We made dumplings on Saturday.

Contrary to my expectations, it wasn’t really that difficult. Sure, there was a lot of arduous dicing, slicing and chopping involved, and some fiddly fumbling with dough to assemble the dumplings, but it wasn’t that bad. Honest.

I realise that it is probably considered heresy to even suggest this, but I reckon that we could have made life a heck of a lot easier by using a blender rather than chop-chop-chopping everything by hand.

Ingredients: 1 chicken 1 rack of pork ribs 1kg of fine plain flour (warning: this was too much, 750g would have been plenty for the amount of filling that we had) about 1 1/2 – 2 cups water (warning: this a guesstimate, we didn’t really measure anything properly) about 500g minced pork about 12-15 chives/spring onions/shallots/whatever you happen to call them – the green leafy veggie things that taste mildly of onions. about 1/4 of a chinese cabbage salt to taste

  1. Chop up the chicken and the rack of pork ribs into large chuncks and stick them in a pot of boiling water. Leave to simmer for several hours. This will make yummy stock in which to boil the dumplings later.

  2. Finely chop up the fresh ginger. By ‘finely’, I really mean ‘mince’ – the piece should be really teeny-tiny.

  3. Finely chop up the chives. Again, the pieces should be tiny.

  4. Finely chop up the cabbage into reeeeeeally small pieces. Scald the chopped cabbage by putting it into boiling water for a minute before fishing it out/draining it. Leave it to cool for a bit, and then squeeze the excess water out of the cabbage with your hands.

  5. Mix the chopped ginger, chives and cabbage with the minced pork. Add salt to taste. Mix thoroughly. Put the mixture into the fridge while you make the dumpling dough.

  6. Take the flour and mix in about 3/4 cups of cold water and spread some extra flour onto a hard, flat surface. Keep adding water to make dough. Knead. Knead some more. Keep kneading. Are you kneading? Keep it up. Yup. Knead. You want to end up with a smooth, slightly elastic dough. It takes a while. Add extra flour or water to modify the texture of the dough as needed.

  7. Once the dough is ready, cut off small pieces and roll them into little balls about the size of a gumball. Then, use a rolling pin to flatten the ball out into a dough circle about 10cm across. Put flour on the rolling pin to stop the dough from sticking to it. The dough should be quite thin, otherwise the dumplings end up being too doughy and not meaty enough.

  8. Take the dough circle and spoon in some of the pork-ginger-chives-cabbage mix. Fold the dough over to make an envelope and seal the meat inside. Pinch the dough shut and put the dumpling onto a floured surface so it doesn’t stick. Dumpling is now ready for cooking.

  9. To stop the dumplings from getting to mushy, we put all the freshly sealed dumplings through a preliminary dip into plain boiling water for about 30sec each. This washed off any excess flour and stopped the filling from soaking through the dough. We put the partially-cooked dumplings onto a chopping board covered in olive oil to stop them from sticking to the surface (and each other).

  10. Once all the dumplings had been assembled and dipped into boiling water, we waited until our dinner guests arrived to start the actual cooking process, so the dumplings would be piping hot. Queue a quick dip in the shower to freshen up and the opening of alcholic refreshments. Mmm.

  11. Guests arrive and dumplings are all sent for a dip in the big stock pot which has been simmering on the stove and filling the flat with yummy smells for several hours. Boil dumplings for about 15-20mins.

  12. Retrieve dumplings from pot and serve with a small bowl of chinese vinegar as a dipping sauce.

Pictorial sequence of events can be seen here, or click on the photo of the finished product below.