Andrea Nguyen - Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More

Copyright 2009 by Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen
Photographs copyright 2009 by Penny De Los Santos

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with publisher.

eISBN: 978-1-60774-092-6

Illustrations by Ann Miya

v3.1

Dumplings make people smile. At their core, they are fun, uncomplicated, wonderfully satisfying foods that can be enjoyed with a crowd or savored in solitude. Theyre reminders of good timespreparing them for family, noshing on them with friends, or queuing up for them with great anticipation. The individual dough morsels, diminutive pouches, and leaf-wrapped packages contain treasures that never fail to please the palate.

Ive enjoyed a dumpling-filled life since my youth. One of the first cooking assignments my mother gave me (after cooking rice) was folding wontons. After all, we ate rice daily and frequently ate fried wontons and wontons in soup. My mother was smart to figure out that a precocious ten-year-old was perfect for these elementary but crucial family kitchen duties.

Making batches of 150 to 200 wontons became part of my life, and I rarely thought of it as drudgery. I rather liked folding different shapes and devising new methods to make the work go faster and better. I didnt always work alone; sometimes my siblings and I challenged one another to see who could fold the prettiest wontons or pleated pot stickers.

We used premade wrappers for Chinese-style dumplings because they were readily available, but there was no such convenience for Vietnamese dumplings. Those were my mothers specialty, and she prepared hers from scratch to ensure that our family had the tastes of our homeland. Treats such as bnh t () were part of my options for both breakfast and afternoon snacks. We also exchanged gifts of homemade Vietnamese dumplings with family and friendswe all knew they were hard to come by in the United States.

Ive probably eaten as many Asian dumplings out as I have at home. My father regularly piled us into our Buick Estate Wagon and drove over an hour to Chinatown in Los Angeles for Saturday morning dim sum. In the restaurants din, I listened carefully for the dumpling ladies melodious calls as they made their rounds of the tables: har gow, siu mai, char siu baothe Cantonese names of perennial favorites (shrimp dumplings, cook-and-sell dumplings, and roasted pork buns, respectively).

During a yearlong fellowship in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, I explored first-rate filled with a nutty surf-and-turf mixture, and nibbled on magnificent tiny steamed buns on a trip to Yunnan province in China. I observed professional dumpling cooks whenever possible, and upon returning to the United States, not only did I continue to seek out more Asian dumplings, I also began experimenting with making Chinese and other styles of wrappers from scratch. I asked my mother about Vietnamese dumplings, their fillings, dough, and cooking techniques. It wasnt long before I realized that there were many similarities among the dumplings enjoyed in Asia.

I studied cookbooks for tips and keys to unlock the world of Asian dumplings. My skills improved through lots of trial-and-error, as there was no publication dedicated to Asian dumplings and cooking classes on the subject were extremely rare. The dough and rolling techniques were hard to figure out at first, and I made plenty of blunders, but my clumsy-looking results always at least tasted good. In fact, over my years of eating and cooking, and especially through the process of polishing the recipes for this book, the most important insights Ive gained are these:

• Asian dumplings dont have to look pretty to taste fabulous.
• With few exceptions, there are numerous ways to fold and shape a dumpling.
• Practice is the way to mastery, but you really dont have to lead a dumpling-obsessed life to learn to make them well.
• You get to eat your mistakes! Enjoy them as much as you do your successes.

Asia is either huge or humongous, depending on where you draw the defining boundaries. Though the Middle East, Turkey, the Central Asian republics, and most of Russia are, geographically speaking, part of Asia, the recipes in this book come from the three subregions of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. A good number of the dumplings from this vast swathe of territory have Chinese roots, as the Middle Kingdoms preparations begot many others throughout Asia, and because Cantonese dim sum is popular all over Asia and abroad wherever there are large Asian populations.

But what exactly is a dumpling in the Asian context? Many English speakers categorize Asian-filled pastas, such as pot stickers and wontons, as dumplings, but in actuality the concept of the dumpling does not exist in the Asian culinary framework.

Writing in the third century C.E. , Chinese poet Shu Xi, considered one of the most learned men of his day, described a number of Chinese foods made from wheat as being members of the bng family of doughy concoctions. In Rhapsody on Bng, Shu Xi lumped filled dumplings, stuffed buns, baked and fried breads, and noodles in that one category of food, without discriminating among their differences. Wheat-milling technology had been introduced to China from western Asia (now the Middle East), and at the time of Shu Xis composition, meat-filled morsels were prepared in other parts of Asia, so the Chinese were adopters, not inventors. The point here is that there has long been a huge variety of foods that may be called Asian dumplings.

In the same vein as Shu Xi (if many hundreds of years later), acclaimed Chinese cookbook author Irene Kuo described pot stickers, siu mai, wontons, egg rolls, buns, and the like as dough stuffs in her classic 1977 work The Key to Chinese Cooking. In the Vietnamese repertoire, such foods belong in the immense category of bnh. Similarly, kuih is the Malay term attached to a large category of savory and sweet cakes, pastries, and dumplings. An Indian vada can be described as a fritter, doughnut, cake, or dumpling.

Ambiguity aside, all dumplings share certain characteristics. They are simple foods with few social pretensions. On occasion they feature meat or seafood, but for the most part, they involve dough made from staple grains, legumes, or vegetables, along with water, salt, and, sometimes, leaven. It is the humble nature of dumplings that steals peoples hearts.

After spending much time pondering, researching, and preparing these foods, I can conclude that for the purposes of this book, Asian dumplings include savory and sweet dishes that are made from balls of dough, or are small parcels of food encased in pastry, dough, batter, or leaves. As you can imagine, there are endless possibilities, and the recipes herein offer a broad sampling to hone your skills and whet your appetite for more.