Hi there, I’m in the process of moving this site from one format to another. Photos are not showing up so please be patience while I tweak the 150+ posts. Thanks and may delicious dumplings fill your future soon!
Andrea
Easy Dumpling Folding Strategies — Video
In July I traveled back East to do a consulting job, stopping enroute in New York City to see my friends at Saveur. (I’ve been a contributing editor at the magazine since 2007.) We’d been talking about making a video of me giving a cooking tip or two and settled on one about folding dumplings.
If you have Asian Dumplings, you know my motto about shaping dumplings. If you don’t have the book, it’s this: Get the wrapper closed. Practice pretty shapes later.
Senior video producer Anique Halliday is a veteran of doing wonderful, fun educational videos; she worked on PBS projects before coming to Saveur. We strategized and planned on the phone in June and then in July, spent a couple of hours at the Saveur test kitchen to produce this:
Saveur’s “Test Kitchen Tips” videos have run the gamut from the viral one on how to peel garlic in less than 10 seconds to the practical one on dipping truffles in chocolate. Asian food-wise, editor in chief James Oseland has shown folks how to tie a knot with lemongrass and how to use and chop kaffir lime leaves into fine hairs. (James wrote the amazing Cradle of Flavor cookbook, which I reference and use all the time.)
If you’re looking for more Asian dumpling tips, jump over to this page.
Asian Dumplings among Top 100 Cookbooks of Past 25 Years!
It’s been kind of an amazing year full of fantastic developments in my food writing career. Along with the Asian Tofu book release, both of my earlier works were selected by Cooking Light for their Top 100 Cookbooks of the Last 25 Years awards. (The awards are in celebration of the magazine’s 25th anniversary.) Each month, the editors thematically reveal their picks.
The March issue has the fourth installment of the series, and the editors chose seven works for the Asian cookbook category. I was blown away to see the above photo with Asian Dumplings and Into the Vietnamese Kitchen in the stack along with Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Madhur Jaffrey’s At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, Hiroko Shimbo’s The Japanese Kitchen, and Eileen Yin Fei Lo’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. Not only do I respect these authors (I have used their works for years) but I am also lucky to count most of them as friends. Wow.
Read more about the awards on Viet World Kitchen. Thanks for your dumpling interest!
Gluten-Free Dumpling Dough: Uses Beyond Pot Stickers
I suppose that you could say that I’ve displayed signs of OCDD (obsessive compulsive dissorder for dumplings). With a fine amount of dough and filling leftover from making the gluten-free pot stickers, I wanted to see how versatile the dough is. The great thing about dumplings is their versatility, right? With the basic dumpling dough in your back pocket, you can use different fillings, create different shapes, and cook your dumplings in a variety of ways.
So I put both kinds of gluten-free dumpling doughs (see the links below to the three recipe trials) to the test. My findings about how they worked with the various shapes and cooking methods are posted on VietWorldKitchen.com in this post.
Related posts:
- Gluten-Free Pot Stickers: Recipe Trial & Dough 3 (sorghum, sweet rice, and tapioca starch dough)
- Gluten-Free Pot Stickers: Recipe Trial & Dough 2 (millet, sorghum, tapioca, and potato dough; includes tips on working with GF dumpling dough)
- Gluten-free Pot Stickers: Recipe Trial 1 (on Asiandumplingtips.com)
- Guide to Building an Asian Dumpling Pantry
- Tolerance Test: Are Gluten-Free Asian Ingredients for You?
If you have the enhanced e-version of Asian Dumplings, these technique videos are included. Otherwise, see the printed book for details and/or watch my videos below, which are on Asiandumplingtips.com:
Gluten-Free Pot Stickers: Recipe Trial 3
What a difference a few years makes. My first attempt at gluten-free pot stickers was in December 2009. It was okay but I didn’t go at it again until now. And after going a second round with making a gluten-free basic dumpling dough, I became a little obsessed and went for round 3.
The second dough made of millet flour, sorghum flour, tapioca starch, and potato starch was pretty darn good. It cooked up to a good chew without being overly rustic. But I was curious about how I could add a little tenderness along with that chew. I went back to my bookshelves and then into the kitchen.
Was the third time the charm? Kind of yes and kind of no. Check it out on VWK:
Gluten-Free Pot Stickers: Recipe Trial 3
Related posts on this site and VWK:
- Gluten-Free Pot Stickers: Recipe Trial 2 (with tips on working with GF dumpling dough)
- Gluten-free Pot Stickers: Recipe Trial 1
- Guide to Building an Asian Dumpling Pantry
- Tolerance Test: Are Gluten-Free Asian Ingredients for You?
If you have the enhanced e-version of Asian Dumplings, these technique videos are included. Other wise, see the printed book for details and/or watch my videos below:
Gluten-Free Pot Stickers: Round #2
Soon after the Asian Dumplings cookbook was published in 2009, people started writing me about gluten-free dumplings. My response was, “There are many gluten-free Asian dumpling recipes in the book. Check the rice, starch, and legume and tuber chapters for ideas.”
As you may know, I tried my hand at making gluten-free pot stickers in December 2009 and they were just okay — mediocre, actually. The dough vexed me and I kept simmering on it until I had time a couple weeks ago to tackled it again. I made two (2) gluten-free dumpling doughs to use in place of the Basic Dumpling Dough on page 22 of Asian Dumplings.
It was a really interesting experiment in which I blended my own flour. I also made unexpected discoveries about working with gluten-free dumpling dough. How I went about it and my technical notes are in this post on Viet World Kitchen.com:
Gluten-free pot stickers: Recipe Trial 2
Check it out, even if you don’t eat a gluten-free diet.