Dumpling School #4 | How to Make Siu Mai Dumplings 烧卖 | Yum Cha

Can you believe we're already in week four of Dumpling School? We've made the standard jiaozi, we've made a red chilli oil, we've made the zhong dumplings, the Sichuanese favourite, and now we're on to quite possibly the West's most favourite dumpling. Of course it comes from Cantonese cuisine and it's a yum cha staple. Today we're making siu mai. This is probably the popular dim sum that people get at yum cha around the world. Siu mai translates to cook and sell because they fly out the door, they are that popular. These are the ingredients that go in to your classic Cantonese siu mai. You've got pork and prawns. Of course you then have a few other ingredients as well, some garlic, some ginger, spring onion, shiitake mushrooms, and a few seasonings here as well, soy sauce, salt, sugar, and some Shaoxing wine. My view on siu mai is that if you're making it with mince, you kind of do a little bit of a disservice because it ends up with a slightly grainy texture. I'm going to show you how to get that really nice sort of meaty texture that a good siu mai should have. I make mine with pork belly. I've got about two thirds pork belly to one third of prawns here and as you can tell this isn't minced yet. I think the best way to make siu mai is to mince it by hand, to leave it quite large, almost like it's pieces of meat rather than minced meat and then you're going to beat it up in the mixer. Now I've actually got quite big pieces of pork here and I don't want to cut it up too much more than that because I think a siu mai should really be quite meaty. So I'm going to put this straight into my mixer. Now don't think using a stand mixer is a completely off-the-wall idea here. You know the first place I saw this being done was at Three Michelin-starred Lung Kin Hin in Hong Kong. That's the first ever Cantonese restaurant to receive Three Michelin stars and I'm pretty sure they make a pretty good siu mai. So if this is good enough for them, it's good enough for me. In there I'm going to put my seasonings first of all. Some soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, some sugar and some salt. So I'll start this off slow and then increase the speed gradually. Okay after beating that up for about 10 or 15 minutes that's exactly what you want it to be. It's really tenderized the meat, that process of going through, but it's also broken down some of the protein so it's going to give us a much moister dumpling. To help that along I'm going to add the prawns in now. I don't want to beat those up too much because I want them to retain their integrity. I'm going to add a little bit of stock as well. Adding the stock is just going to help keep the mixture a little bit lighter. You know the moisture from the stock is going to get trapped within that protein net that we're creating from beating up all of the proteins in the pork. That looks really good. So last we'll go in with the spring onions, shiitake mushrooms and ginger. And these ones I'll just combine over low speed. Now this really looks perfect. Scrape the filling off the beaters. There we go. Just look at the texture of that. This is what I really suggest doing your dumplings in a mix like that because just through breaking up the proteins in that meat a little bit you get such a much springier dumpling mixture. Put this away and we'll get to folding our siu mai. To make siu mai we use wonton wrappers. These sort of egg pastry wrappers and there's no shame in using pre-made wrappers for any dumpling but specifically not for siu mai. Even the top restaurants will use bought-in wrappers rather than making their own. One thing that I really like to do though when I am making siu mai is just to flatten these out a little bit more. You know your standard wonton wrapper is a little bit more thick than you'd like for siu mai. So to do that just take your rolling pin and just make a few indentations along the length. Turn it 90 degrees and make a few more. Now that's just ever so slightly reduced the size. Ideally you want these to be circular. You can make it with a square one, no problems with that. You'll just have little bits of wrapper coming along the outside. So to make a circular one just take a cutter, push down and remove the outside. Keep all of these off cuts too. You know they're actually quite nice thrown through a bit of soup or something. It's now the process of folding a siu mai. Siu mai is always an open top dumpling and so you kind of want to make a cup shape to hold this filling. Take a little bit of filling, press it into the center and just keep adding little by little to that. Then kind of slip it into the okay symbol so that it's sort of ringed around your thumb and forefinger and keep adding more of the mixture on top. Naturally this creates folds in the top of your siu mai. So when you get to the end what you've got to do, give it a bit of a tap and that is your siu mai shape. Drop that onto my tray and continue on making a lot more. When you've got a tray of siu mai ready you can get them into the steamer but there's one more step before you do that. It needs a bit of decoration for the top. Sometimes you see a red mark, sometimes you see a piece of carrot, sometimes you even see a green pea in there but my preference is to use roe. Traditionally it's crab roe but this is flying fish roe and it's perfectly fine as well. Something bright orange, red, that kind of a color that you can put on top and steam. Now you can put it on afterwards, this is totally fine to eat raw but I prefer to put it on top so it actually cooks with the dumpling. Just a touch on the top of each one and they're ready to steam. Now you're probably wondering why I got them on this big tray. Of course you can put them in a little bamboo steamer but if you want to cook a lot of siu mai at once, let me show you how I do it. A bamboo steamer is totally fine but I find it actually a lot easier to use a steam oven. You can actually put a bamboo steamer into the steam oven to make it easier on your stovetop as well. Of course you do need a steam oven to do this so if you don't have one, back to the stovetop and your regular bamboo steamer. All these need is just full steam which is 100 degrees for about 12 minutes. When these come out you can just transfer them to a plate or a bamboo steamer to present them and that's it, your homemade Cantonese siu mai.