Potstickers/Dumplings

Welcome back!

Today, we have a very classic Chinese dish: potstickers, or jianjiao/guotie, literally "pot stickers". These are something you see all over China and which has spread to other East Asian countries like Japan with their gyoza or Korea with mandu. These can also have a wide variety of fillings, but for this one, we stuck to a very traditional style of dumpling: a standard pork and vegetable mixture.

Potstickers/Dumplings

Ingredients:

2 packages dumpling wrappers
1 pound cabbage (about 1/2 of a head)
1 pound ground pork
6 green onions, diced
1 1/2 teaspoon ginger paste
1 egg
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon oyster sauce (or soy sauce is ok)
3 tablespoons sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
2 tablespoons cooking rice wine/dry white wine
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon corn starch

Sauce:

Soy sauce
Chili oil
Sesame oil
Vinegar
Garlic, cilantro, green onion (optional)

Directions:

Chop up the cabbage. Remove all the excess water; you can do this simply by squeezing it. You could also add 1/2 teaspoon of salt into the cabbage and let it sit for 20 minutes before squeezing to help the water come out easier.
In a bowl, add in all the ingredients, as shown below.
Mix all these ingredients thoroughly.
Wrap the potstickers/dumplings. The amount that you put in each one depends on how big and thick your wrappers are.
Time to cook them!

In a pan, put about 2 tablespoons of oil on and set it on medium heat.
Arrange the dumplings onto the pan, and cook for 1-2 minutes.
Add about 200 milliliters of water (you want to cover the dumplings about halfway).
Cover the pan and cook until the water is pretty much gone - you'll hear a sizzling sound. This will probably take about 8-10 minutes.
Uncover and cook until the bottom is golden.

Mix your sauce simply by adding the ingredients you want together and enjoy!

What's convenient about this recipe is that you can make a bunch of dumplings and then save them in the freezer for later. Obviously, since it's frozen, it will take a little longer for the dumplings to cook, so keep that in mind if you do that. You could also try other combinations of ingredients in these dumplings - beef or shrimp are also sometimes used instead of pork, and some contain green onion as a primary vegetable. We've even done some that were just filled with a taco meat/refried beans mixture!

-Chefpo

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