The motivation:
It is truly unbelievable that an “old China hand” like me has never made jiaozi 餃子 dumplings before. I’ve certainly eaten them on many occasions but I’ve always been shy of making them. It’s something to do with the weight of expectation – I’ve never made chapatis either – combined with my history of sheer lack of artistic talent and crack-handedness. Put it like this: I would never have earned a Blue Peter badge. I’m a reasonably good cook and my food normally tastes good but the presentation is often a total disaster.
I’m not generally a fan of fake meat but, having enjoyed Omnipork potsticker guotier 鍋贴 at our local vegan restaurant, I wanted to try cooking it for myself. I found a Thermomix recipe, screwed my courage up in both my hands and gave it a go. After all half a billion people have these in their culinary repertoire, so they couldn’t be that difficult, could they?
The verdict:
It did take a while to prepare and shape the skins, and I probably didn’t use enough filling in each dumpling. I had to shape them like this in order to fit all 36 into my Varoma steamer at the same time, so in truth these look more like tortelloni than jiaozi. Next time I do them, I’ll use more of a more highly-flavoured mixture, maybe with spring onions or chilli. Chicken or prawns might be nice. At any rate Meeta, the chef at Hemingway’s needn’t watch her back too closely for a while.
There’s no doubt that these are a bit of a faff and one or two of the dumplings were a bit thick-skinned, but it was probably worth doing. I made a lot so I’ll be eating them all week. That’s far from an unpleasant prospect.