Dumpling Monday #1

[7 animals died for our dining pleasure. (Mince was used, so maybe more).]

Introduction
Me and my comrade Tony Jones love dim sum and boy! do we love dumplings. I have been particularly interested in making dumplings ever since seeing the film Dumplings by Fruit Chan. The atmosphere of the film really got under my skin and made me want to cook dumplings. In a similar way the novel In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami sent me wild for miso. People get chopped up Ryu's novel, and aborted babies are chopped into the youth-giving dumplings of Fruit's film. We're going for pork and prawn this time though:

Pork and Prawn Dumplings
i - With Chive and Garlic
ii - With Coriander, Ginger, Spring Onion and Garlic

We got the recipes off the back of the special Dumpling Flour we bought down China Town, otherwise our process was guess-work. If you know better than us, please pass on your tips!

We don't know, by the way, what is special about Dumpling Flour. We could've used ordinary flour which is cheaper, but given that we were in China Town it seemed like a reasonable idea to pick up the Dumpling Flour. The question is... can a man use Dumpling Flour for any other purpose than making dumplings? It's quite nice to have prescriptivist ingredients sometimes and we'll be sure this flour is never used outside the context of dumplings.

Pastry
- flour and water (with a grinding of salt mixed in the water for taste)

We used a ratio of 16:5 flour to water; mixing just a spoonful of the water at a time. Don't rush it, mix the dough until it is doughy.

We chucked flour down on a worktop and kneaded the dough. Newton's law suggests the dough kneads us as much as we knead the dough, which is nice to know. We stretched and pulled at it and finally rolled it into a sausage shape, wrapped it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge to settle.

Fillings
Pork and prawn mix : we used king prawns, decapitating them and cutting their prawn socks off as we went along. Also we removed prawn poo as we chopped them up. We assume it was poo, it was brown and something stunk, if it wasn't poo.. something was.

We made up two different bowls to create fillings:

i - We chopped some chives up in bawdy and rough manner. To this we pressed and added a clove of garlic.

ii - We took a knife to some coriander and monstered it. We added grated ginger and chopped spring onion. Finally we added a couple of pressed cloves of garlic.

We then mixed each with the pork and prawn, adding a splash of sesame oil as we squeezed the meat. We covered and put both fillings in the fridge with the pastry.

Who Put The Dump In Dumpling?
We rolled out small balls of pastry until as thin as we could handle with our clumsy hands. We inserted a dollop of our filling and sealed up the pastry around it - adopting the Cornish Pasty stylee. And we steamed our little dumplings for 10 minutes.

Sauce
Meanwhile we knocked up some sauce to use with the dumplings. We chopped a couple of spring onions and a handful of coriander. In a bowl, we poured soy sauce and added several teaspoons of chilli oil. You have sauce.

And we had Dumplings.

Conclusion

Excellent dumplings! Far better than we could imagine a first attempt coming out. Whilst it is true that the pastry was thicker than you expect in a Dim Sum restaurant, it is hard to imagine being able to roll it and handle it any thinner.

We will be returning to dumplings in the future, but for now WE put the DUMP in DUMPlings! Or maybe it was the prawns.