Wonton Soup | A Freezer Staple with an Easy Soup Base! | The Woks of Life

Hi, everyone. Today, we are going to make a simple wonton soup. This is our family's go-to wonton recipe. We always have some in the freezer for quick bowls of wonton soup whenever we want them. And while we have lots of different wonton recipes, this is a great starting point if you've never made wontons before. I'm gonna make a double batch so that we can have some now and have some in the freezer for later. Let's get started. Today, I have shepherd's purse, which is frozen. This is one of our favorite leafy greens to use in wonton fillings. It's just a very flavorful vegetable, but you could also use baby bok choy. You could even use spinach. Really easy to put these together. We're gonna make the filling. We're gonna wrap them, and I'll talk about freezing and storage as well. So this is my mom's recipe for wontons. This is the one that we grew up with. My mom's from the Shanghai area, so this wonton recipe kind of has that vibe. There are different wonton recipes from different areas of China, many of which you can find on our blog, thewalkswithlife.com, but this one is going to be a simple pork and shepherd's purse filling. It is really delicious. The shepherd's purse is very aromatic. These are the seasoning ingredients. You don't need much. Shaoxing wine, sesame oil, white pepper, salt, and a little bit of light soy sauce. When it comes to Chinese takeout wonton soup, you think of it as more of like a lunch or a dinner item or like an appetizer. In China, wontons are an anytime of day kind of food. In fact, when we travel to Shanghai, one of our favorite breakfasts in the morning is a bowl of wonton soup, and the wontons are very small, so you get a bowl of like 20, and you just slurp them, and they're so good. These wontons are definitely different from what you would get at like a Chinese takeout restaurant. Those are what I affectionately refer to as rubbery wontons because the wrapper is very, very thick, and it's mostly wrapper and not a ton of filling. We are using Shanghai-style wonton wrappers. They're kind of on the thinner side. They're not yellow, which means that they don't have egg, or these days, more likely it's food dye. Important to note, when you're buying wrappers, the circular ones are for dumplings. Make sure you buy the square ones. So I'm at the sink. I have my frozen shepherd's purse, which I've taken out of the package. It comes a lot like frozen spinach in a block like this. The thing that you wanna do with this is thaw it and wash it at the same time. So I'm just gonna put it into a bowl of water. If you don't have shepherd's purse and you wanted to use spinach, I would probably use fresh spinach and blanch it, and then just squeeze the water out and chop it. Same goes for baby bok choy. If you wanted to see that process, you can check out our Only Dumpling Recipe You Ever Need video, which we will link in the description box. When you're washing leafy greens, you wanna make sure that you're picking the vegetables up out of the water rather than pouring the entire thing into a colander, because if you think about it, pour it into a colander, you're just pouring all the sand right back on top of your vegetables. You don't wanna do that. It is a little bit finicky, but you don't want sand in your wontons. Okay, so now it's time to squeeze the water out of these vegetables. So I'm gonna pull out about a fist-size amount, and I'm just gonna squeeze it between my hands. Continue that until you've gone through all the vegetables. Our recipe calls for 10 ounces of vegetable for about eight ounces of meat, and that's fresh. And if you have a little bit more vegetable in your filling than meat, that's totally fine. If you have a little more meat than vegetable, that's totally fine. You just wanna make sure ultimately that it is properly seasoned. Okay, so the next step is to chop the vegetables. The mouthfeel after you eat the finished wonton should be like that filling is like one cohesive texture. So chop these really finely. I'm just gonna keep it in that sort of ball that I have, and I'll probably go over it a few times. If you've never had Shepherd's Purse, you can already smell the fragrance, like a taste preview of it. You just sort of find the stem end and just trim it off. I will chop this again. You know, this brings me back to our only dumpling recipe you ever need video when I was like, I'm never hand chopping these vegetables again because the food processor was so easy. I will admit, I'm probably never gonna hand chop again because that was really a lot easier. And here I am hand chopping vegetables. So if the question is, can I do that in my food processor? The answer is yes, yes you can. But it does release even more water. Yeah, it does. That was the catch. But I am wishing that I had taken out the food processor. Okay, so this is about how fine you want the vegetables so that they're all in short little pieces and bits. You don't want any like stringy pieces in there. Transfer to the bowl. While you're chopping, should we do a little lightning round of wonton questions? Sure. Homemade chicken stock or store-bought chicken stock? I mean, homemade obviously preferred. Particularly my mom's chicken and pork stock. If you can get your hands on some of that, it is really, really good for wonton soup. What's your favorite bowl of wonton soup in the world? Favorite bowl of wonton soup in the world is probably somewhere in Shanghai, a bowl of like 20 tiny wontons for breakfast. So, so good. What's your favorite bowl of wonton soup in New York City? I would say Wu's Wonton King, kind of on the outskirts of Chinatown. It's called like three flavor wontons in bone soup. It is really very, very good. Homemade wontons or store-bought wonton? Homemade. Chinese takeout wonton soup, yes or no? Yes. I love Chinese takeout wonton soup. When they're like huge and like it's all wrapper and the filling is pretty simple and that neon yellow broth. I don't know, it's kind of like Doritos for me. I'm into it. So our vegetables are chopped and now we can make the filling. I have pretty fatty ground pork. That's what you want. Our recipe technically calls for eight ounces but I'm making a double recipe today which I highly recommend because it's like if you're gonna go to the trouble of making wontons, you might as well. And freeze them. Now I'm gonna season that. Five tablespoons of sesame oil. Three, four. Couple tablespoons of light soy sauce, Chinese light soy sauce or any regular soy sauce if you have like Kikkoman at home, that'll work. And then a quarter cup which is four tablespoons of Shaoxing wine. And this seems like a lot of liquid but it will all absorb into the filling, don't worry. I need a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of white pepper. And now we can mix it all together. When it comes to mixing these wontons, I use just two pairs of chopsticks or four chopsticks. I'm just gonna start by breaking up the meat a little bit. You can just start slow and then once everything sort of starts to incorporate, you can mix faster. Shepherd's purse is already really fragrant and the sesame oil is super fragrant too. When you buy your ground pork, you do wanna make sure that it's on the fattier side. Don't buy lean ground pork because as you can see, there's a lot of vegetable in here. You wanna make sure that there's enough fat and moisture to make the filling like really succulent. And in order to do that, you kind of need a little bit more of a high fat ratio in your ground pork. My mom always said mix in one direction. She didn't give much of an explanation as to why but I'll do what she says. Okay, so the filling is really nicely emulsified and we are ready to assemble the wontons. We have a bowl of water, we have our filling, we have our wrappers and then we have two parchment lined baking sheets. This amount of filling should make around eight dozen wontons. Each package of wrappers, at least for this brand, which is wonton specialist has about 50 wrappers. The exact number is actually 52. So I figure it's like four dozen with like a few extra uppers for mistakes. Here's how you fold a wonton. First, you dampen the edges of the wrapper with water. Since you're gonna be folding it in half, you actually technically only need to do it around half cause like this will be enough water to make it stick. And then you put some of the filling in the center, about like a heaping teaspoon. You fold the wrapper in half. So you have like a rectangle like that and make sure that there's no air in between the wrapper and the filling. Dampen one corner of the wrapper. You pull the back edge of the wrapper towards you and then you bring those two bottom corners together. There is your little wonton. It's so cute. That was one method. Now I'm gonna show you a second method. So if the first one looks like a bonnet, this one looks like a little like gold ingot or like a diamond. I wet the wrapper just on two of the edges. I add my filling, same amount. And then you fold in half into a triangle. And again, making sure that there's no air in between the filling and the rest of the wrapper. Put a little water on that bottom corner and then you just bring those two corners together and you end up with this shape. Which to be honest, like it's a difference in eating experience when you eat like the bonnet one versus this one. Because this one sort of has like these bigger like flaps of wrapper. And this one like is much more tight and compact. This shape is actually great for fried wontons because you get a lot of this crispy edge action. The next step is a really important one, which is before you get too far on your assembly, taste a few wontons. You could boil just one for yourself to taste. If you have other peanut gallery family members in the house just cook one for everybody and they can all give you their sort of feedback, taste and then adjust the seasoning accordingly. I think they just need a little more moisture. The oil. Maybe a little more oil. If your filling is a little bit dry, you may need to add a little bit more neutral oil. And I'm just gonna add also just a splash more of Shaoxing wine. It also adds moisture to the filling. Okay, I think we can assemble. So as Caitlin and I have been making wontons, we've definitely noticed that there is a difference when you really like pull that back edge of the wrapper towards you before you bring the two corners together versus doing it a little half-heartedly, right? So you can kind of tell, like this one's very stable and flat. This one's more of like a round shape, I would say. And like the bonnet is more like out. Both are totally fine. They're still gonna taste good. So if you wanna get that proper sort of bonnet shape, just make sure that you do this pulling of the back edge of the wrapper towards you before you bring those two corners together like that. And the same kind of goes for the diamond shape as well. When you fold it in half into a triangle, you're pulling this back, but also pushing the filling up while you bring those two corners together. And then you end up with this sort of like mound of filling as opposed to like this version where you just brought the two corners together and the filling is sort of like recessed. There's definitely a difference between the two. Both are totally fine, but this one definitely has a little bit more aesthetic appeal. Okay, so our dumplings are assembled and now I can talk about freezing them. We've put them on this parchment lined baking sheet. It's okay if they're touching a little bit because they will come apart pretty easily. You're gonna cover these. So you could use plastic wrap, but we usually use two clean plastic grocery bags. These came from my grandma. She transports dumplings and stuff in these and we just reuse them. So see that? It just covers it. And then I just put another one on the other end so that it is actually sealed. And we put them in the freezer. So you do have to clear some space in your freezer to make sure that the dumpling tray stays level. Overnight, they will be frozen solid and then you can move them to a Ziploc bag after that and keep them for longer storage. You definitely wanna freeze them right away after you've assembled them. Don't put them in the refrigerator. If you do, they may get a little bit soggy and you might get holes when you cook them. If you're cooking from frozen, you do not have to thaw them. Just put them straight into boiling water and they will cook up for you really nicely. You just need to extend the cooking time by a minute or two. Okay, so for the soup, I'm just gonna use store-bought chicken stock. No shame in that. We're gonna kinda Chinese-ify it. If you can find one that's just pure chicken stock without the vegetables and herbs and that kinda thing, then that will work a little bit better, but this is fine. So to this chicken stock, I'm just gonna add a drizzle of sesame oil and we're gonna add a little bit of white pepper and a little bit of salt and that's it. Just let that come up to a boil. To boil the wontons, you want a really big pot of boiling water. I'm gonna take a slotted spoon or a spoon. I'm gonna stir and just make sort of a whirlpool as I add. That way, the water prevents the wontons from just sort of sinking to the bottom and sticking. You're gonna cook the wontons for six minutes for fresh, seven minutes if you're cooking them from frozen. If the water comes back up to a rolling boil, you're gonna add a cup of cold water. See that? It was boiling vigorously, so I added the cool water. That's gonna stop that boiling process. It essentially buys you more time to not overcook the wrapper while you're waiting for the filling to cook through. If you let it sort of like boil rapidly for a long time, the wonton wrapper can sometimes overcook and can also turn out a little bit starchy. Another good gauge to tell when your wontons are done is once they're floating on the surface, cook them maybe one to two minutes past that and they should be good. So these are finished cooking, so I'm going to ladle them into bowls. I just use a strainer to do that. Now I have my soup. Soup is simmering. Take some broth first. Good. Store-bought is, you know, it's doable, but again, if you have my mom's chicken and pork stock on hand, that is really gonna be the best stock option for this wonton soup. Hot. Really good, really flavorful. The shepherd's purse is so fragrant. Highly recommend if you can find it at your local Asian market in the frozen section. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, wontons are a go-to. It takes a little bit of work to put them together, but it's a fun group cooking activity to do with your family to make them together, have them in the freezer, ready to go for meals in the weeks and months ahead. 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