Dumpling School #7 | Japanese Gyoza (including the "Skirt") | 餃子

Hello, hello. We are back with a little bit more dumpling school and today we're making Japanese dumplings. Today we're making gyoza. Now I say gyoza are Japanese dumplings but to be honest within Japanese cuisine, gyoza are considered Chinese food. Now I know you can get them in a lot of different places in Japan but the word gyoza just means jiaozi or gaoji in Cantonese, and within Japanese cuisine you'll find them mainly at Chinese restaurants, ramen restaurants which are considered almost to be Chinese restaurants although quite naturalized obviously and even though they are a Chinese dumpling the way they're made in Japan is a little bit different. The main difference is I guess in the perspective or the focus. I know that sounds a little bit confusing but in China there's a lot of focus on the filling. In Japanese the focus is kind of on the skin. It's a little bit more of a textural dumpling so this is why gyoza in Japan are quite often steam fried to sort of have a crispy skin on them and I'm going to show you one of the most popular ways to do that which is called hanetsuki which means with wings attached. This is how you see sometimes it's called a skirt but in Japanese it's known as a wing. The wings attached to the outside of the gyoza. You've probably seen it before and I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. I'll get started with some Chinese cabbage. I should probably use the Japanese word for it which is hakusai, white vegetable. Cabbage is chopped and one of the really big differences between I guess Japanese gyoza and Chinese jiaozi is that for gyoza the vegetables often usually I should say aren't cooked before you mix it together with the filling. To draw the excess moisture out of the vegetables, scatter them with salt quite generously. Mix the salt through and then leave that for 20 minutes, half an hour so the salt can start to draw all the liquid out of these vegetables here. A good massage along the way actually helps that process. Now for my other ingredients. I've got about half a kilo of fatty pork mince here. A good fat content is very important for dumplings. If you don't know why, just go off and watch some of the other videos in dumpling school. To that I'm going to add some pretty basic aromatics. Some garlic, some grated ginger. Now it's kind of up to you whether you want to include the pulp of the ginger or whether you just want to squeeze the juice out. For this kind of a thing I think it's totally fine to leave the pulp in. So I'm just going to throw that straight in. Some spring onions as well. Now I add in my seasonings. Some sake, a bit of soy sauce, sugar and if you like a bit of white pepper. Now there's a little bit of salt from the soy sauce there but I haven't added any salt to this because I'm not rinsing this Chinese cabbage here. This Chinese cabbage is going to go straight in so it's going to provide a lot of salt that we need to create our dumpling filling. You can kind of see how much liquid comes out of this immediately. This has only been sitting for about 20 minutes and there's already a lot of liquid there so I'll throw it into a sieve. Squeeze out as much of the liquid as I can and this can go straight into our dumpling filling as well. I'll give that a good stir to bring it all together. Again always just in one direction. Now whereas for a Chinese dumpling filling I would be mixing this a lot more to make sure that we're really getting into the protein of the meat and letting the salt break that down a little bit and give us those sort of long dumpling filling like filaments in the meat filling. But for a Japanese gyoza it's not that important so you can actually just mix it together. If you do want a slightly springier filling inside keep mixing it a lot more but as I mentioned before gyoza is a lot more about the skin and the cooking process than it is about the filling. So we can even skip refrigerating the filling to let it firm up and get straight on to folding our dumplings. So let me clear out all of this and I'll show you how to fold a gyoza. I only use pre-made skins for these just for something different. You know if you want to use your homemade skins and roll them out yourself please do do that. You know the recipes are up there again as part of dumpling school but these pre-made skins are totally fine to use particularly if you're getting used to making dumplings for the first time these are fantastic. Just need a round wheat flour skin not one of those egg pastry skins. If you're using pre-made skins you do need to have a little bit of water to make it seal around the edges. Your homemade skins will stick together just by folding but the pre-made skins a bit of water around the edge. So I'm Now you can see that this is a much more separate filling than my Chinese style fillings which tends to be a little springier a lot more sort of solid but for a Japanese gyoza you kind of want to crunch through the skin and then you don't need as much resistance in the actual dumpling itself. If you went back through history there's some reasoning for that you know dumplings came to the west much later than they came to Japan so we tend to have more meat in our fillings. Japanese gyoza are probably more like dumplings were in China back a few more centuries ago where there was a lot less meat added. Of course you can add an egg to this or whatever you wanted but it's totally fine just to leave it kind of I guess soft you would describe this filling to be. Now really important point you don't want to overfill gyoza because they'll shrink up quite a bit as you're folding them because you're putting pleats into them. So pinch it together at one side and then just make pleats only on I guess you could call it the top of the dumpling and that's kind of how it comes together. Now important point you really need to pinch that top together because for these pre-made skins because they don't stretch so much you've got kind of a double layer so a single layer all around there a double layer at the top so you need to keep pinching it quite hard so that that double layer becomes a single layer you can see the width of that there and that's your gyoza. I think one difficulty with a lot of dumpling making videos is you're kind of watching from the opposite angle so here's a shot of how to fold this from over my shoulder so you can see kind of point of view of how to fold and make these pleats. So I've got one tray of gyoza so instead of finishing these off we're on a schedule so we'll go over and cook them but I want to show you how to make the skirt or the wings that go around the gyoza because it's one of the most popular ways of doing it. It all is in the mixture of the water that you're using to steam. A normal steam fried dumpling is just water you fill that about halfway up the side of the dumpling that boils evaporates and the dumpling fries underneath. Here we're going to mix in some flour into the water to give that skirt that goes around and fills in all the gaps between the dumplings in our frying pan. I'm using potato starch you could use corn starch, you could use regular flour, you could use rice flour, it really doesn't matter. I see some recipes that say you need to use a particular flour, it doesn't matter. They will be slightly different in the way that they look at the end but most commonly for Chinese dumplings that do it the same way it's just regular flour. In Japan potato starch, katakuriko as it's known in Japan is probably the most common. Easily you can substitute corn starch or rice flour. The proportions are around one and a half to two tablespoons of starch or flour into each cup of water. So I've got my potato starch here into the water and I'll stir that around until it's completely dissolved and this will be our steaming liquid that when it reduced down the water goes we're left with that fine layer of starch that's going to crisp on the bottom. The only things we need on top of this is a little bit of oil to start frying the dumplings and a bit of sesame oil to finish. So let's go over to the stove. A good non-stick pan or even a carbon steel pan that's well seasoned is kind of a good way to do this. You can do it with most pans but you run the risk of it sticking if the pan's not non-stick or it's not well seasoned. Whatever the size of your pan, make sure you've got a plate that fits on top of it because this is how we're going to turn out our dumplings at the end. So if your plate isn't the right size you're going to end up with a bit of a mess. Pan goes on the stove now, low to medium heat here. You don't want to go too high with the heat because the dumplings and the skirt can burn. Touch of oil in the pan, lay the dumplings in, leaving a little bit of space between each one. You don't want them to be too tightly packed together. When it's very lightly browned on the bottom, I want to put in my mixture. Keep that stirred so that all the flour is evenly distributed and you don't need to use it all, just halfway up the side. That's why I mix it before I put it in because I don't know exactly how much I'm going to use. That will vary depending on what pan you're using. Cover it with a lid and steam for about six minutes. Then we remove the lid and we watch as our skirt kind of forms at the bottom. You don't want to take this out too early. Watch here around the sides where the skirt starts to come away from the pan and that tells you it's time to add your sesame oil. The sesame oil is going to help the skirt brown and give you a really nice colour. Another minute or so, again make sure the heat is low. Now leaving a gap between the gyoza is quite important because they do swell a little bit, as you can see, but also it lets you know when to take it out because you can see in between these gaps how our wings are going. So right here you can see how brown it's getting and you can actually judge how brown you want it to be. Do you want it to be completely dark brown all over or just sort of a light crisp, light brown coating? I think this looks pretty good to me now. Give the pan a little shake, make sure there's nothing sticking and we'll turn out the gyoza. Serve this with some soy sauce, rice vinegar, a touch of chili oil and it's Japanese-style gyoza.