Simple Potstickers Recipe
Potstickers is a kind of Chinese dumplings, which is a popular dish across East Asia.
It is tradition to make and have dumplings during Chinese New Year!
The shape of the dumplings is similar to a kind of ancient Chinese money, therefore, dumplings are a symbol of good fortune in the Chinese culture.
Dumplings are usually boiled in a pot of water, but when they are fried-steamed in a pan, they’re called “potstickers”, or called “gyoza’ in Japanese.
If you love Japanese food, you definitely know what gyoza is.
The great thing about making dumplings is that you can literally put anything you want inside of them, as long as all the ingredients are chopped into really small pieces!
The ones that I made are pork-cabbage dumplings. I’ve seen other people using beef, carrots, zucchini, sweet corns, shrimps, mushrooms, etc.
What I love about dumplings, other than they are delicious, is that they are so CONVENIENT!
You can make a bunch of them and just freeze them in the fridge.
Take some out to boil or pan-fry, and that’s a meal!
Dumplings have starch, meat and vegetables.
You don’t need to cook other things to go with them.
This dish is perfect for teenagers and college students. Hahaha. 😀
Ingredients
Filling
3/4 lb ground pork
3~4 leaves napa cabbage (or cabbage)
2 spring onions
3 cloves of garlic
1 tsp ground ginger powder
2 tsp (Chinese) five-spice powder
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp salt
A pinch of ground black pepper
Five-spice powder or Chinese five-spice blend can usually be found at grocery stores, like Walmart, in the spice aisle. If not found at the spice aisle, it could be at the Asian food aisle. You can always find five-spice at an Asian or Chinese market if there is one nearby.
Sesame oil is usually located at the Asian food aisle in a normal grocery store as well.
If you struggle to find either of these, you can always find them on Amazon.
Wrappers
1 and 1/2 cups flour (all purpose)
1/2 cup water
or
You can just get some wrappers from the grocery stores or Asian markets.
I’ve seen them in stores, like Walmart and Winco. They are usually right by where tofu is.
Store bought dumpling wrappers are convenient, but they also break very easily during cooking, so I still prefer homemade wrappers.
Instructions
1 First, let’s start with the wrappers.
Mix the flour and the water together. Gather the dough and start kneading!
Knead until the it is smooth on the surface of the dough.
Put the dough back into the bowl, put a plastic wrap over the bowl, and let the dough sit for 10 minutes.
Knead the dough again for about 3 minutes (the surface should be really smooth now).
Put the dough back into the bowl, put the plastic wrap back on, and let it sit for 1 hour.
I actually made the dough the night before making the dumplings. After the second time of kneading, I just wrapped the dough really well in plastic wrap, and put it into the fridge for the next day.
2 While we’re waiting for the dough, let’s get the filling ready.
Wash and chop the cabbage into really fine pieces.
Chop the spring onions really fine as well.
Minced the garlic.
You can chop the vegetables in the traditional way, with a knife, or if you’re lazy as I am, just use a food processor.
I would still recommend chopping the onions with a knife or a pair of scissors though. Food processor tends to make spring onions mushy for some reasons, and it doesn’t chop them up very well.
3 Mix cabbage, ground pork, spring onions, garlic together really well.
You can mix it with a spoon, but I’ve found using hand is the easiest.
Wear plastic gloves if you don’t wanna ruin your nails or ring. Heeh. 😀
Mix in the soy sauce, sesame oil, salt, five-spice powder, ground ginger powder, and some ground black pepper.
Make sure everything is mixed really well!
4 Take the dough out, knead a little bit, and make it into a long stick shape.
Cut the stick of dough into small pieces, about the thickness of a thumb.
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5 Make the small pieces of dough into a ball shape, and then flatten it a bit.
Use a rolling pin to make it even more flat.
Roll from the edge to the center, and turn the dough as you roll.
The edge should be thinner and the center thicker, so it is easier to wrap the filling and doesn’t break apart easily during cooking.
See this video for clearer instruction: How to make Chinese dumpling by Maggie Zhu
Another option for making the wrapper: roll the dough out, flatten it to very thin, and just use a cup or a round cutter to cut out the wrappers (as shown below).
6 Take a wrapper, place it in your palm,
and get about 1 tablespoon of filling at the center of the wrapper.
Put a little bit water around the edge of the wrapper, and then close it up by folding it in half.
Make folds on one side of the edge, and seal the two edges together tight!
*Make sure the dumplings are able to sit on its own, as shown in the last photo. (for pan-fry purposes.)
See this video for how to fold dumplings.
Full original video from Just One Cookbook.
If you are not eating the dumplings right away, lay the dumplings neatly on a flat plate or baking pan, and put them in the freezer.
After the outer part of the dumplings is hard and cold, you can put the dumplings into a ziplock bag and store them back into the freezer.
Frozen dumplings are good for a month in the freezer.
Ways to Cook Dumplings
1 Deep fried
2 Boiled
Boil a pot of water.
After the water start boiling, drop the dumplings in.
It takes about 5-8 minutes to cook.
The dumplings are almost done when they float to the surface of the water, but since there are raw meat, I would still let them boil for another minute or two after floating.
3 Potsticker (or Steam-Fry in a Pan)
Heat up some oil in a frying pan.
Lay the dumplings in the pan with the folded side up.
Distant the dumplings a little bit, so they are not in contact with each other.
After you fill the pan with dumplings, gently pour 1/2 cup of water into the pan.
Turn the heat to MEDIUM.
(If it is on HIGH, the dumplings will stick to the pan and burn, and the filling inside won’t be cooked.)
Cover the pan with a lid, and let the dumplings be steamed.
When the water is almost dried up at the bottom of the pan, remove the lid, and let the rest of the water evaporate.
The potstickers are done when a crispy thin layer is formed underneath them. You should be able to pick up the potstickers very easily by this point.
Watch this guy’s video on how to fry gyoza (potstickers).
Put the crispy sides up in a plate, so it won’t turn soggy again.
Enjoy your delicious homemade potstickers!!!
