Asian Dumpling Tips: Chinese recipes

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).

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.

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!

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.