Daring Cooks: Dumplings times two

It is that time of month, when the Daring Kitchen unleashes the hoards with this month's challenge. This time it is the Daring Cooks Challenge, rather than the Daring Kitchen, so if you are looking for sweets, you'll have to wait a few more weeks for that post.

In the meantime, lets get on with the technical details of this here challenge: This month's challenge, hosted by Jen of use real butter, is for Chinese dumplings, aka Potstickers!

I was pretty thrilled with this challenge as I love exploring different foods, as well as cultures through food, and I had never made potstickers before. Plus, the versatility of this challenge makes it so easy to adapt and personalize.


Jen's rules for this were very simple: the dumpling wrappers must be made by hand!

She didn't mean you had to make the dough by hand, though you could choose to if you didn't want to use your food processor (I used Bob), or that you had to make the wrappers thin as can be by hand, no you could use a rolling pin or a press for that. No, she meant you could not go out and buy wrappers for your potstickers. You had to make a dough, roll the dough, stuff the dough and form the dough. What you stuffed it with was up to you. If you steamed them, or boiled them, or pan fried them, again, up to you.

I went two ways. I both steamed and I fried. We all liked fried the best, but since I had recently purchased myself a bamboo steamer, I was thrilled to get the chance to use it to steam a set of dumplings. The steamed ones were good too, but I did like the crunch of the pan fried a bit more.


For filling, I stuck with Jen's suggestion for a pork filling, of which I have half left. I'm going to freeze the rest for the next time I make potstickers. Or alternately, tomorrow morning I'll make some more and freeze those instead. Either way, I'm making these again.

Thanks, Jen, for giving me a reason to try something new. And for choosing something that was suitable for multiple people working on (my little guy donned his apron and helped me roll the dough into snakes, flatten the individual pieces before rolling, helped roll a bit, and got the cabbage and the potstickers into the steamer for me. He also poured the dipping sauce into individual little bowls for each person at the table. Such a good helper he is!)