My Favorite Japanese Gyoza Dumplings | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's Kenji I'm going to make some dumplings guza in fact Japanese guza this is a thing that I have this is the thing that I made more than any other thing in my life probably um I started making guoa when I was like a toddler like you know four years old or something maybe younger um you know my my mother is Japanese and what we would do is uh she would sit me and my two sisters down in front of the TV you know in the living room and then uh about once every other month or so maybe once a month we'd sit there uh she would make the dumpling filling and put out dumpling skins and we would sit there and make dumplings and then uh put them in the freezer so that we'd have dumplings for the whole um month cook them straight from Frozen very convenient um oh so what I'm doing here I got equal parts pork a pound of pork ground pork nice and fatty uh and ground cabbage you could also use like ground chicken if you want ground turkey um and ground and uh and a pound of cabbage this is just a green cabbage cabbage um usually I use something like napa cabbage or maybe like a Hong Kong style uh cabbage but this is what green cabbage is what I had in my fridge today so I'm using that might be just shy of a pound but you want roughly equal parts cabbage and pork for this um now the Cabbage it's acts not not just as a flavoring agent but really it acts in the same way that say something like breadcrumbs would in a meatball or a meatloaf you know it's a uh it adds bulk to it but it also prevents the um the interior the sa the uh dumpling filling from becoming like a a sausage you know we don't want sausages in there we want nice tender juicy filling all right so I've just cut it into you roughly chopped it you can do by hand like I just did you can do it in a food processor doesn't really matter what I'm going to do now is take my cabbage put it into a bowl my cabbage has a lot of water in it you know like most vegetables it has a lot of water that's what makes it so FID um so I'm going to take some of that water out we want to get rid of it so I'm going to take about a teaspoon of kosher salt sprinkle it over the Cabbage give it some tosses and then through the power of uh osmosis that salt is going to draw liquid out from inside those cabbage cells and the Cabbage will go from being uh tumescent to flaccid it'll take about 15 minutes so I'm just going to set that aside meanwhile I'm going to start working with my other ingredients so these are garlic chives um you don't need to use these kind of special chives you know I just I use these because I found them at the Chinese market yesterday you can use regular scallions you can use regular chives if you'd like but these are just happen to be garlic chives a couple ounces of them I'm going to kind to finally chop these if you were doing scallions what I would do is I would um cut them into segments you knowbe three or 4 inch segments and then split them lengthwise um a couple times uh and then line up those lengthwise pieces and slice across them like this so that you get them really sort of finely finely chopped I like my scalling to be really finely chopped um sometimes if I'm really feeling very sort of extra special and I really want to put some extra effort into this I will take my garlic chives or my scallions and I will briefly very briefly blanch them uh in salted boiling water um which will help them actually lose some of their moisture ironically they lose moisture when you blanch them because you can then squeeze them and the Cs collapse um it'll help them lose some of their moisture it'll give them a slightly milder flavor um it's really kind of you know it's one of those things that takes a bunch of extra work and really only uh you know incrementally adds to the quality of the finished dumplings so if you want your dumplings to be like 3 or 4% better you can briefly blanch your garlic chives or your scallions squeeze them out really well and then add them to your pork okay so this pork um I know I had a pound which is about uh 450 G to that I want to add 2% salt so 9 G of salt so for that I am going to use a scale but it's about a couple teaspoons of kosher salt or about a teaspoon of regular salt close enough this is the Cabbage but obviously you're not going to need to add any extra salt to account for the Cabbage because the C cage is already salted uh and then I'm also going to add white pepper you can do you know any kind of filling you'd like for these dumplings I'm keeping mine very I like to keep mine very very simple some people will add you know soy sauce you might add sesame oil it's not that common in a Japanese dumpling in a Japanese dumpling in a guoa to add soy sauce or any other flavorings really um mainly the flavor comes from the meat salt white pepper uh and uh whatever vegetable you're adding to it in this case cabbage and chives now if you again if you want it to go all out you could make your own dumpling skins um but Japanese dumplings um are often made with uh store bought skins you can buy these round guoa wrappers um and that's what we always use growing up that's what my mother used my grandmother used uh and so that's what I use now sometimes I will make homemade skins but usually I reserve the homemade skins if I'm making more you know Chinese style dumplings okay uh this cabbage is going to sit for about 15 minutes you will see the liquid come out in fact you won't but you will see the LI the Cabbage after the liquid has already come out so I will be back in 5 minutes or so you know I came back I decided today for funsies for funzo I'm going to add a couple other things I'll add a little bit of garlic in here um again not necessary but I have a ton of garlic in the fridge and uh I'm leaving for Christmas break soon so I want to get through it all right garlic give it a smack smack you know my mom when growing up in fact most of the time we actually had beef dumplings um because my mom was very frugal and um you know we lived in uh Morningside Heights in in an area of um Harlem that um at the time you know in the early ' 80s mid 80s was a sort of meat packing District you know so a lot of butcher shops um a lot of meat packing uh facilities there uh and so sometimes I'm sure I've told this story before for people who follow the channel but sometimes what would happen is we'd be you know driving and we'd stop at the light at 125th Street and uh Broadway and uh at that light there was uh always somebody who would wash your windows you know always someone who would want to clean your windows uh and then often times there was a guy who would come by with a cooler of uh frozen meat that I think I think the guy worked at one of these meat processing plants plants and would you know steal it out of the loading dock and come and sell it on the street um and so we would often buy you know steak or ground beef or whatever from the uh from a guy with a cooler at a stop sign at a stoplight um and so my mom always had a lot of we had a lot of ground beef in the house growing up that was like the main meat was ground beef um oh by the a couple cloves of garlic I'm going to slice This Ginger I'm not going to bother peeling it cuz this Ginger peel is very very tender um but I am going to smash it right until it's like obliterated and then you just chop it up um so anyhow we had a lot of ground beef um my mom would sometimes use it to make things like you know spaghetti and meat sauce um meatballs whatever but uh very often she would use it for dumpling fillings mapo tofu and dumpling fillings that's where it usually ended up and those were my two favorite dishes growing up and still my two favorite dishes now um mapo tofu traditionally is made with beef um yoza typically not but we made them made we made them with beef cuz that's what we had now we're going to need another couple minutes so I will be back in few minutes later all right so it's been about 15 minutes total um by the way last thing I'm adding to this dumpling filling I apologize for doing this in steps a little bit of sugar um all right so the dumpling filling just as a reminder a pound of pork a couple of ounces of chives or scallions a couple sver in here a couple of garlic cloves about a teaspoon of minced ginger uh about uh 9 G of salt a little bit less 9 G of salt is going to be pretty salty um so you can do less than that if you want you know you can do something more like 6 G if you like sort of only a moderate salt level uh and then finally about a/ teaspoon of ground white pepper uh as well as a teaspoon of sugar over here I've got another pound of cabbage that I've seasoned uh with about 6 G of salt okay and so that salt is going to draw out the liquid and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to squeeze it so there there's a couple ways you can go about squeezing your cabbage one way is to get a clean kitchen towel you know lay it out put your cabbage in the middle twist the towel um that works uh it's also pretty rough on your towels so um you know i' I've torn kitchen towels doing that before uh and they don't come out very clean at the end um so what I what I'm doing today instead I'm taking a potato ricer I'm going to put my cabbage in it and once again with the power of physics this one in this case what is it a class two lever I think um I'm going to squeeze out all that excess okay is that a class two lever class one is a seesaw right I think this is a class two where the uh the fulcrum is at one end the the work is on one end and the and the load is in the middle the idea is we we really want to concentrate the flavor we don't want to introduce too much extra water in here so we're squeezing out as much moisture as possible possible if you ever want this written recipe by the way or at least a uh a version of this you know I never follow exact recipes on this on the YouTube channel but if you want a actual written tested cross tested published version of this recipe um you can find it for free on Serious Eats I always encourage people to do free stuff if they can't to for to support me in other ways um you can find it for free on receipts you can just follow along in the video um or you can find it in uh my book The Walk which also has lots of other recipes that are well worth at least according to the reviews on Amazon everything is well worth the price of admission in this book all right that's my plug for the day okay so now we're going to go in here with our hands and we really want to kind of knead it all together do you need to knead it uh yes you do need to um it we're doing more than sort of just thoroughly combining here you know the idea is not just to evenly distribute the um pork and the cabbage and and all the seasoning and stuff that's part of it but really um we also want to uh make sure that the the proteins in the fork um start to become sticky you know the the more you buy the more you the the more you work at it like this the more mechanical action you take on them um the the proteins which are sort of like you know tangled up little bottles of yarn as you knead them like this they start to detangle um and start to cross link with each other and that's what's going to make sure that the filling is cohesive now if you did this without all the uh filler you know without all the cabbage and the other vegetables and stuff um you would end up with something like sausage you know sausage uh is mainly meat and fat some seasonings but usually doesn't have a lot of what are called inclusions you know other vegetable matter things like that um and so sausages end up actually very very sticky because the proteins really tightly bind together and so that's why a sausage um has that sort of springy bouncy texture to it um it's all through the action of meat and salt in fact even the name for sausage comes from the word for salt you can't make a sausage without the salt at least not a good one all right there's our dump filling I'm going to transfer it to a smaller Bowl in fact I'll just use this [Applause] bowl all right so at this stage we're going to start making the actual dumplings themselves uh and to do that we're going to take our skins so if you work fast you don't really have to do much with the Skins if you don't work too fast what you want to do is have your skins um make sure that they're completely covered all the time so either with a piece of plastic wrap um or with this original packaging just upside down like that um but if you work pretty fast you can just leave them unstacked um I know I work pretty fast so I'm going to leave them so I'm going to show you first sort of the real um the way I would the way I typically do it um so add a little bit of water around the outside of the rim like that going to add a smear of the uh the filling okay and then starting with this end I'm going to give it a little pinch and I'm trying to do seven pleats here okay so I do I'm pleating only one side so only this side of the rim uh of the fill of the wrapper is going to be pleated whereas this side's going to remain flat so I pinch it there here's one 2 3 4 5 if it's a little too full you can pull some out six and then finally seven okay so one side is pleated the other side is smooth and what that does is it forces it into this kind of Crescent shape so then when you put it down you can kind of plump it up like this you see and then give it a nice little squeeze and there you end up with a perfectly pretty yza I don't know why seven pleats um that's just what I was always taught when I was a kid make seven pleats you know um and so I do it but uh I don't know it's probably because like when you make seven pleats you end up with eight sections and you know eight is a uh is a lucky number maybe that's what it is I'm completely speculating there but smear of filling that's probably too much filling even eye over stuff sometimes water one two 3 four five six seven N I didn't over stuff perfect dumplings you know the tendency is to over stuff in the same way that like the tendency is to overstuff burritos you know um and when they're overstuffed especially if you haven't done this a ton um it's difficult to make those pleat um and so you end up with not even being able to put in as much filling um so start with start with a minimal amount of filling and work up from there all right if you want to make them a a slightly simpler way here's what you do okay you do the same thing get the edges wet okay now instead of starting at one side just fold it in half just like that right pinch it right in the middle right and then working from each side do one pleat just like that and then another pleat one pleat and then another pleat you'll find that is a much easier way to do it um the dumplings don't end up looking the way I expect a dumpling to look but that is perfectly fine that is a perfectly serviceable dumpling in fact I think it's a pretty dumpling if you want to make it even simpler of course you can always just do something like this Boop just the way you'd make a I don't know a perogi just like that fold it in half right and if you want to make that a little bit prettier or if you say you're going to put it into like a soup or something you're going to boil it or steam it um and you're not going to bother frying it the other way you can make that prettier is start by um putting a a little start with this shape put a little bit of water there and then pull these ends together and pinch them there and you got essentially what you've got like a like a capalini you know or what they would call a water Caltrop shape um that's that all right um and if you don't want to do any any of those things you can do like what my daughter does which is just randomly fold the fold the dough into various shapes with some amount of filling or sometimes no filling at all um and uh yeah you know no matter how you do it it's going to come out delicious um I'm going to finished making these dumplings you'll see I'm putting them on this um uh on this tray right here what I'm going to do is I'm going to line up this whole tray with dumplings and then I will throw the whole thing into the freezer uh and leave it there for a couple hours and then tonight I'll come pick up the dumplings put them into a bag and they will be ready to go you know they'll be good in the freezer for about a month and you can cook them directly from Frozen the brand you know there there is some variance in the brand but generally you're stuck with what you can find at the supermarket um so you know just go with whatever go go with whatever you can find uh and uh it'll work I've never found a that doesn't you know that literally doesn't work some are thicker than others um and and honestly I don't I don't necessarily have a preference for um whether I prefer like super thin dumplings or kind of thicker cheerer dumplings um I'd like them both so honestly I've never found a brand of dumpling skins that uh I dislike so um it doesn't matter too much at least for me all right so to cook these dumplings non-stick skillet you can use carbon steel if you got a really nice well seasoned carbon steel Pan um but I I like to use non-stick just cuz it's completely foolproof nonstick skillet reasonable amount of oil enough to coat the bottom okay we are going to fry we're doing this in What's called the pot sticker style so um the bottoms are going to be fried uh the tops are going to be steamed and so you get that combination of textures hard and soft crispy and tender if I was using carbon steel I would let it preheat a little bit but in a non-stick pan you can throw them right in even when the uh pan is heating up um and as I mentioned you can absolutely do these straight from Frozen uh if you'd like and you can also feel free to Crow the pan I'm not because I'm only making six uh but you can as long as uh the dumplings are touching the bottom of the pan uh you can put as many as you like in there it's not going to it's not going to ruin them to try and cook too many at a time I'll make a couple more of these while uh while I wait for that um I think I have another video on the channel already where I show you how to um cook these dumplings maybe I even showed you how to make the dumplings I probably have an older video showing you how to make dumplings um and I know I definitely have a recipe or a video somewhere that shows you how to make uh dumplings with the crispy fried wings you know essentially what you do is as you're frying them um once they start to fry you pour in a slurry of U either corn starch or mixture of corn starch and maybe tapioca starch or wheat starch um and flour uh and water uh you pour that in there and then as the water evaporates it leaves behind this kind of layer of starch on the bottom that ties all the dumplings together and Fries up nice and crispy um I call them dump wings um they're um in Japanese they're called um you know they are literally they're literally called dumplings with wings in Japanese so hanuka is that right I think so all right let's see how this Browning is going all right so nice and brown looking good all right so at this point what we're going to do is we're going to add some water to there enough water to come up about a/4 inch or so we'll cover it up turn the heat up and now what's going to happen as that water is obviously evaporating bubbling uh and as the water evaporates it's going to steam around there it's going to cook the dumplings and then eventually all that water is going to evaporate away leaving just the dumplings in the oil once again and at that point we will risp it that's going to take probably 4 to 5 minutes um so I will come back in 3 or 4 minutes all right so I can hear from the sound of it uh that most of the water has evaporated I starting to crackle and Sizzle now um so I'm going to take the lid off in fact yes the water has all evaporated so at this point give it a little Shake make sure the dumplings are separated from the bottom and what I'm looking for now so the dumplings are all the way cooked through and so all I'm looking for now is to make sure that the bottoms are crispy again which they are almost there you know I'm going to go get a little a little dipper I'm going to do these um for dipping I'm going to do a little combination um of soy sauce and rice vinegar which is the way uh which is the way we did it growing up um although you know you can use something like Chinese black vinegar just on its own oops little bit more soy sauce than I wanted but that's all right I would do generally do about 50/50 soy sauce rice vinegar um that's the way we did it at home uh you don't have to do it that way of course all right let's take a look at how crispy these are woo look at that beautiful let see that all right let's shut that off go plate it up I like to Plate these up with the pleat the pleat and the uh the crispy bits facing up and kind of nestled into each other that way the crispy bits stay crispy the pretty side the pretty side shows and everybody's happy woo that got really inflated huh got a little balloon they they will look bigger when they're in the pan obviously because they're hot and then as they cool down a little bit they're going to lose some of their volume because uh that air uh is going to lose volume as it cools down all right I ate a bunch of these and I accidentally shut off the camera um so I'll eat some more uh and give the same commentary all right um You can see how crispy these are right crispy bottoms tender tops I'm going to give it a little dip in the uh mixture here filling is uh springy juicy and tender plenty of good flavor from that cabbage and chives I am double dipping and I'm aware man yeah dumplings are so good there's a reason these are my favorite food right one all right bud you can have the last bite all right Japanese guoa very simple very delicious guys gals non-binary Pals I will see you next time bye-bye I think comeone just [Music] farted

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 616,821

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Id: VoTqzjg83u8

Length: 23min 57sec (1437 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024