Dumplings Two Ways (by G)

Tonight I wanted to make dumplings - wanted is too strong a word perhaps because it is a bit of a dick around. I made dumplings two ways - not intentionally, there was just a bit of a hitch along the way.

I started out with half a kilo of mince and 32 gyoza wrappers. I divided the mince in two and added spring onions, grated garlic and ginger, rice wine vinegar, white pepper, soy sauce, Chinese cooking wine, sugar and coriander to one half.

To the other half of the pork I added grated ginger and garlic, cabbage (which I salted and squeezed the water out of), spring onion, miso paste, dried chilli and a little sugar.

Then the time consuming chore of folding little lumps of mince into the dumpling wrappers. That went okay, the difficulty came with the cooking. My plan was to cook them all gyoza style, fried then steamed - one lot first and then the other then steam them all together for a little bit to get them all warm at the same time. After frying, then steaming the first lot of dumplings I found that they had all stuck to the pan and were effectively ruined - so I did what I always do in such circumstances - take a vigorous spatula to the whole thing and add some soy sauce. It turned out as a bit of a mince noodle dish.

To avoid a repetition of that little disaster I decided to boil the second lot of dumpling - that worked out okay.

The disaster dumpling turned out to be the best, probably because the addition of soy sauce gave them more moisture and flavour. The others were a little dry but not too bad.