Easy Siu Mai Recipe | The Woks of Life #food

If you've ever had shumai out at a restaurant, you know that the texture is kind of supposed to be snappy when you bite into it. It's like when you take a bite and there's that bouncy chewiness to it. This mixing, this excessive seemingly amount of mixing is what's gonna get you that texture. So if this seems excessive, sorry, it's not. Hi everyone, today we're gonna make one of my favorite recipes from our cookbook, The Walks of Life, Recipes to Know and Love from a Chinese American Family. It's a pork and shrimp shumai and it's the opening recipe of the book. And you can do the entire thing in a stand mixer and you're gonna see how easy it is to make delicious dim sum at home. So I have the recipe open and it is my favorite. It's one of my favorite recipes in the book. My sister actually makes fun of me for how often I'm pushing this recipe, but I think it deserves it. The steps are really easy. Soak the mushrooms, you're gonna chop mushrooms, you're going to wash the shrimp. I'll show you that process and what that looks like and why we do it. Then you're gonna mix the filling in the stand mixer and then we're just going to assemble them using these Hong Kong style dumpling wrappers. If you've never seen these particular dumpling wrappers before, you can tell the difference because they are very thin and they're yellow actually in color. And if you can't find these dumpling wrappers, you can actually use Hong Kong style wonton wrappers. They'll work much the same way. You just kind of take the corners and fold them down and squeeze them onto the sides of the shumai. Then we're going to garnish them and steam them and it's super easy. So the first step is to wash the shrimp. It's kind of a, it's an interesting technique, but this basically will give the shrimp that kind of crunchy snappy texture in the filling. And we're just gonna let the shrimp sit now for 15 minutes and then we'll rinse all this stuff off before we mix it into the filling. So while the shrimp is sitting for those, that 15 minutes, let's cut the mushrooms and start assembling the filling. So you want shiitake mushrooms that are dried. Those are gonna give you the best flavor. I wouldn't use fresh here just because you're using such a small amount where I call for either three small shiitake mushrooms or one large and you really want dried mushrooms to get that concentrated flavor. I soak these for a few hours. You need a minimum of two hours to soak them and now I'm just gonna really finely chop them. If your mushroom is larger, you might wanna trim the stems. The stems can sometimes be a little bit tough so you might wanna trim that off. And what I do is I take the mushroom kind of long ways if it does have a long side and I julienne it one way, so lengthwise, and then cut them the other way. You make a claw with your fingers and you just run through it. Now that they're at this stage, I can just kind of run my knife through them again. So it's pretty important that these mushrooms are really fine because you want them to kind of disappear into the filling a little bit. You don't want chunks of mushroom in your filling. Maybe even a little finer. Okay, so here's the start of our filling. In here we have some ground pork, a tablespoon of sugar, some cornstarch, which is going to help bind the filling, Shaoxing wine, salt, and white pepper. Put it in the mixer, fitted with the paddle attachment, and we are going to mix this on medium-low speed for five minutes and you're gonna see the pork start to kind of turn into this paste-like texture. And you'll know when it's done when the filling starts to come together. The filling looks like a sticky paste that's kind of sticking to the sides of the bowl. So this isn't ready yet, because it is sticking to the sides of the bowl. Five minutes. When you take a bite and there's that bouncy chewiness to it, this mixing, this excessive seemingly amount of mixing is what's gonna get you that texture in addition to that shrimp washing step that we talked about earlier. This is why we suggest using a stand mixer if you have one, but if you don't, mix by hand. I've done that before where I'm just like mixing by hand in front of the TV. 15 minutes goes by pretty quick. Or you could kind of take it in shifts and have a kitchen helper help you. Five minutes each kind of thing. In the meantime, let's go rinse that shrimp that we seasoned earlier. So I'm just gonna run water into it. And I'm basically just sort of zhuzhing it around while the water flows in. I'll drain it. And then I'm just gonna rinse again. This is just gonna wash off that excess baking soda. But you will notice a difference in the texture from this step. Now it's ready to add to the filling. Okay, so it's been five minutes. And as you can see, the pork is very nice and sticky looking. And now I'm going to add the shrimp. And actually, before I do that, I'm gonna go grab a spatula and scrape down the sides of the bowl. We're a big fan of the spoonula at the Walks of Life. And now we are going to turn the mixer back on to low speed because you don't want the shrimp to kind of go flying out of here. So low speed for two minutes. So the mixer is doing the work here of breaking up the shrimp. After this initial two minutes at low speed, I'm gonna increase the speed and the shrimp is gonna get even more incorporated into the filling. If you're mixing by hand, you can roughly chop the shrimp before you add it and then mix by hand that way. And I think we say, yes, we say 10 minutes for that to really make sure that the shrimp is well incorporated into the filling. So let's increase the speed to medium. This is really gonna integrate the shrimp with the filling and we're gonna stay here for another two minutes. So now we're going to add the mushrooms and we are going to add some neutral flavored oil and we're gonna add oyster sauce and sesame oil. I like to measure oil before I measure oyster sauce because it actually helps the oyster sauce get off the spoon easier. It's gonna be really satisfying when the oyster sauce just slides out of the pan. Okay. So the reason I'm adding these ingredients separately from those initial seasoning ingredients I added is because I want the oil to emulsify into the filling after the filling has been emulsified, like after the pork fat has kind of been emulsified already. It'll help the oil kind of incorporate better. Okay, so our filling is assembled and now you're gonna see how easy it is to make the shumai. You wanna have your bamboo steamer ready and it's lined with one of these rattan or bamboo mats, but you could also use this perforated parchment paper for steamer liners. You could also use cheesecloth. You could use cabbage leaves or napa cabbage leaves. Okay, so you take a wrapper, put about a tablespoon of filling in the center. Then you kind of make a little cup with your hand and let the wrapper and shumai sort of fall through. You're gonna squeeze it while you fill it and you wanna scrape the top flat. Don't wanna put too much filling in. Just enough to get kind of like a one inch diameter. Once you've scraped it flat, you kind of tape it a little bit. Make sure that the sides of the wrapper are nice and squeezed to the sides. The moisture from the filling is enough to hold everything together so there's no need for any water or anything to seal. Just put it right in the steamer. Okay, so I have my steamer basket with my shumai here. They're placed about an inch apart and we have one more step before we steam them. So when you go to the dim sum place, usually there's like a little bit of like fish roe on top of these. That gives it a little bit of pop of orange color. So rather than, I mean, I don't know about you, but we don't have like fish eggs in our pantry usually. So I'm gonna use carrot and this step is optional. You can also use like a green pea if you don't wanna like fiddle around with the julienning carrots, but I'll show you. It's not that hard. You can do it. So I'm just gonna cut it into sections. So I'm just gonna cut a thin slice so that I have a flat surface to work on. The carrot won't move while I'm cutting it. So now I'm just gonna slice into very, very thin slices. You can go as slowly as you need to. The thinner, the better, the finer your garnish will be. Once you're there, you can kind of flatten them out. These are a little bit more difficult to work with, so I'm gonna just move those aside. And now that they're nice and flat and sort of in a line, I'm going to julienne them. Now you have like nice, fine carrot shreds. Now your final step is to do the same thing the other way so that you can get little carrot, fish roe looking carrot bits. And again, if this is like too fussy for you, you can absolutely skip this step if you like. Or you can get fish roe if you find, if you have a source for that. Now we're just gonna add these to the top. I'm just using a chopstick. If you want, you could use like tweezers, but also just use your fingers. I have my steamer full of shumai. I'm only gonna steam one level today because this is all we're gonna eat. The rest I'm gonna freeze. These are very freezer friendly. In order to steam these in a bamboo steamer, you're going to need a wok that will fit a bamboo steamer. For this size steamer, generally the minimum size wok you would need is 14 inch diameter. And basically what you wanna do is make sure that this water is coming to a simmer. You wanna make sure that the water level is coming up about a half inch up the steamer. You don't want it to be so high that the simmering water is gonna touch the food in the steamer, but you don't want it to be so low that it's gonna like, that the steamer is gonna be dry and like sitting on a hot surface that's gonna scorch it. So this is actually rapidly coming up to a simmer. So that's about right. This is about the level that you want your water to be at. You're gonna cover it. And that's gonna steam for nine minutes. If you're cooking these from frozen, you can cook them a minute or two longer because obviously they're frozen, they're gonna take a little bit longer. But if you're cooking them right away after you've assembled them, nine minutes should do it. I just love this recipe. I think it's so good. It's a confidence booster because you're gonna make it and you're gonna be like, am I really gonna be able to make dim sum at home? And then you're gonna make it, you're gonna eat it, and you're gonna be like, yes, I can. It is a major kitchen confidence booster. Not that hard to make. Our claim to fame on this recipe is that our aunt who never encounters a recipe, like any recipe she encounters, she changes it. She'll like fix it to improve it. She had nothing to say about this one. No improvements. Yes. So this carrot is very- I can see you now, Ma.