Last week, when we were grocery shopping, my daughters saw Chinese dumplings, also known as jiaozi (pronounced jee-ow-dzuh) in the freezer section and requested that I buy them. Without even looking, I knew they’d be expensive, and had an idea.
“Why don’t we make them from scratch together as our next mother daughter activity?”
Lately, with life getting busy, I’ve been trying to set aside time with my daughters once a week to do something special, whether it is going bowling, going out to a movie, getting ice cream, etc… and we decided to make dumplings together as the activity this past week and it was a hit. Lots of fun, a frugal activity, and we ended up with a nice frugal dish that cost literally fractions of what the packaged dumplings would cost, and even drastically more cheap than what similar dumplings would cost at a restaurant.
These dumplings were made with a simple flour and water dough, which is allergy friendly and extremely cheap, as long as you aren’t sensitive to gluten. They are simple to make too, and the dough is easy to work with.
Once you have the dough, you can fill it with whatever you want. I threw together a filling from ground chicken, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, and grated onion, but you can make fillings from whatever you’d like, any proteins from ground turkey to beef to pork to egg to tofu, and you can add in vegetables such as cabbage or carrots or bok choy or mushrooms or any other vegetable you like, and you can make it entirely vegan by leaving out the proteins or using tofu as the protein. Redhousespice.com is where I got my recipe for the dumpling wrappers and it has a whole page dedicated to what you can use for fillings.
Steamed Dumpling Wrapper Recipe
Ingredients
- 230 g (scant 2 cups) all-purpose flour/plain flour
- 100 g (½ cup minus 1 tablespoon) boiling water
- 30 g (2 tablespoons) room-temperature water
Instructions
- Mix the boiling water with the flour with a fork, spoon, or chopsticks until all the water is mixed in.
- Add the room temperature water and mix well.
- Knead the dough until you have a good, workable dough. If the dough is too dry, add a tiny drop more water. If it is too sticky, add a drop more flour.
- Cover the dough and let it sit for 30 minutes.
- While the dough is sitting, prepare the filling.
- After letting the dough sit, it’s time to divide the dough into 24 equal parts. To do this, do as follows:
- Cut the dough into two equal portions. Cut each of those into two equal portions. Cut each of those into two equal portions. You now have 8 pieces. Cut each of the eight pieces into 3 equal portions. You now have 24 equal pieces of dough.
- Roll out each of the pieces of dough into a circle shape. If you find it sticks to the surface where you’re working, add a little more flour.
- Place a little filling for your dumpling in the center of your wrapper and fold up your dumpling. My daughters and I folded the edges and gathered them together into a parcel shape, but there are so many different ways you can fold them. (See here for inspiration.)
- Prepare enough dumplings to fill your steamer but not too overfilled because you don’t want them touching. Place the prepared dumplings on parchment paper so they don’t stick to your work surface. If you are using a very wet filling, don’t fill more than you need at once or the filling can get your dough too moist and it might fall apart. But if yours isn’t overly wet, like mine wasn’t, you can prepare them all at once.
- Prepare your steamer. I used a bamboo steamer basket. You can use a different type of steamer if you have one with a flat bottom. Bring the water in the steamer to a boil.
- Line your steamer with something to stop the dumplings from sticking to the steamer. I used parchment paper cut to size that I poked a few holes with a knife into it to allow the steam to come through it. The author of Red House Spice says you can use a slice of carrot under each dumpling to keep it off the steamer, use napa cabbage leaves, or oil a metal steamer basket, but I found the parchment paper to be simple enough.
- Fill your steaming basket with your dumplings and steam for 10-20 minutes, depending on your filling and how thinly you rolled out your dough. If your dough is thicker, you want it cooked longer or it might be too chewy.
- Eat immediately, with or without a dipping sauce. My kids had dipped in soy sauce or sweet chili sauce, but you can use your favorite Asian dipping sauce.
- Fill your steaming basket with the next batch of dumplings and steam them, repeating as needed.
- Eat these hot and as soon as they are prepared or they’ll get rubbery. If you don’t have them immediately, you can steam them again for a few minutes to soften them up.
- Enjoy!
Have you had jiaozi before? Homemade, from frozen, or store bought? What did you think of them? What type of filling did they have? Is this something you think you’d try at home? What would you fill them with?
