Shanghai Styled Soup Dumplings

My dad, who is originally from the Shanghai region, tells me that dumplings, noodles, and all sorts of bread-oriented foods tend to be more Northern in cuisine since wheat and meat are more readily available. You'll likewise find a plethora of vegetarian dishes the farther south you go within China. While these dumplings are very labor intensive and you'll have the satisfaction that you didn't pay a small ransom to eat at Bellevue's Din Tai Fung restaurant, even though they have a visitor's window that lets you see their prep cooks rolling, filling, and making the very same dumplings.

Think of the last bread recipe you've done then multiply the time you spent waiting for that lazy dough to rise up by two and you get the approximate time it takes for all these ingredients to come together. Good thing gelatin that comes in small neat packages or else we'd be scraping down a length of pig skin for its gelatinous properties.

This recipe ratio comes from Brian Yarvin's A World of Dumplings book. The secret to having soup in a dumpling is to add a small amount of jelled soup to the dumpling before it gets steamed. The heat melts the soup that gently bathes the dumpling in a rich meaty broth, enhancing the elements of the dumpling; or at least that's the idea.

Dumpling making is a group affair, and doing this recipe with others is pleasantly more enjoyable. I should also mention that for this batch, I only made the dough and had the patience to pleat one dumpling. Oh, and I wrote the post and took the pics. :)

There are three ingredient sections to this recipe: the dough, the filling, and the soup.

The Dough

This is pretty straightforward for a dumpling wrapper. Take 3 cups of all purpose flour and mix it with 1 cup of hot water. Let it cool enough to knead by hand. Stir until it comes together as a dough. Then knead it for about 7 minutes until the dough springs back at the touch of a finger. Roll it into a mound, cover and wrap with plastic wrap and store it in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. You'll find that the dough is much easier to work with after the dough has rested from the manly kneading you've just done to it.

The book's author calls these wrappers "Chinese Wheat-Flour Dumpling Wrappers," and besides these soup dumplings, they can also used for Japanese gyoza, Chinese shu mai (steamed Chinese pork dumplings), and some other Chinese and Korean meat and/or vegetarian filled dumplings.

This amount of dough makes 50 dumpling wrappers, when rolled into a 3/4" long and cut into 3/4" sized pieces. Roll these out circular with a rolling pin. The thinner the edges are, the better.

The Filling

1/2 c. dried shitake mushrooms, rehydrated and diced (stems removed)
1/2 lb ground pork
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp fresh ginger, finely minced
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp Chinese red rice wine
pinch of kosher salt (optional)

Mix filling ingredients together in a bowl and refrigerate until ready to use.

The Soup Base

The soup base has the longest prep time with a minimum of 3 hours chilling to allow the soup to set after gelatin has been added. We had a few quarts of already prepared chicken stock from a recent meal, so we didn't have to get any bone-in chicken thighs to make the stock.

To the chicken stock (1.5 quarts or 6 cups), these ingredients were added:

1 small smoked bone-in ham hock
2 tbsp green onions, coarsely chopped
2 tbsp fresh ginger, coarsely chopped
1/4 c. Chinese red rice wine
kosher salt, to taste

1 packet of unflavored gelatin powder

Combine soup ingredients in a large pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer uncovered until the broth has reduced to a third of the original liquid. Strain out the solids. Put the warm soup in a nonmetallic container and sprinkle the gelatin powder on the surface. Let it stand for 10 minutes, or until the gelatin has absorbed some of the liquid and no longer looks powdery. Give it a good stir so that the gelatin dissolves. Cover the container and refrigerate for at least three hours.