Jiaozi dumplings

Ingredients

• Plain flour400 g
• Warm water200 ml
• Minced pork — fatty400 g
• Chinese cabbage — finely shredded400 g
• Spring onion4
• Ginger20 g
• Soy sauce2 tbsp
• Sesame oil1 tbsp
• Cold stock80 ml
• Neutral oil3 tbsp
• Black vinegar for dippingto taste
• Saltto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Knead a dough from the flour and warm water for eight minutes and rest it under film for half an hour.

   40 min

2. 2

   Salt the shredded cabbage and leave it fifteen minutes, then squeeze it dry by hand.

   18 min

3. 3

   Work the pork with the ginger, soy and sesame oil in one direction, trickling in the stock until the mass turns tacky. Fold in the cabbage and spring onion.

   10 min

4. 4

   Roll eight-centimetre rounds, thinner at the edge and thicker in the middle. Add filling and pleat one side shut.

   30 min

5. 5

   Heat the oil in a pan, set the dumplings in seam up and fry three minutes to a golden base.

   4 min

6. 6

   Pour in a hundred millilitres of water and cover at once. After seven minutes take the lid off and let the water go, back to a crisp base.

   10 min

About the dish

The cabbage for the filling is salted and squeezed. A cupful of water leaves it — water that would otherwise burst the dumplings during cooking and leave the filling watery.

The meat is worked in one direction for about five minutes, with stock trickled in. The proteins bind, the filling turns tacky and releases juice when bitten — that is what separates good jiaozi.

The fry-then-steam method gives a crisp base and a soft top at once. Water goes into a screaming pan and the lid follows immediately: steam cooks the dough above while the bottom fries.

Worth knowing

• — The pork has to be fatty, at least twenty per cent. Lean mince gives a dry filling with no juice.
• — Stirring in one direction is not superstition: it lines the protein strands up so they hold moisture.
• — The dip is black vinegar with a drop of sesame oil and grated ginger. Soy can join it, but the vinegar leads.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

580 kcal

Protein

26 g

Fat

24 g

Carbs

62 g

More from China

• Mapo tofu — Tofu in a hot doubanjiang sauce with Sichuan pepper, which numbs rather than burns.
• Gong bao chicken — Diced chicken with peanuts and dried chillies in a sauce where the vinegar matters more than the sugar.
• Yangzhou fried rice — Rice with prawns, ham and egg, where every grain stays separate under a thin film of egg.