Lamb Wontons with Chili Oil

What is up everybody and welcome to Fan of Lamb, our very first cooking class here in the Fan of Lamb cooking club. I'm Joel Gameron and I'm gonna be your chef today. This is gonna be epic. If this is your first time, which it is your first time, because it's my first time here, I'm gonna lay down some ground rules for you guys and some really just kind of frameworks. But the idea here is we're here together. We're cooking alongside of each other. This is totally interactive, meaning you can ask me questions in real time, I can ask you questions in real time, and we can all celebrate American lamb in all of its glory in real time together. The idea behind this club is we believe American lamb belongs on your table so much more often than probably it is landing on your table. I think when we think about lamb in general, we think it's a special occasion thing. Maybe we're going out and getting lamb chops for a holiday or something like that, but lamb is so versatile. It is absolutely so smart to buy. It can play so many different roles in your cooking repertoire, and it is so important that we are supporting American lamb. This is lamb made by American ranchers, family farms scattered across America, and that is what this cooking club and what this cooking class is absolutely dedicated to. So we are gonna go live once a month. Usually it's gonna be me. It might be some of our chefs here at American lamb that might be interacting with you, but outside of class, we can chat with each other in the community place. So if you've ever been on the community page, we're gonna be chatting with you guys daily, talking to you guys about recipe inspiration. We want you guys to share photos, ideas, anything that you can imagine as it relates to American lamb. This, again, is for all of us who just love, love lamb. What makes this really special also is it's not just one chef. There are two of us. We have an amazing chef in the chat. Her name is Diana. Diana, how are you? Hi, Chef Joel. I'm so excited to be here. It's kind of fun being on this side and so excited about this first club class, and I totally love this project. Love this. Diana is a killer chef with us. I hope that she'll teach a couple of these fan of lamb classes this year. But if you have questions about the recipe, about American lamb in general, she's right there to support you guys along the way. Diana can type right back to you. She can also tell me out loud verbally your questions so I can kind of address them in real time. Without further ado, should we get cooking? By the way, Diana, I know I'm lobbing this to you, but fan of lamb, yes? Huge, American lamb, huge fan. What's your favorite way to use it? Well, I tested this recipe at home last week and it was so delicious. So delicious, such a fun way to use lamb. I kind of feel like we're kind of starting it off with maybe the best recipe that you could possibly imagine. I don't know how we're gonna be able to top this. We're gonna continue to try and top this, but we are making lamb wontons with chili oil today. And this recipe, you just need to sit because it is a moment where you're like, why is this so good? It is absolutely the most round, just crave-worthy dish. And we are using ground American lamb. So when you go to the grocery store, there is obviously just so much different cuts of lamb that you can tackle. We'll be talking a lot about different cuts throughout this year. We'll have lots to talk about. Ground lamb is so important. In fact, it is probably, if I was gonna say, whichever lamb that you should buy the most of, it's ground lamb, why? Super economical, also incredibly versatile. Whether you're making meatballs, burgers, meatloaf, stews, chilies, it's just there. And it brings this beautiful sweetness and it's so sustainable, right? There are cuts or trim that our ranchers maybe are not using and they're grinding into this. Nothing crazy, nothing you need to be worried about. All that just adds beautiful complexity to the ground lamb. So ground lamb is like stage one for us lamb lovers out there. So we've got half a pound of ground lamb in here and we're gonna stud it with some beautiful flavors. So I've got ginger and I've got garlic. And I was taught this at a Chinese restaurant, but the best way to kind of deal with garlic is you could grate it, but we want this super fine. The problem with grating is sometimes, I don't know, when it's small like this, you can grate your fingers and I don't like cutting myself in the kitchen. So a good hack here is just to put your garlic down and give it a good smack. I worked at this Chinese restaurant and it was one of my first jobs as a chef and they all were using cleavers to chop with. And I just have never seen that before. I've always been used to like the chef knife and they were just smashing everything. I'll show you how they did it with ginger too, but you can see it just breaks it down so fast. So I've got some chopped garlic here and I'm gonna just kind of put that over our ground lamb. And then I've got ginger. And I think, listen, ginger, here's the deal. You see it at the grocery store and you're like, I don't wanna deal with ginger. I don't wanna peel it, the whole thing. So A, you don't have to peel it. Did that just blow your mind? You can eat the peels, okay? If you wanna peel it, you can take a little knife like this. You can kind of get rid of all these little nooks and crannies. Another great tip is to grab a spoon and kind of scrape it down like this, if you wanna peel it, okay? Also, don't get rid of all these trims and these peels. Just like our American lamb farmers, we keep these, we repurpose them. You can infuse these in teas and cocktails, all that good stuff. So leave your ginger trim alone. But if you wanna just leave the actual skin on like I do, I just cut like little coins of ginger like this. And like the garlic, I just give it a good smash. Diana, how we doing on the chat? We have some lamb lovers out there? Oh my gosh, do we ever. Okay, you're making a lot of noise here. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. We do. Somebody said lamb in pozole, right? Stop that. Right, right, right. And spaghetti squash with lemony lamb. See, that's huge. I'm just FYI, I'm trying to lose another 50 pounds, but I've already lost 50 pounds. Spaghetti squash. Can we just talk about how underutilized spaghetti squash is? And then you put something like American lamb in it, and it just gives it a little bit of fattiness, a little bit of richness. It's perfect. All right, so I've got ginger and garlic in my ground lamb here. And I'm just gonna add a couple more ingredients. This is gonna be a little quick. If you're cooking along, no problem. But I'm adding some chopped up little scallions here. I say quick, because I'm not chopping them up. I'm just pouring them in. So chopped up scallions. Cilantro. Cumin and chili flakes. And then a little bit of soy sauce. Now, when you're doing a cooking show like me, and you look totally badass just pouring things in, I know it doesn't take, you know, that fast at home. We're lucky that we got everything ready. We have all these little cute dishes. I feel like Martha Stewart over here. At home, we know, listen, you have the spoon, it takes a minute. If you don't have one or two or even three of these ingredients, like you don't have soy sauce, or you don't have cilantro, or you don't have, no problem. It will still be delicious. I don't want you to feel like you need all of these ingredients. It's a big ordeal. You don't. If you have three of these six ingredients, I don't care which three, this is gonna kick butt. Okay? Just know that. This is a very approachable recipe. And then this right here, if you can kind of track this one down, sesame oil. Ugh. Now sesame oil is like truffle oil. It's really strong. A little bit goes a long way. I like to store it in my fridge. Otherwise, after a month, it starts to kind of taste a little bit flat. But the fridge kind of keeps it nice and fresh. So I have all this over my ground lamb. And now I'm gonna get in there and just give it a good messing, right? Good mess around. So I'm gonna start kind of kneading this. So ground lamb, I wanna ask everyone out there, what would you make with ground lamb? And I think this is important to kind of talk about is, I've noticed, because I've taught so many home cooks, people just get so tired of the same recipes. I don't know about you guys, but like everyone's always like, I'm just so bored of like the same meatloaf, the same pasta dish, the same soup. And you know, all you have to do is if something calls for ground chicken, ground pork, ground beef, try swapping in ground lamb. Just see what it does. Lamb is one of those special proteins, one of those special, beautiful proteins that just has that own flavor profile. And it totally changes it. Like my brother-in-law is also a chef. My wife obviously has a thing for people who can cook. And he is awesome. And he always makes this lasagna with bolognese every Christmas. And this year he did it with ground lamb. And it just tastes like completely different from Christmases in the past. It was like a totally its own vibe. And it was that one simple swap. So I kind of feel like if you're in a rut, or you just want like a new flavor profile, or you just wanna kind of like refresh it, lamb is really the way to go. All right, what do people say about ground lamb? Just curious. There's still so many great ideas coming in. Lamb raviolis, gyros, burgers. They just are keeping them coming. It's great. Gyros are my jam. And can I just say that it's so great. There's so many dumpling restaurants now that are popular. And they're expensive. They're delicious. There's some good restaurants out there, and they're delicious. But they're expensive. So these are just fun to make at home and put them in the freezer, right? Dude, totally. I will also say like DoorDash and all these delivery things, also super expensive. Like yesterday, my wife's like, should we make or should we order in Thai food? And I'm like, well, what do we have in the fridge? And she's kind of telling me, and I'm like, no, we're gonna make it. Saved us probably like 70 bucks. I mean, it's crazy. If you can figure out a way for this stuff that we do take out or we go out to, like Diana said, to make it at home, man, you save so much money. And ultimately you're saving, I think it's gonna taste better and it's so much more sustainable, right? It's just great. So, all right. We have these little wonton wrappers, which are essentially pasta dough. Like literally you can buy these anywhere. Freeze the ones you don't use, okay? They look like little playing cards. So we're gonna make little wontons, little lamb wontons. I will say if you leave them out, they start to get kind of dry. So it's nice to put like a wet towel over the top of them or something damp just so they don't dry out because rolling them takes a little bit. And I'm gonna start rolling them, but basically I take it and instead of it being kind of square to me, I do it kind of like at an angle. So it looks like a diamond. And I grab a little water on my finger and I just brush the outside. And I grab about a teaspoon of my lamb mixture here. And I put it right in the middle. And then I just go point to point, right? This one's a little dry, but I think it will work. And then I just crimp it tight. Take it like that. And then I just grab one little more dab of water and I have this beautiful little wonton. This one's a little dry, but it's still gonna be great. So I'll put this one to the side. Let's do another one. This one is less dry. It'll be good. And you can really feel it. If it's too brittle, don't worry about it. So outside, a little teaspoon of lamb right in the middle. Gorgeous. Point to point. Squish out all that air. One more dab and around we go. And you have this perfect little wonton. So I'm gonna keep making these for a second. And I will say, these are one of those things, you know, and there's a couple of moments in cooking and certain recipes where it just makes sense to get other people involved. You know, it could be your partner, it could be a parent, it could be your kids, but this is just so relaxing. And if you look at other cultures, whether it's rolling pasta in Italy or dumpling rolling, you know, in China, this is like their social hour. This is like the moment like to gather and talk, maybe do a little gossiping. So I love it. This is our moment to talk. So one thing I wanna say why it's so important to support American lambs specifically is nine out of 10 of these ranchers who grow American lamb, these are family farms, right? This is the backbone of America. And I just think it's important, you know, when you're at the grocery store, to just know where your lamb's coming from, right? Is it a farm nearby? Is it a farm here in America? Those all make such a big difference to these families, to lamb in general. So I just wanna call that out. Take a minute, know where your food's coming from. It makes such a big difference, not just for yourself, but obviously for the environment and the economy as well. All right, so I'm just gonna keep making these up. Diana, how we doing in the chat? Any questions I should be hitting up? We're doing great. Some comments about how it's just nice to do something that's not traditional with lamb. I know. You know, I mean, I love a lamb rack and a lamb roast and a lamb leg a lot also, but it is, it's fun. It's just a little bit of a different type of recipe. Lamb gets kind of, I kind of said this at the top, but it kind of does, it's one of those proteins that gets kind of pigeonholed over the years. And we think, oh, lamb with mint jelly, or it's like it only has one purpose. Lamb is one of the most versatile ingredients. And I mean that in animal protein and outside of animal protein, you can imagine. There's so many different ways you can use it. And again, as a chef, the best way to kind of tell you is wherever it calls for another protein, try swapping in lamb. It really just refreshes everything up. All right, I got these going. So there's this restaurant here in Seattle, that's where we're based, called Din Tai Fung. Anyone ever heard of Din Tai Fung? It's an unbelievable kind of Taiwanese, Chinese-influenced restaurant. And I love going there, it's a total treat. But it's one of those places that you just like can't get into, you know? And this is like one of those reasons where last time I was waiting in line, I was just dreaming of this class. And I'm like, I can't wait to just make these myself, because I can stand here, spend a couple hundred dollars, and maybe three hours of my life, where I can just rock these out at home. Yeah, Diana? Can we get a slow motion close-up of folding one of those folds? Yeah, let's do it. Slow motion close-up. There you go, somebody was having trouble seeing exactly how you were doing that. All right, so here we go. Let me just move some friends out of the way here. So I'm going point to point, right? And then I'm kind of squishing it down, so you have this kind of triangle bit. And then I'm going another point to point, and kind of wrapping it around itself. And then crimping tight. Thank you, Chef. And it's totally okay if they open up. Yes. Yeah, oh, good, good, good. Thank you, that was great. Of course, I'm gonna do one more, and I think we're in really good shape. So as I'm doing this, I do have some water boiling, right? Just a little bit of water. And just like pasta, that's kind of how we're treating this. No big difference than pasta. So I kind of crimp these up. Obviously, you can make a lot more of these, but I don't want you guys to have to sit around and watch me do all of them. And sometimes they open up, and that is just the joy of cooking, man. These are not made by a robot or a machine. These are homemade, and they should say that they're homemade. I love that. Okay, I wanna do one more. I gotta do one more. They're kind of therapeutic. This is, you know, when I started cooking, it was in high school, and it was my therapy. It still is my therapy. You know, when I have a stressful day, I get in the kitchen. I don't know if anyone else is like that. Feel free to speak up, make me not feel so alone. But I like getting in the kitchen alone, hanging out, doing a project, like crimping wontons. This is just the joy for me. Some people see this as, you know, a task, not me. All right, so I'm just gonna load these up on a little sheet tray. These look so cute, easy. And again, these will dry out. So a little wet towel, if you're not gonna cook them right away, is the way to go. This looks great. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drop them in our boiling water. So you can see here, we've got some boiling water. All right, and I'm just gonna kinda drop them right in. And I don't want this water to be semi-boiling, kind of boiling, no. This needs to be hot tub bubbles. All right, rolling boil. And these will take about four minutes for the outside wrapper to get cooked and nice and soft, for the lamb to cook all the way through. Easy peasy. I'll show you guys how to know they're absolutely done as well. Any questions on kind of the rolling of the lamb? I'm gonna give my hands a quick wash. Or the shaping of the wontons. There were a few questions. I think the last demonstration that you did was really helpful for people. Yeah, good. Yeah. Good, all right, awesome. Well, these are cooking away. Diana brought up a great point as we were kind of talking about this. You don't have to boil these. In fact, these are really good if you just put a little olive oil in a pan and you can do kind of like potsticker style, where you almost saute them and get the outside really, really crispy. You can steam these, awesome. You can bake them. They get kind of crispy like an egg roll. You can deep fry them. Unbelievable, obviously. So lots of ways you can cook these once you kind of have them wrapped. But we'll just kind of head back here for a sec just so you can kind of see, we're at like the halfway point. If I just kind of carefully lift them out, look how beautiful those look. Aren't those awesome? You can see the lamb inside is getting nice and cooked and the noodle itself, the wrapper, is just getting perfectly tender. So those are doing their thing. I have to say, beyond the lamb, what makes this recipe just sing is the oil, the sauce. Now this is a really typical kind of sizzling oil Chinese sauce. And I love the way that they infuse oils in China with different flavors, whether it's peppercorns or chili flakes or lemon zest. There's so many ways you can do it. But just the oil itself is enough to just give these dumplings all of the layers that they deserve. So I'm gonna tell you guys what we need here. So we have a little bit more garlic, a little bit more ginger, beautiful. And we've got kind of some ingredients in here. I'm gonna hold them up. John, hopefully you can see this, but we've got sugar, salt, a little bit of black pepper, chili flake, and then secret ingredient. I'm gonna call it out. It's chicken bouillon, okay? We test this recipe, we test a lot of our recipes, a lot. And one of the things that makes Chinese cooking so good, I have to call it out, and this is gonna be controversial, I'm gonna say it, MSG. Now, not every Chinese restaurant in America uses MSG, nor do they care or stand behind it. MSG, for those of you guys who don't know, is kind of like a little powder form of umami. So it just gives it kind of a roundness. And there's been a lot of controversy around it because people think it's chemically. This is not MSG, this is chicken bouillon, but it plays a very similar role. So if you don't wanna add chicken bouillon to this, you don't need to. I will say a really natural thing that you could add to this is ground mushroom powder. So dried mushrooms, ground up. If you can't find the mushroom powder, just look for the dried mushrooms and then put them in like a little spice grinder and put them into like a little powder form and they're great. It solves the same issue. But that little flavor plays so good with lamb because lamb has its own little umami going on and this just heightens it. That's all it does. All right, I've got a bowl here. I'm gonna just take out, look at these. Oh my gosh. They smell ridiculous. Just absolutely ridiculous. All right, so I'm pulling them out. They've been about four minutes. I'm getting as much water off them as I can. I've got one more in there. I can't let that puppy go to waste. Oh, beautiful. This is actually perfect. This one popped out. So we'll show you guys. So this is what the inside would look like and you can always cut into it and just kinda make sure it is cooked all the way through because this one is beautiful. Let me try it. Oh. Oh my gosh. Just the lamb itself. Lamb and ginger. We have a moment for lamb and ginger. So good. Yes, Diana. Chef, I have never heard of dried umami powder. Somebody's asking if we could use that. Are you familiar with dried umami powder? No, it's a cold umami powder. I wanna learn more. I definitely have heard of mushroom powder, bouillon. All those are good replacements but I've never heard of umami powder. I'm gonna have to Google that one. All right. So I thought I'd just show you guys kind of a different technique here with the ginger. You can smash it like I did in the beginning or with the skin on, just grate it. So again, this is gonna be for our sauce. So a little bit of ginger, I'd say about a tablespoon of ginger. Beautiful. And we've got some garlic. And again, I don't like to grate the garlic because it just, it plays it too close to the fingers for me but quick smash and we'll chop this all up together. Now, this technique for this sauce could not be more easy. So I'm gonna chop this all up. The key for this sauce is to chop it incredibly fine. Like you wanna chop it almost to like a pulp. Even if you have like a little food processor, just like zip it up. All right, so we're gonna chop that up. While we're chopping it, I wanna heat up some oil. So I've got two oils here. All right, I'm gonna turn up the heat here. I've got a little pan. Hopefully you guys can see that. And I've got two oils. I've just got canola oil and I've got chili oil. Those two things. Now I said this earlier, but let's say you don't have the chili oil. You just can't find it at the grocery store. That's cool, just go with canola oil. Same thing, if you've got chili oil, you don't need to have the canola oil. We like the balance. We test these recipes out a lot. We kind of like the balance of both. So we're putting this in a pan and we're gonna bring it up until we see a slight smoke. Like almost we're gonna like saute something. So we wanna warm this oil up. And while that's happening, I'm gonna chop up this ginger and garlic. Really, really, really fun. This looks really good and it smells crazy delicious. All right, did we get a clear bowl yet or no? That's cool if we didn't. I will show this technique. So now I'm taking my knife and I'm kind of pressing the garlic and the ginger. You could do this with the dumplings too, but this kind of smears it and breaks it down even finer. And you have this just unbelievable pulp of ginger and garlic. Really, really nice. So I've got, again, kind of our sugar, salt, umami mixture, our ginger and garlic. And then I'm actually flying in here a little, thank you, glass bowl, because I want you guys to be able to see this. So I'm gonna add all these ingredients into this bowl. Cool? And just like back of a spoon, just kind of mix it all up. Ah, smells so good. And we haven't even started the fun part yet. So I just wanna kind of recap what we've got going here, because we've got a lot going on. We've got cooked, beautiful, unsauced wontons, okay? Lamb infused with gorgeous spices and aromatics. So those are ready to be sauced. We've got oil heating up in a little skillet. This is chili and canola oil. And then we chopped up a bunch of aromatics, okay? And what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this little skillet of oil, and watch this. We're just gonna pour it right over the top, and it's gonna just sizzle. Isn't that beautiful? You don't need to cook it in the pan, nothing. Just let that really hot oil bloom all these beautiful flavors. Look at that. Have you guys seen this chili crunch everywhere right now? It's so trendy. Diana, are you a fan? There's been some conversation in the chat about that. Really? What did people say? Oh yeah, that we are loving it. Yeah, a lot of people love it. Also, great comment. Air fried wontons. Oh, who said air fried wontons? I wanna call them out. Margie. Margie, thank you for that call. Absolutely, I'm kind of an air fryer. Or maybe somebody else. Well, everybody's really excited about it. Maybe a lot of people are commenting on it. Maybe somebody else said it themselves. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, air frying is amazing. I mean, for those of you guys who don't know, what air frying does, it just allows air to go underneath and on top of whatever's going on. So it kind of gives it a crispy exterior. You could totally, I would spray them down with like a little bit of nonstick spray, put them right in there raw, air fry them for maybe eight minutes, and they'll come out so crispy and delicious. Shout out to Kimberla, air fryer. Kimberla. Kimberla, all right. Shout out to Kimberla. All right, this smells like God just gave me a kiss on the nose. Like, I don't know what else to say. Like, it smells so dynamic and so different. Look at this. I mean, I will sneak this under my pillowcase tonight if my wife would have it. This is everything to me. This smells so good. It's absolutely beautiful. Look at that red oil, the chili oil, and it's now infused with the garlic and the ginger. It's beautiful. So we're gonna add a little bit more to this. A little soy sauce, a touch of water, actually. And that kind of just balances out the oil. You could add a little bit of rice wine vinegar to this if you want to, but you have just this gorgeous little chili oil sauce situation. I'm just gonna try it. It's a 10. I don't know what else to say. It's just so good. And even this just, like, drizzled on top of a lamb burger or some lamb meatballs. Like, you don't have to do the whole wonton thing, but this sauce itself really pairs nicely with lamb. All right, so I've got our wontons. They've been hanging out. At this point, if I kind of move them, you can see they're kind of sticking to each other, so just give them, like, a little shaky shake. All right, and they'll kind of start bouncing around. That looks great. And then I just take a couple of spoonfuls, oh my gosh, of this chili-infused oil, and you just start kind of hitting that in there. Look at that. You just kind of drown them in this oil and just give it a good shake around. Oh, this looks crazy. I have to put a little bit more before I serve it. That looks incredible. We've got some other ingredients, too. We've got a little bit of scallions, a little bit of sesame seeds, and if you want, you can tear up a little bit of cilantro. I like a little bit of it just to kind of add a different type of green. So just kind of bundle that up, chop it up beautifully, and then over the top we go. And I'm just gonna let that sit for a sec. You guys, hopefully what you took away from this dish is not so much how good it is or all the different techniques, but you're seeing the versatility, right? Like, this is one dish. We're gonna celebrate, hopefully, hundreds, if not thousands, over the course of this community, all of us who love lamb. But lamb can just take us to so many different places, whether it's China, whether it's Europe. We're gonna travel all over the world through lamb, but also just really approachable things, right, here in America. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. The reality is just that lamb is just this open vessel of so many different possibilities. All right, I was gonna go fork, I'm going spoon. I wanna get some of that beautiful oil, so I'm just gonna get in there. I don't know if we can kind of see this just dripping. We get a closeup of this, John? Oh my gosh, this is just crazy. All right, here we go. Hardest part of the job. This is where I need a chair. I told you, you need to sit if you're gonna eat this. Whoa, just whoa. Talk about an explosion. You bite into it, it's just incredibly juicy. Lamb has that perfect balance of fat, so it's not overly fatty, but it's not lean. It's got that bounce, perfect. The inside with that ginger and garlic, you kind of crunch into the ginger. It gives it a spiciness, same with the garlic. Garlic is spicy if you really taste it. It's unbelievable. The cumin, it's just a little bit, but it's like humming in the background. And then this sauce, it kind of mirrors what's in the actual dumpling itself, but the sauce is just, I mean, it's just falling into all the little nooks and crannies of the dumpling, and it's just. I could eat that every day. If this was in front of me every day, no problem, I would never get sick of it. I'm telling you that wholeheartedly. I love this. I want to call out beyond this class, and thank you so much for hanging out with us. I want to call it again, head to the community forum. That little page, once you log out of here, we can share, we can talk about what we liked about the class, what we can improve upon this class. We are as much in this community here as you are, so we want to make sure that you are just getting inspired, you're getting empowered, and you're just celebrating all things American lamb. With that said, we absolutely want you to sign up for all of these live streams. Why? You don't have to attend. We know that your schedules get busy, but we want you guys to remember, we'll notify you guys when we do go live, and you might forget, something will come up, but you'll get that little notification, you'll be like, oh my gosh, they're going live today with American lamb burgers, so it's really important, even if you're not going to attend, sign up. It just acts as a reminder. Regardless, we just want to talk to you, we're in there daily, we want to just inspire, get you guys going when it comes to all this, and answer all the questions you might have. We want to be like this living resource just for you guys, so I so appreciate you guys joining us. This is our inaugural American lamb fan of lamb class, which is so exciting. We have so many amazing plans for this entire year, lots to celebrate, thank you so much, and thank you for eating American lamb. We absolutely love you, see you next time.