Cooking Equipment Archives - Asian Dumpling Tips

Nifty Dumpling Tricks from Chengdu

Cooking Equipment, Cooking Tips & Tricks, Technique Videos and Photos

I just came back from a 3-week trip to Asia, where I went to Taipei, Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing and Chengdu. There was much to learn, eat, and observe. Of course, I had to check out lots of dumplings. I watched the professional dumpling makers wherever and whenever I could. On this trip, I had my digital and Flip video camera.

In Chengdu, China I captured some footage that reinforced authentic, time-honored dumpling traditions but also showed me some modern techniques too. Check out the post and video at Vietworldkitchen.com:

Asian Dumpling Tips from Chengdu Pros

DIY Asian Wooden Dowel Rolling Pin

Cooking Equipment, Cooking Tips & Tricks

If you’re going to embark on making Asian dumplings, one of the most important tools to have is a skinny light rolling pin. Don’t think you can use a regular Western pastry rolling pin to roll out dumpling wrappers for Japanese gyoza, Shanghai soup dumplings, Tibetan momos and Indian samosas. It’s really cumbersome to use a large rolling pin to individually form thin 3 inch round wrappers. Take a look at the video for how to roll out Asian dumpling wrappers to see the skinny rolling pin in action. The Asian rolling pins are nothing but a 12-inch length of wooden dowel. They’re sold at many Chinese house ware and restaurant supply shops for about $3 each. But you don’t need to venture to one of those shops to get one. Make the rolling pin yourself.

Weigh Your Options, Use a Kitchen Scale

Cooking Equipment

Escali kitchen scale, comes in many colors

Leifheit/Soehnle kitchen scale, thin and comes in many colors

Like many old-fashioned cooks, my mother has a personal approach to measuring her cooking ingredients. She scoops up flour with a particular ceramic rice bowl that she got free for buying above some dollar amount of groceries at the Asian market. A specific Chinese soup spoon is used for fish sauce and soy sauce. She reaches for a metal serving spoon to measure sugar and loves to use heaping spoonfuls of this and that. But ever since I was a kid, I remembered Mom keeping a scale in the kitchen too. In her written recipes, she often has weighted measurements in both kilos and pounds for meat and flour. I recently found out that she’s taken to weighing her reconstituted shiitake mushrooms too. “They come in many sizes and I want the food to be good every time,” she told me.

The lesson learned from growing up in my mother’s kitchen is that the scale never lies, and that it pays to be consistent in how you measure ingredients. Weighing ingredients may seem fussy to many home cooks but that’s what the professionals do. My friend Christophe Lillienfeld, a classically trained French pastry chef and cook since he was 14, loved to give me exact weighted measurements, such as 335 grams of flour, 45 grams of sugar, etc. Precision is important as you never know how you may weigh something from day to day.