Viet World Kitchen

Asian Dumpling Tools: Tortilla Press Buying Tips

My cross-cultural cheat for making near-perfect dumpling skins is the Mexican tortilla press. I wasn't the first to think of that nifty trick. A number of Chinese-American cooks thought of it years ago. I just extended it to a bunch of different kinds of dumplings!

Yesterday, Laura from Boston emailed with a report on her first weekend of dumpling making. She also asked a good question:

Hi Andrea,

I would like to first tell you that my first attempt at a recipe out of your wonderful Asian Dumplings book was a huge success!  I made the first recipe in the book for the Pork and Napa cabbage dumplings, and my "dumpling otaku" family was very pleased with the taste and quality.  I used your how-to video about rolling out the wrappers, which I found to be very helpful.

My important question of the weekend concerns the tortilla press you use.  Do you recommend a particular one made of a particular material?  What size do you recommend, especially if I'd like to make tortillas one day?

My response to Laura's question:

I've used both plastic and metal presses and they've both been broken by food professional friends pressing a little too hard! Right now, I'm using a new aluminum press that I got for cheap at a Mexican grocery store. It's lighter than what you get at a fancy store which means you exert a nice amount of pressure without crushing the dough.

I've used both the plastic and metal for tortillas too and they have been perfecto! Just don't press too hard if the press seems flimsy. Wood ones are good but they're difficult to find nowadays.

As for size, a 6 1/2-in press works well for dumpling skins and corn tortillas.

So your decision depends on convenience. There are widely available plastic and metal tortilla presses. Metal overall performs better. Light aluminum allows you to vary the amount of pressure more -- say for wheat starch flour that requires light pressure. If you work more with the basic wheat flour dumpling dough, then find a heavy cast iron press.

Or, go for wood, should you find one. But know that it can be bulky.

And if you don't want a press, use a glass measuring cup or heavy sauce pan with no imprints on the bottom! Whatever you decide, the press kickstarts you on the road to making terrific dumplings!

Taiwanese Spicy Beef Noodle Soup Recipe (Niu Rou Mian)

Tomorrow my husband and I will be celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary. (I was a child bride. Ha! -- NOT.) We were discussing what we should do, where we could go out, what we had eaten on past anniversaries. We didn’t make any concrete plans but I started thinking about the meals we shared when we first started dating in 1989. Yes, we’re an old couple.

One of our favorite places was the Mandarin Deli in Chinatown, Los Angeles. It was a hole in the wall that my sisters introduced me to when they were attending USC down the way. I loved the Mandarin Deli’s giant pot stickers that burned my mouth with their hot juices (they’re mentioned in Asian Dumplings).

An order of dumplings was always paired with hot bowls of beef noodle soup (牛肉麵, niu rou mian). Its inky spicy broth, plump wheat noodles, and chunks of red-cooked beef were perfect with the dumplings. It was good in the cooler months as well as the hotter months. I ate it year round.

Since then, I’ve made various versions of the soup from recipes found in Irene Kuo’s classic, The Key to Chinese Cooking, and Fuschia Dunlop’s enlightening work on Sichuan cuisine, Land of Plenty.  I’ve also ordered plenty of beef noodle soup from Taiwanese joints, such as A&J Restaurant, which has outposts in Southern and Northern California.

Overall, I like the Taiwanese version of niu rou mian (literally beef meat noodles) better than other versions of the Chinese soup. The Taiwanese take usually has more complexity in the broth but I didn't know why until this past weekend.

Tasty MSG-free Frozen Asian Dumplings

I have tried so many commercially-made frozen Asian dumplings over the years and have been disappointed. Mushy flavorless fillings, unremarkable skins, and MSG are usually the culprits. But nevertheless, I always check the freezer cases at Asian markets for something new and interesting. Who knows, I may discover and learn something new.

Most recently, I bought a bag of frozen Asian dumplings made by WeiChuan, a company that produces Asian food products (frozen, canned, and dried) for sale in the United States. Their products are usually reliable. You may also know Weichuan from informative cookbooks such as Chinese Snacks, which I used as reference work when researching for Asian Dumplings. 

A few weeks ago, I noticed a new dumpling promotion at Lion Foods in San Jose. It was for WeiChuan’s new line of Asian dumplings called the “Shan Dong Dumpling Series.” The dumplings are MSG-free (hurray!) and made in the U.S.A. Both points were touted on the packaging, reflecting WeiChuan’s understanding of consumer trends and concerns. No one wants to eat Melamine-laden dumplings.

Instant Bao Experiment

I’ve made buns from many kinds of dough and one of the most interesting ones is refrigerated biscuit dough. My friend Victor Fong revealed that his mother used the poppin’ fresh dough all the time to make fluffy bao for the family. In a regional Chinese cookbook published decades ago, Calvin Lee mentioned instant bao dough as a modern Chinese-American secret to quick and easy bao.

I tried the dough out for plain steamed buns (the type you’d tuck a slice of pork belly in) and it worked. I was so impressed that I put a recipe for it in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen (see the Banh chapter). The commercial biscuit dough that was available when I wrote Asian Dumplings didn’t taste right because companies had changed their formulas. I did not suggest refrigerated biscuit dough as a ‘Lazy Day Tip’ for bao.

The other day I noticed that Trader Joe’s and Whole Food had refrigerated biscuit dough. I checked the ingredient listing and didn’t see too many chemically ingredients. I bought a canister of Trader Joe’s buttermilk biscuit dough to experiment with.

My goal was to stuff the dough pieces to make an instant filled bun. Could I do it? Yes. Did it taste good? Read on to find out:

Wok Stickers: Original Pot Sticker Experiment

My recent focus on stir-frying and woks got me thinking about how Chinese pot stickers may have first been cooked. As the dumpling legend goes, pot stickers date back to the Song Dynasty (960 – 1280 A.D.). They were initially regular shuǐjiǎo boiled dumplings cooked in a wok (guō) – the multipurpose Chinese cooking vessel. The chef cooking them forgot about his dumplings. After the water had boiled away, the dumplings stuck (tiē). He didn’t know what to do so he pried them from the wok and served them.

His guests loved the contrasts between rich filling, tender skin, and crusty bottom. Thus the pot sticker was born. The Mandarin name for pot sticker is guōtiē, which literally means wok sticker.

I was a brazen dumpling maker last week. After improvising a filling from leftover steak and bok choy, I prepared my basic dumpling dough and shaped a batch of dumplings. Instead of pan-frying them in a nonstick skillet as usual, I decided to use the wok. It was sitting out from all the stir-frying I’d been doing from Grace Young’s great new book.

Wok Sticker Trials
The experiment helped me understand why pot stickers are cooked they way they are today. The photo at the top of this post is of my wok stickers. You can see the flecks of wok patina that got caught onto the dumpling wrapper. I didn’t foresee that unintended consequence from using my well-seasoned wok. The dumplings stuck and I had to use a water and wooden spatula to detach them from the wok bottom. It was a slight struggle.

Asian Dumplings on the Fly: How to Create Your Own Fillings

If you’ve worked your way through a few recipes in the Asian Dumplings cookbook, you may want to break out on your own. You have a lot of dumpling leeway in the filling, which are mostly interchangeable in the cookbook recipe chapters. Read the recipe introductions and think of a mix-and-match ensemble wardrobe. (How many ways can you wear a business suit?) Once you understand the foundational filling flavor profile and texture, try winging one. Below are few pointers on how I did that today.

My fridge was overloaded with odds and ends of ingredients that I had prepped, cooked, or over purchased. There was leftover grilled steak, a partial bunch of bok choi, finely chopped wood ear mushroom from recipe development, and too much scallion, which I bought on impulse at our farmer’s market yesterday.

Key size, moisture, and ingredients. After making a steak sandwich for my husband’s lunch, a few slices remained. I wondered if I could chop them up fine and put them into a dumpling filling. I went at the beef with my knife until it was reduced to bits. You want things small for dumpling fillings. When improvising an Asian dumpling filling, do it with cooked meat as you can safely adjust the flavors by taste.

Render Instant Schmaltz for Tasty Stir-Fries

I hate to throw away fat as I’m prepping chicken. The skin, the tail, the little bits by the rear opening to the body cavity. Whenever I prep a large amount of chicken, I squirrel away the fat trimming in small sandwich bags, freezing them for batches of schmaltz (the Yiddish term for rendered chicken fat) later on. My problem is that I either (1) forget to render the schmaltz or (2) cannot find the rendered fat when I want it for cooking. And that’s usually right as I’m heating up the wok.

This evening, I deboned several chicken leg quarters for a stir-fry. I took the skin off and trimmed the fat. The flaccid spare parts sat in a heap on my cutting board.  I was contemplating whether or not it was enough to save.  And, just as I was about to scoop up that skin and fat to discard it, I remembered some great instructions from a 1968 Chinese cookbook that I’d recently read.

The cookbook was by Jim Lee, a graphics designer turned school teacher in Manhattan. He was a cranky but very thoughtful and practical writer. One of the things Lee mentioned in a recipe was to render chicken fat on the spot for stir-frying.

Now let me pause here to let you know that stir-frying with rendered chicken fat is fantastic. My mother said that in Vietnam, fat chickens were precious. Growing up, her family save every bit of fat from their chickens and rendered it for cooking. “We keep the fat in a little can,” she wistfully told me. Just like bacon grease, no?

A few years ago, Chinese food expert and restaurateur Bruce Cost revealed that chicken fat was used at his Big Bowl restaurants in Chicago. They save the fat from stock making, and it lends wonderful flavor to food.

Pork fat is nice, but chicken fat has an incomparable round richness. Duck fat is equally lovely and I saved the fat from steaming the Sichuan deep-fried ducks.

How to render chicken fat on the spot

Back to my chicken fat tonight.  I heated up my skillet to medium and put the fat in there. I went about preparing the remaining parts of the dinner ingredients while the chicken fat sputtered and hissed. Once in a while I stirred and poked at the fat to keep it moving.

When there seemed to be enough for dinner (about 2 tablespoons), I turned off the skillet and let the sizzling noises subside. Then I removed and discarded the whole pieces, saving a few cracklings to superfluously add to the food. 

The fat was already in the skillet and ready to be reheated for stir-frying the spinach and garlic. The result was fantastic. I felt no guilt for eating chicken fat because it was an ingredient that I put to use instead of discarding.  The calories are about the same as for other fats, and since chicken fat is natural stuff, I can digest it a lot easier.

Next time you trim chicken, don’t throw away that fat! Render it on the spot.
 
Do you cook with chicken fat? What do you do with it?

Pairing Beer with Vietnamese Food

As you may have surmised by now, my stern mother got me cooking and my wacky father got me drinking. Bo Gia (Old Daddy, a term of affection in Vietnamese) introduced me to red wine and cognac when I was of elementary school age. I suppose that was among the benefits of being raised Catholic in a former French colony. Even though Vietnamese women (let alone girls) are not usually thought of as drinkers, Bo Gia (pictured above, photogenic as always!) and I became drinking buddies. It’s been that way for most of my life and after I got married, my husband Rory became part of our drinking circle.

Last week was spring break for Rory and we headed down to Southern California to spend a week hanging out with family, friends. Our activities revolved around lots of food and drinks. We went to my parents’ house for lunch last Monday, and thought it would be fun to introduce my dad to Pinkus, a great certified organic beer from Germany. In case Bo Gia didn’t like the Pinkus hefeweizen or ur pils, we hedged our bets with one of his favorites, Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale. These are sizable 500ml bottles and we figured that the three of us could polish off three beers.

I knew that my mom would be serving a main course of cha ca Ha Noi, the turmeric and dill catfish classic that is enjoyed with funky fermented shrimp sauce (mam tom). It turned out that she had a three-course seafood lunch menu. (Mom is an overachiever when it comes to spoiling people at her table.) Rory and I surprised Bo Gia with the beers and told him that we’d have an impromptu beer tasting.