How to Make Pork Dumplings and Zha Jiang Mian (Beijing-Style Meat Sauce and Noodles)

[Music] today on America's Test Kitchen dan makes bridge at the ultimate Chinese pork dumplings Lisa reviews ginger graders and Keith makes Julia a Chinese favorite Beijing style meat sauce and noodles it's all coming up right here on America's Test Kitchen [Music] cooking with family is an important part of Chinese culture and especially one dish dumplings well that's a family affair we've got a member of the HEK family here it's Dan he's gonna show us how to make great pork dumplings and Arenal so Bridget this is one of those things where you have them out at restaurants and you're like you couldn't imagine how you could possibly make them at home right right this recipe we're gonna take you through the whole process and it's actually easier than you think it would be but it really starts with making your own dough so you can go and buy those wrappers they don't have that nice chew and that texture that we want for homemade so we're gonna start really simply with two and a half cups of all-purpose flour this is 12 and a half ounces we love our food processor for putting dough's together this is gonna be great for that all right and now I have some boiling water over here which is actually traditional and useful for this dough so I'm gonna measure out a cup of boiling water here you always want to boil your water and then measure it so you know we have the accurate measurement I'm gonna turn this on and while it's running we're gonna go right down the feed tube with the hot water 30 to 45 seconds is all it takes to come together really fast that's partly because the food processor works so quickly but it's also because we're using hot water so it helps to hydrate the flour more quickly so the dough's gonna be ready to work with sooner also limits gluten a little bit so it's gonna be easier to stretch and work with so I'm just gonna knead this for two to three minutes on the board here just kind of get that gluten to work together and make a really nice Network okay so that's just a couple of minutes there and you can see oh yeah it's really supple but it's not sticking at all you did not flour the board at all no and we would definitely need to if we were using cold water I'm just gonna kind of round it off got a nice taut exterior so we're gonna wrap this in plastic wrap we're gonna let it rest for 30 minutes during that time flours gonna hydrate a little bit more that gluten that we did form is gonna relax so it's gonna be even easier to work with so just set that aside no refrigeration no refrigeration even don't we want to let that sit at room temperature so I'm just gonna scrape out our food processors here so we can use it again all right as Dan mentioned boiling water is very important to this recipe and that's for two reasons one in the boiling water hydrates the starches but it also helps to denature the gluten now let's take a closer look at that flour is made up of starch and protein molecules when you add room-temperature water to flour two different types of protein girls in the flower glutenin and gliadin they linked together to form protein fibers called gluten and those mesh into an elastic network now the gluten Network helps to give baked goods like bread its structure with that same structure that we like in bread can make things like dumpling dough pretty hard to work with the elastic gluten wants to snap back on itself so that's where the boiling water comes in boiling water denatures the protein strands in the flour and that alters the structure of the proteins preventing them from linking up and forming as much gluten and less gluten results in a more malleable dough that doesn't stick to your hands or snap back when you try to manipulate it all right so Dan you cleaned out the bowl there I did some light housework so next up we're gonna work with napa cabbage here so we're making a classic pork and cabbage filling it's fantastic we're gonna make quick work of this cabbage using our food processor so this is five cups that's we've cut into 1-inch pieces I'm just gonna pulse this until it's nice and small about eight to ten pulses telling you it's not as hard as you think to make these okay so that took care of the chopping I'm gonna get this into a small bowl over here cabbage is wonderful flavor texture we love it and unfortunately has a lot of water and if we don't get that out before we put it in the filling is just gonna suck out everything we do in there so we're gonna get the water out first and that's where the 1/2 teaspoon of salt it's just gonna sprinkle that over salt is gonna draw moisture out we're gonna let this sit for about 10 minutes you'll see tons of water come out and then we'll squeeze it and get rid of it sounds good so ten minutes are up and you can see that water pooling right underneath there quite a bit quite a bit so there's even more than that in there so we're gonna do is just use our hands and just give it a good squeeze but you could just see how much just comes out it's so crazy that would ruin a dumpling filling okay so squeeze that out and I just go into a little bowl over here okay so check out how much liquid we get that's at least a half a cup okay so now we are finally getting into the meat of the matter our pork we're gonna use ground pork so I've got 12 ounces of ground pork here into my trusty food processor again now we're gonna season this really really nicely so we're gonna turn to a number of key ingredients that just bring a ton of umami and salt and flavor great so we're gonna start with 1/2 1/2 tablespoons of soy sauce we haven't one 1/2 tablespoons of toasted me oil really flavorful yes I also have a tablespoon of vegetable oil we don't want all of our fat to come from that toasted sesame because it can really overpower I also have one tablespoon of Chinese rice wine you can use dry sherry if you can't find that I have a tablespoon of hoisin just salty but also have that nice sweetness it is a flavor explosion explosion a tablespoon of grated ginger half a teaspoon of salt quarter of a teaspoon of white pepper it has that really beautiful fragrant kind of floor aroma very different than black pepper so now we're gonna process this now this is totally different than making meatloaf or burgers where we want this really crumbly tender mixture right we want this to be more on the sausage end of things like a little bit snappy it really holds together and traps all those juices and fat inside yeah compact so about ten pulses should go yeah you can see it start to stick to the sides yes so now what I'm gonna do is just scatter it over our salted drain cabbage I also have four scallions that are just minced up you need that Allium that really nice kind of sharpness in there great way to add it so I'm just gonna pulse this together until it's combined about eight pulses what looks excellent so now I'm gonna go into our Bowl here I'm gonna pack it in really nice and tight here and smooth at the top of it we wrap it transfer to the fridge and let it firm up a bit while we get our wrappers ready to go okay our dough has rested for thirty minutes and you can see it's slacked out a little bit and then we've got our pork filling over here which is chilled a bit so I'm gonna go a nice cross here and then I'm just gonna take out a quarter of it will work with a quarter of the dough and a quarter the filling so I'll set this aside and we'll work with just that okay all right so let's get into this dough here so the first step is we're gonna get this down to a 12 inch cylinder really not hard to do it almost does it on its own if you look at it the right way so I have a ruler here that's 12 inches so we're gonna cut it into four equal pieces now so I like to go right down the middle first and then cut each half in half a lot of math in this recipe just watch out so we're gonna work with just one of these at a time and the others we're gonna wrap in plastic and just set them off to the side so they don't dry out gotcha okay so our next cylinder we're gonna go 8 inches this time it's a very forgiving dough isn't it yes go in and out okay so that's 8 inches okay I'm gonna divide that in half and then I'm gonna pass one over to you mostly we want to cut these into 5 equal pieces I have equal pieces yep so it's 4 cuts and I've got a little bench scraper there for you all right okay we've got this wooden board here where we need a lot of flour okay I'm just gonna come in and dust here thank you let's just kind of smooth it out a little bit and then we're gonna go kind of with the cut side up there okay and put them down on the flour and you can give him a little flip flour on both sides okay I said before we got our rolling pin out what we're gonna actually do is just use our palm and press down on them we can get it down to about two inches just by pressing like that another nice trick is if you have your bench scraper you can come right over on the side here and press down oh look at you you don't have kind of irregularities of your palm involved there yeah I like that technique there we go nice okay great so there's a wet towel over here so you what we want to do is just cover them up while we're working with just one all right okay great so you have plenty of flour also really nice idea take your rolling pin get some flour on that as well and you don't really have to apply much pressure it's such a soft dough but you're just kind of starting in the middle pressing out and I like to just kind of give it a quarter turn every time I do that so we're rolling these out at this point seven three and a half inches nailed it nailed it nice so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put a scant tablespoon in each one okay you want to place it right in the middle all right so next up here is to brush away excess flour it's gonna make sure that we bond it together really nicely yes because flour to prevent sticking now we want stick now we want some stick okay so we're gonna start with the back here and the front and we're gonna bring them up and meet them in the middle just like that and the seal right there is gonna be a one and a half inches across beautiful okay so here comes the pleading so we're gonna take this side here and pull it up to the back from this side it would be like that exactly yep all right just like that and then on this side so you want to keep closing that down okay all the way and get right next to the filling so you don't have too much of an air pocket in there and then we're gonna repeat the same thing on the other side coming up and overlapping now the final step once you have it together is to just kind of curve it around so you get that beautiful nice true crescent shape ah very nice go and then we just transfer them over to this flowered parchment baking sheet okay so now we know how to do it we just got to do it uh thirty-eight more times so we're just making 40 of these total alright it's a good thing to do with family and friends I think once you know what you're doing though it goes a lot faster look at this beautiful dumpling landscape we have 40 gorgeous dumplings in front of us they have multiplied we're gonna cook 20 right now 20 them freeze beautifully and then you can cook them from frozen so you put the effort in front and then you have a nice weeknight meal perfect so if you want to set those aside all right here and we'll work with just these so we're gonna use a classic potsticker technique here where they sear then they steam to cook through and then they researh so the easiest way to do it and to arrange 20 in here is to start in a cold skillet so I've got a tablespoon of vegetable oil and I'm gonna use a pastry brush just to get a nice even coating on the bottom here is how we arrange 20 dumplings in this skillet so we're gonna start here and do 16 around the outside kind of nesting them and then the last four just Nestle in like this so now we're gonna heat these over medium heat I'm gonna cook them uncovered like this about three to four minutes we're looking for a little bit of browning to start on the bottom let's check these out that's been about 4 minutes Oh perfect beautiful spotty brown spotty brown they're ready a little bit crisp mm-hmm we're gonna sock it out though so what we're gonna do is move this off the heat while we add 1/2 a cup of water ok it's gonna sputter a lot so we wanted to do it off the heat I'm very nice beautiful so we're gonna pull it back on the heat now bring it up to a boil and then we're gonna cover and go medium-low heat for about six minutes and this is the step that really cooks them through so that filling is is fully done so that's six minutes we're going to take the lid off Oh most of the water is gone there's just a little bit left and once it's gone we're gonna crank this up here to medium-high it's gonna start browning again that beautiful flat side will turn golden crispy brown it only takes about a minute to three minutes all right let's take a look at one of these and that is gorgeous perfection that's what you're looking for so we're gonna turn off the heat and get these on to our platter no I like to plate them with the crust side up not only for you know beauty and no bragging rights ethics aesthetics but also because it keeps it nice and crispy that makes sense you don't want that crust sitting right on the plate and steaming exactly so these obviously look beautiful but we're gonna know how good they are until we so we have a couple different options for how to dip all right so we've got some soy sauce and black vinegar which are totally traditional and delicious we also have a Sichuan chili oil and this is really cool it's got a combination of heat from the chilies and then also this numbing quality from Szechuan peppercorns and it's an amazing combination all right let's dig in yeah alright you took two so I'm gonna do exactly the same I don't want to be rude that's just the start and eat them all right that's so good crispy on the bottom Oh super crispy that wrapper is so nice and chewy if you used regular store-bought wrappers they can be really thick so where it's pleated it ends up too gummy and too thick and doughy we've been talking about the filling I would eat that filling all by itself tons of flavor packed in there it's not just steamed a little bit of pork no and it's still tender even though you really processed it and it was so easy well I'm gather your family and why don't you make dumplings as well make a dough by processing boiling water into flour knead and then let that rest create a filling with pork soy and spices along with chopped cabbage and scallions roll fill and pinch each dumpling and then until spotty brown add water cover and steam until those dumplings are crisp and super brown serve with soy sauce and a little numbing chili oil so from our Test Kitchen to your kitchen easy to make fun to make it's Chinese pork dumplings well done thank you [Music] we love freshly grated ginger and all kinds of sweet and savory recipes cookies and cakes stir fries and glazes sauces and soups and normally we just use our rasp grater the rasp can grate a tablespoon of ginger in one minute but we've seen all these tools that claim to ace the job so we bought 10 and after grating pounds and pounds of ginger we learned that seven of these or no better and in fact this one took four minutes to grate the ginger so all of these were out and that left three that were better and of those this was our favorite it's the microplane home series fine grater for 1495 it's super speedy this thing grated a tablespoon of ginger in just 15 seconds look how easy this is it has sharp edge holes they sliced the fibers so you get less waste it's got a big grating surface so you get more ginger per swipe it's got an open paddle so it's easy to get all the puree this comfy handle feels nice and secure and the open design makes it easy to clean to see how it held up we created another whole pound of ginger on her winner and it was still as sharp as the first time we used it so if you cook with a lot of ginger this thing pays for itself today we're making a Chinese noodle dish called Zhang Mian also known as old Beijing noodles Beijing meat sauce or fried sauce noodles but whatever you call it it's delicious and Keith's gonna show us how it's made you read it does have a lot of different names but no matter what you call it it's a very simple dish that starts with an ultra savory meat sauce served over chewy lo mein noodles and that's all sprinkled with slivered fresh vegetables it's a really delicious sauce but there are a couple of items that we had to find substitutes for to make it accessible to the home cook all right so we're gonna start with our meat I have 8 ounces of ground pork it's an intensely flavored sauce so we don't need a lot but we're not gonna just use straight ground pork we're gonna use a little bit of baking soda in here to make sure it stays juicy and tender when we cook it so I have 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda I'll just sprinkle that over and I also have 2 teaspoons of water and that will just make sure that baking soda gets distributed in that ground pork I'm just gonna mix this together we're just gonna set this aside now we're gonna focus on our substitutions traditionally this is made with two sauces that we have here they're kind of hard to find for most home cooks the first one was a ground bean sauce like I said it's not available to most home cooks but what was available was red miso paste fermented soybeans big umami flavors and so I have 5 tablespoons of red miso paste so our second sauce is what we call a sweet bean paste hard to find you're not gonna walk into your local supermarket and find this we used hoisin this has sweet flavors salty flavors momy flavors much like hoisin does and most people probably have voicing in their pantries so we have three tablespoons of hoisin here we're going to add that to our red miso now there was one flavor that Voisin did not provide and that was kind of a smokiness or a bitterness that a sweet bean paste had but the hoisin does not and we tried a lot of different things and we endothelin molasses it does almost have a smokiness to it yeah and it's gonna really lend a lot of depth of the sauce so we have three tablespoons of oils in one tablespoon of molasses also we're gonna finish this up with five tablespoons of soy sauce which is a traditional ingredient and a half cup of water okay so we have our two main components for sauce ready and now we can focus on the vegetables so we're gonna start with a half of an English cucumber we're gonna leave the skin on I'm just gonna cut this in half and then we're gonna just cut this into matchsticks really simple create a nice flat surface and you can just create slices now you have these planks you can just run your knife along like this okay cucumbers done and we're also going to be using scallions we're gonna use the tops the green part as a vegetable component to top our noodles and then we're gonna use the white part for the aromatics I'm just cutting these on a bias a fancy word for an angle so we have eight scallion greens I'll just put that in a bowl and give those to you to set aside so now I have the white green and white part I'm just gonna take the root end off these line them up like that get rid of that and I'm gonna cut these into half-inch pieces and now I'm going to take this and I'm gonna go over to the food processor we're gonna let the food processor do the work in this case so I have our scallion white green and white parts I have two cloves of garlic and I have a half inch of ginger that has been peeled and sliced thinly now this is a pretty traditional aromatic base for a lot of Asian cooking so I'm just going to pulse this five to ten times and tell all those ingredients are nice and finely chopped and I'll scrape it down once or twice on the way through because there's not a lot in there and they get kicked up and stick to the side so our aromatics are nicely finely chopped and we have one last ingredient that we're going to put in 4 ounces of shiitake mushrooms that I've stemmed in sliced a half inch thick a little bulk through the sauce a little meatiness a little umami flavor that complements the other ingredients I'm just gonna pulse that you can see that everything is nicely finely chopped okay now we are ready to cook so I have a medium saucepan here I'm just gonna put it over medium heat I'm gonna add a 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil and I'm gonna add our pork to this we're just gonna cook it for a minute so it's been a minute the pork is starting to lose his pink color so I'm just gonna take our aromatics scrape that into the pot stir this in now we're gonna let this go 5 to 7 minutes and what's gonna happen is those aromatics are gonna release some liquid we want that to evaporate we don't want that liquid in there so we're just looking for this to dry out and start to stick to the bottom of the pan ok so you can see that all that liquid has now evaporated and it's starting to kind of stick on the sides of the pan and we have a little bit of color there that's okay and now we can add our miso mixture that we mixed earlier we're gonna stir this in now that's looking good yeah we're just gonna bring this up to a simmer we're gonna go 8 to 10 minutes it's gonna get a little darker and it's gonna get a little thicker and then at that point we can cook our noodles sounds good it's been 8 minutes and I think that our sauce is ready yeah yeah it's gotten darker it's thickened up a little bit and it smells really intense I'm gonna put a cover on this this is ready to go we can focus on our noodles now today we're gonna be using 1 pound of lo mein noodles this is what it looks like out of the pack eautiful yeah and this is what it looks like in the package you can find them in most supermarkets large supermarkets you can certainly find them in any Asian food store if you can't find lo mein noodles we recommend to use dried Italian fettuccine it has a similar texture as long as you cook it al dente but you only want to use 8 ounces of fettuccine you don't want to use a full pound that's right because these are fresh noodles they have moisture in them these are dried yeah exactly what you want to avoid is these Chinese style noodles that you find in the refrigerator you know those they don't have a lot of flavor they're kind of a mushy they don't have that nice chew that the lo mein noodles so avoid this if you can't find lo mein then use dried fettuccine all right okay so let's cook our noodles so I have 4 quarts of boiling water here I'm just gonna drop one pound of lo mein noodles in here I'm just gonna give this a quick stir three to five minutes we'll come back and we'll eat all right so I think our noodles are tender I can just try one here mmm they're perfect they're tender but they also you can tell there's a little bit in the center that's not quite cooked but by the time we drain it and eat it it'll be perfectly bites can I ask you to drain that you know that it's for the noodles to the platter you've got it whoo they look hot our sauce is still warm here you can use a ladle but I'm just gonna put it right on top right out of the saucepan it's a small amount of sauce but it's gonna be really intensely flavored so we have the cucumber's and I'm just gonna put these in little stations around the edge here you can arrange them however you would like to I'm adding six ounces of bean sprouts no prep just open up the package rinse them off you can go right onto your platter and I'm gonna add our scallion greens and a couple piles like this this is really pretty oh I'm getting the smells of the sauce so we've gotten everything nicely mixed in there and I think I can't wait any longer get some more garnish on there want some more guys yeah that's the stuff mm-hmm the sauce is rich and deep and then it's mitigated with the fresh cucumber and the fresh bean sprouts in the small amount of baking soda in there is made sure that that pork is nice and tender still juicy even though we've cooked it for 10-15 minutes it's still really great this is absolutely delicious really great sausage yeah thank you welcome so if you want to give it judge on me on a try start by seasoning ground pork with baking soda make a quick miso based sauce and finely chop some scallions and shitake mushrooms then cook both with the pork for a few minutes to make the sauce boil fresh lo mein noodles until tender then topped with the pork and some fresh cucumbers and bean sprouts from America's Test Kitchen to your kitchen a cool new recipe for Beijing style meat sauce and noodles thanks for watching America's Test Kitchen what you think we'll leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our Channel see you later I'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 182,516

Keywords: how to make dumplings, zha jiang mian, how to make dumplings from scratch, dumpling recipe, dumplings, pork dumplings, chinese food, cooking, cooking tips, cooks illustrated, america's test kitchen

Id: _Xo4zQKuLyM

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2020