Jiaozi dumplings
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Jiaozi dumplings are a common dish in Chinese cuisine. It has many design options, and the filling is also quite variable. Jiaozi is eaten both boiled and fried.
However, jiaozi are not wontons or gyoza. They differ from these two types of dough products in the thickness of the dough: for wontons and gyoza the dough should be rolled out very thin, almost until transparent, while for jiaozi the dough is thick. There is also a difference in serving. While wontons are served in liquid, jiaozi dumplings are served without it. They are traditionally eaten dipped in specific sauces. For this reason, the filling of jiaozi can be quite neutral in taste - the spiciness is achieved through those same sauces.
The composition of jiaozi, in my opinion, is best described by one of the many legends about their origin.
There was once an emperor, a famous lover of life and a glutton. And so one of his nobles advised the emperor that if you eat a hundred different and non-repeating dishes, then this will have a particularly good effect on life expectancy and health.
I don’t know why such a strange thought came into the nobleman’s head - either he hoped that the ruler would overcome pancreatitis from incompatible foods, or he really wanted to please his ruler and came up with a tempting entertainment for him. Well, they invited the best cook to the palace, he prepared 99 different dishes, but he couldn’t come up with the hundredth!
However, as you know, nothing develops brain activity more than the thought of parting with one’s own head - and the cook, out of fright, simply finely chopped and mixed the remains of the products that he had used for other dishes, and rolled them into the stale dough. And it was the hundredth dish that the emperor liked the most. This is how Jiaozi appeared.
Nowadays, there are fewer liberties in the composition of products, but, nevertheless, there is no strict canon either. The most traditional meat for jiaozi dumplings is pork (one cannot say that it is the only meat - theoretically, there are, say, jiaozi with shrimp). But their composition can include almost any kind of greens: cabbage, white cabbage, Chinese cabbage, chard, spinach... Herbal seasonings include neera (which is difficult to buy in Europe), green onions and wild garlic.
Ингредиенты
Flour - 250 g
Water - 125 ml, plus water for cooking
Pork - 150 g
Cabbage - 150 g
Green onions - 1 pc.
Garlic - 2 cloves
Ginger - 2 cm
Soy sauce - 2 tbsp.
Brown rice vinegar - 1 tbsp.
Рецепт
1. Preparation of the dough should begin at least 4 hours before serving. I use an electric dough mixer to knead the dough; it must be very strenuous work with your hands - it’s extremely tight! Pour water into the flour, knead the dough until it forms into a single lump (if it does not want to form into a lump, add water a teaspoon at a time), and then knead for 10 minutes.
2. Keep the dough in a bowl under a damp cloth for 2 hours at room temperature.
3. Knead the dough for another five minutes and place it in a bowl under a cloth for another half hour.
4. During this half hour we need to prepare the minced meat. I’ll be honest: for me it’s a matter of five minutes. For this you need a very powerful electric meat grinder. I simply run cabbage, green onions, and pork through the coarsest cutting mode, and squeeze the garlic through a garlic press. This method can only be used under jiaozi for cooking.
5. If you are going to fry them, then the cabbage should either be cut into very thin noodles, or finely chopped, salted, pressed with your hands and left to drain for at least 10 minutes to remove excess liquid. Those. The filling for frying jiaozi should be drier than for boiled ones, otherwise they will not turn out properly crispy.
6. Stir 1-2 tablespoons of soy sauce into the minced meat. If you are going to eat jiaozi without hot and salty sauces, add salt and even pepper.
7. Knead the dough a third time, now for a short time with your hands. The consistency should be absolutely rubbery, the dent made with your finger begins to straighten out right before your eyes. This dough can be rolled either without flour at all, or with a very small amount of it.
8. Divide the dough into 3 parts. We keep the two we don’t work with in a bowl under a cloth.
9. Divide the dough into two halves, each of those halves into more halves, and each of those halves into more halves. In short, we should have 8 approximately identical pieces of dough.
10. Roll each piece into a ball.
11. Flatten each ball with the palm of your hand into a flat cake.
12. Lightly roll out the cakes with a rolling pin - literally a couple of movements in one direction and a couple of movements in the other. No need to roll thin! Tonko is gyoza and wontons. The circles should be smaller than the round part of your palm without the fingers.
13. Place a teaspoon of filling in the middle of each circle. There should be free zones of 1-1.5 cm along the edges.
14. Make the first 2-3 folds on one side. We pinch very tightly; under no circumstances should jiaozi dumplings have holes or come apart during cooking.
15. Well, then we pinch the folds one by one with a pigtail - first on one side, then on the other.
16. In general, there are many different sculpting options, and many different shapes. But in this case, the braid goes from one side to the other, gradually narrowing.
17. The result is something like a leaf or petal in shape.
18. Ready-made jiaozi is convenient to lay on fabric. An alternative is to flour a surface.
19. When you are sculpting the last portion, you can put the water to boil for cooking. Jiaozi are lowered into boiling water, then with a careful movement of a large spoon or wooden spatula they are separated from the bottom, to which they are often stuck.
20. Cooking - in boiling water. The criterion for readiness is floating to the surface and swelling (more clearly visible when cooking under a lid). Cooking time until done is 5-8 minutes. An alternative option is to add 100 ml of cold water to the boiling jiaozi at the moment of floating, wait until it boils again, pour in another 100 ml of cold water, and when it boils again, then it’s ready. There is, however, a version that this is a ritual action that has nothing to do with cooking, because jiaozi is one of the dishes traditionally served on the Chinese New Year.
21. While cooking the dumplings, you can actually prepare sauces. They are very easy to make. Mix soy sauce and brown rice vinegar in equal proportions. If it is not there, use a smaller amount of some other sweeter vinegar (not essence). Normally, garlic and ginger are supposed to be finely chopped, but I can safely press them through a garlic press. They drown very quickly in the sauce, literally after a minute only brown liquid is visible.
23. Jiaozi dumplings are served without liquid. When eating, they are individually dipped into sauce or sauces.