Chu and Connie Lovatt.  I think that if I were to describe a perfect food, it would be a dumpling. The authors give a three-part definition of dumplings as carbohydrate-based, boiled or steamed, and not noodles.  Within this definition - which allows things like steamed puddings and tamales but not doughnuts or meatballs - there is a staggering variety of recipes and techniques from all around the world.

The book is conveniently organized by month.  Recipes are sorted into the seasons they fit best so, while I will be trekking out more to get things like banana leaves and taro, I'll still be able to source many of my ingredients from my favorite local farmers.

I know this is the sort of thing that I should have started on January 1, but really, that's such a hectic time of the year that it's no good for making any major decisions.  Fortunately we get to celebrate a second New Year right around the time things have settled down after the first one.

So to mark the inception of the new project, I made a recipe from the January section, actually.  They're steamed rice buns for the New Year, called "Fot Gao" in the book but if you want to look them up online, they're spelled "Fatt Koh." They're basically rice flour, sugar, water and leavening mixed together and steamed in muffin cups.  Some recipes also include coconut milk, yeast and bright food coloring, but this one used just baking powder and unrefined sugar.  The first time I made these, I used white rice ground in my grain mill, but those didn't "bloom" as much during steaming as the ones I made with purchased (Bob's Red Mill) white rice flour.  I also cut out 1/4 cup of sugar the second time around with no apparent detriment.

These are very chewy and gooey, and if you aren't likely to eat something like this out of hand, they're really good steamed on top of my morning oatmeal as it boils.