27 Jul 2018

Jiu Cai Dumplings

So the first thing you might notice is that we’ve missed a week (or maybe not). You’re right! We were in Luxembourg, eating chocolate cake, an overpriced (and underwhelming) sushi buffet, and some pretty awesome traditional Lux food. (Shoutout to Six’s friend, ICMindTheCrap.)

For this week back in the good old Cambridge, though, we decided to revamp an old project : dumplings! We finally finished the dumplings from last time, but we missed the convenience of frozen dumplings, so we thought we should give at another go.

This time, we started truly from scratch, making our own dough and everything. We decided this method is strictly better than buying the skins, because 1. cost and 2. we didn’t have to wait for anything to defrost. The filling was different: we chose pork and chives (jiu cai, for those Chinese speakers).

We started the dough early on, since we found from experience that resting it helps it get nice and plushy (“like a baby’s bottom”). We (Six, mainly) kneaded it with all our might, and we let it rest while we shopped for the rest of the ingredients.

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Once we got back, we excitedly checked on the dough, which bounced back just like we wanted it to.

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We then split up the tasks: Six rolled out the dumpling skins while Fish made the filling. In reality, Six actually did stuff for the filling too while Fish was being strict about washing everything carefully.

First, we blended up some shrimp into a paste (Six insisted on this):

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The only difference between this and the chive box filling was that Fish managed to convince Six not to blend the dried shrimp in as well. Meanwhile, we had the egg cooking. which Six very much enjoyed mincing up:

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Lastly, Fish cut up the chives! And even took an artsy picture while doing it! (Except you can see the bits we cut off on the side… “Makes it more authentic” - Six)

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Finally, we mixed it all together (unclear if we got the ratios right, and we probably needed more chives) into a nice paste:

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All this time, Six had been alone, kneading away and chopping up little pieces of the dough. His method of handling the dough was weirdly reminiscent of that short before Incredibles 2 (HIGHLY recommended, by the way) with the bao baby.

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Six finished rolling out the dough balls (actually, more like a fourth of them), and we got to wrapping! (“That doesn’t deserve an exclamation point…” - Six)

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Some of the dumpling wrappers were a little too small, since Six was fixated on getting them nice and thin (which meant everything was thin, but some things were too thin, and some things could not be thinner, which meant they couldn’t be bigger). No worries though, the skin was nice and strechy, so it could actually take a lot before tearing.

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As we were making the dumplings, we got hungry (naturally), so we made a plate of fried dumplings (these were the ugly ones we knew would burst if we boiled them). Of course, that wasn’t enough, so we steamed some too. And, of course, we were still hungry, so we boiled some of the ones that were nice at the end, too. You can see the triplets below:

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All in all, success! And…more leftover dumplings.