Dumpling School #1 | Basic Dumplings (Jiaozi) From Scratch | 饺子

If there's one thing that people absolutely love about Asian food it would have to be the miraculous world of dumplings. So today on this YouTube channel we are starting a new series. This is Dumpling School and lesson one is the most famous and most basic dumpling of all, the classic Chinese jiaozi. Okay welcome to Dumpling School. The reason I wanted to do this series is because there are so many different types of dumplings and so many people tell me they wish they could make their own dumplings but they can't. It's actually incredibly easy to do. We're going to go through a lot of different types of dumplings. It's not a series that's going to sort of run for a little bit and then end. We're going to do the next maybe four or five weeks doing some dumplings each week and then might take a break and we'll come back to it later. So please stay tuned to this channel and I'll take you all the way through to make sure that you can make great dumplings at home. Of course the best place to start is I guess where most people start making dumplings, the classic Chinese jiaozi. Jiaozi just means dumpling essentially. You know in chinese cuisine you can break your jiaozi into different categories. It can be shui jiao which is boiled dumplings or zheng jiao, steamed dumplings or even guotie which is the fried dumplings. Lots of different kinds, not all that different in how they're made. People get really caught up in the folding of dumplings but let's go through everything. We're going to make our skins, we're going to make our filling, we're going to cook the dumplings. It's going to be fun. Let's start first of all by making our dumpling skins. You can of course buy skins, nothing wrong with doing that. If you want to just go out and buy some skins now, go do that. If you want to make your own, let me show you how to do it. Just some regular all-purpose flour and there's really two classic kinds of basic dumpling skin. Lots of different variations on it but your classic dumpling skin falls into two categories of either a hot water dough or a cold water dough. Generally your hot water dough, obviously made with hot water, is going to produce a slightly thinner skin. It's a little bit more tender, usually used for steamed dumplings or something like that. Your cold water dough is a bit more all-purpose. You can use that for boiled dumplings etc. I actually, when I'm making jiaozi, I tend to make it always with hot water dough because even if I'm boiling the dumplings, if you make them right, they still hold together. So I'll show you how to do a hot water dough, exact same proportions. If you're making a cold water dough, just use cold water instead of hot. This, I think, is the most useful thing for making dumplings. A kitchen mixer can help you make the dough, make the filling, everything. Of course if you don't have one, totally fine. Just mix and knead the dough by hand, mix and knead the filling by hand. But to get started, dough hook on the mixer. I've got about three cups of all-purpose flour going in. Just grab some hot water, about half the volume of the flour. So three cups of flour, about one and a half cups of water. No need to sift the flour or anything like that. Like I said, it's actually really simple. Water and flour in and then just get it on to a relatively low speed to really bring that dough together. That'll probably take about 10 minutes to become a really smooth dough. So while that's happening, I'm going to boil some cabbage for my filling. Dough looks pretty good now, so just lightly flour my hands and a piece of cling film here. You see the dough is really quite wet and that's the way it should be. We're going to add quite a lot of flour to it in the rolling process. So if you start with the dry dough, by the time you finish rolling it out, it's going to be a little bit too dry to work with. Scatter a bit more flour on top. Just wrap this up and put that aside for about half an hour to an hour. The dough is resting now, so it's time to make the filling. The ingredients are pretty simple. I've got some pork mince here and it's kind of a fattier mince. It's probably around 25% fat, which is really good for dumplings. A few other flavourings and seasonings. Some ginger, some garlic, sugar, salt, a bit of white pepper. I've got some garlic chives to go in there as well and of course my boiled cabbage. The cabbage has just been boiled and then drained, but I've rinsed it with cold water because you don't want to put a hot ingredient into the filling. I just need to really finely chop this and really important, make sure I'm squeezing out as much of the liquid as possible. After the cabbage is chopped, we can get everything back into the mixer. Yes, I'm going to use the mixer for making my dumpling filling. The reason I'm going to do that is because my grandma always used to tell me, you stir a dumpling filling in one direction. It's kind of an old wives tale, but if you look at the science behind it, it actually makes a lot of sense. You see, meats like pork contain proteins called actin and myosin. Those proteins, when they're in an acidic environment, can create a kind of a gel net. The filaments of protein need to be aligned to create that net. What that net does is it traps moisture. So in fact, stirring a dumpling in one direction aligns those protein filaments and creates a broader net for capturing moisture. I know that all sounds a bit scientific and technical, but all you need to know is that if you stir your dumpling in one direction in the presence of salt, you're going to get a more moist and a more springy dumpling. The best way to do that is actually in a mixer. Of course, if you don't want to use a mixer, just do it in a bowl or a pot and just make sure you're stirring in one direction. I'm going to use the beating paddle for this. In goes about a kilo of pork mince, some ginger, garlic, sugar, salt, some white pepper, and I'm going to throw in some Shaoxing wine as well. Okay, take a look at this now. You can see the mince is in kind of pieces. It makes sense because it's minced meat, but let's take a look at it again after we've mixed it all together. Okay, so now after about five minutes of being bashed around in a mixer, you can see that the meat's no longer in these kind of round minced pieces. It's kind of elongated and lengthened, and that means the proteins inside have done the same thing. You can even see that the texture of it is already springy just as we touch it like that. Now I can throw in my Chinese cabbage and then also some garlic chives. I'm just going to cut that into about half centimeter pieces. Of course, these other ingredients are optional. You know, you don't have to include Chinese cabbage. You don't have to include garlic chives. Everybody makes their jiaozi differently, but I think the only thing you've really got to worry about is whether to add egg or not. If you're using a lot of vegetables in there, the thing that is protein. It's not starch. So the protein is there from the meat. The vegetables you're adding don't have protein. So if you add a lot of vegetables, you need to add more protein to bind it together. That's why you add egg. So we haven't added too many vegetables to this. It's still a very meaty dumpling, so I don't think I need to add some egg to this. Just on a slightly lower speed, I'll beat that again until everything's combined. Okay, that's all nicely mixed and you can see just how different our filling is. It's not minced meat anymore. It's a dumpling filling. It's almost like a paste, but it's still a very meaty paste. What's actually quite important to do at this point is to taste that filling. My grandma always used to just grab a piece of the raw filling and throw it straight into her mouth. If you're a bit squeamish about doing that, just get some water on the boil, drop a little bit in, boil it and taste it. It should taste really well seasoned. If it's not well seasoned, you might have to add a little bit more sugar, might have to add a little bit more salt, something like that, even some soy sauce if you wanted some extra umami in there. When the filling tastes good and well seasoned, throw it into the fridge, clean down everything and I'll show you how to fold some dumplings. Okay, the preparation is done and this is the main event. This is the dumpling folding. We've got our filling, got our dough and other things we need. A couple of trays to put the dumplings, lined with a bit of baking paper and then here I've got a rolling pin. This is a Chinese style rolling pin. If you don't have one of these, which you probably don't, just go down to your hardware store and get a length of dowel or broom handle or something like that. I'd say that's about a two centimetre diameter there. This is a spatula for taking the filling. If you didn't have one of these, just a regular butter knife is totally fine. So, a lot of flour. We need a lot of flour for the rolling process. Onto a wooden board, really be quite generous with it and keep a bowl of flour handy because you're going to use quite a lot of it. As you can see, this dough is quite sticky, even with the flour that we've put on there. It's probably going to stick a little bit but we'll just cut off a bit of that dough now. Keep the rest of it wrapped up so it doesn't dry out too much and with more flour, we'll just roll this into a snake shape. Doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be exactly even. If you have round about the same volume of dough in each one of these cuts, you'll end up with dumplings of about the same size. Each one of these pieces of dough, turn it up on its end. So, not on its side and press it down. You turn it up on its end and then press it down with the heel of your hand. Now, with your rolling pin, give that a little bit of a flour and the action is essentially to pick up one side of the dough, roll it with the pin and then turn it a quarter of a revolution, so 90 degrees. Roll again, keep turning and rolling and that should get you to a point where you're getting, doesn't have to be exactly, but a relatively round dumpling skin. And the benefit of doing it this way is actually you're only really pushing towards the centre. So, you're getting a thinner skin on the outside and a slightly thicker skin on the inside and obviously when you're pinching the outsides together, that means you're going to get a relatively even amount of skin on all your dumplings. Remember again, just rolling halfway in. You're not going all the way across the dumpling, just halfway into where you've picked it up. So, into the centre, turn it 90 degrees, more flour onto the board if you need it and just keep turning it. Now, once you've rolled them out, they do tend to dry out quite quickly. So, you want to maybe roll two or three at a time or even just one at a time and start to make your dumplings. The folding of the dumpling. This is one of the really big misconceptions about dumplings, that they have to have these intricate pleats and folds and you have to get the pleats right. This comes from most people being exposed to dumplings first in a restaurant. Restaurants try to make their dumplings look really fancy but I can tell you, most dumplings in the world are not intricately folded with pleats. This, for a standard jiaozi, is how you fold a dumpling. Take a little bit of filling, don't take too much, press it into the centre, then fold it up, pinch it together at the top and that is a dumpling. No folds required whatsoever. Now, if you missed that, what I did was I essentially made two V's with my fingers. On my left hand, the index finger is straight. On my right hand, the index finger is bent. You then put them together so they make a V with your thumbs and you squeeze one side with the index finger that's straight and the other side with the index finger that's bent and you kind of get that crescent shape of a good dumpling. It's hard to explain but actually very, very intuitive when you do it yourself. Pinch together at the top, one side with a straight index finger, another side with a bent index finger and that is a dumpling shape. It makes life a lot easier and actually it makes the dumpling making really fast. You know, this much mix will make about 100 dumplings and I'll probably whip through that in a little less than an hour. It's always good to get friends around to make dumplings. I always used to do that when I was a bit younger but these days, to be honest, I find it quite relaxing to do it by myself. Just throw something on the TV or listen to some music, sit back, make a couple of hundred dumplings. Now, the reason why I'm putting these dumplings onto trays lined with baking paper is because you're not likely to eat 100 dumplings in one sitting or most of us aren't anyway. These are absolutely brilliant for freezing. You can freeze them raw just as they are. So put them on some baking paper. Once you've got one tray, throw it into the freezer until it's kind of just hard enough to not stick to each other and then you can just throw them all into a big Ziploc bag and you've got dumplings for days. Now, the easiest way to is to boil them. I've made these with a hot water dough rather than a cold water dough but I do that because it gives me more flexibility. I can steam these, I can fry them, I can fry steam them and as we kind of go through dumpling school, I'll show you all those different ways of doing it but just to get started, just for absolute basics, I'll show you how to make a sui jiao which is a regular boiled dumpling. Just some water brought to the boil, no salt or anything and you drop the dumplings in. It's very easy like. Now, as the water comes back to the boil, obviously putting the dumplings in is going to knock it back from 100 degrees as it was. As it comes back to the boil, you need to put in about half a cup, three quarters of a cup of cold water again, just to take it back a little bit. If it's boiling too vigorously with these handmade skins, it can break apart. It can be a bit too rough so keeping it just kind of below that boiling point is really, really good for cooking dumplings. Dumplings are done when they rise to the top. Give them about another 30 seconds to a minute. Take them out with a strainer. Strain off as much water as possible and you can serve these just with a bit of black vinegar and soy sauce as is done in northern China. I have my own sort of black vinegar, soy sauce, touch of sugar mix that I use that I've been aging for years and years. I can show you how to do that. If you like, go down to the comments below if you'd like to see that recipe but it's really simple. Bit of chili oil, bit of exo sauce, however you like to have your dumplings. This has been the first step. This is lesson one. I hope you've learned something but dumpling school will be continuing for the next few weeks so check back in next week for a new video.