Making your own dumplings

Minimal Recipe

Ingredients

Pork mince – don’t sweat the details, just buy the 500g pack at your local supermarket or butcher.

Dumpling skins – findable in any refrigerated section of any Asian grocery. A 250g bag is a good starting point, but expect to have leftover mince or skins if you’re doing this for the first time. Use that as feedback to figure out how much more of each to buy next time.

Instructions

Before starting, you should have:

• a bowl for the pork mix, something to mix the pork mix with (e.g. rice cooker spoon, chopsticks, hand), and a teaspoon
• a smaller bowl of water to dip your fingers into (for step 3),
• plates/containers to put completed dumplings on, I usually have a single plate and then repack dumplings as needed

1. Put the pork mince (plus any additions) into a bowl and mix/mash it together until it looks more like slop.
   (There’s an “old” habit about stirring it with a pair of chopsticks to ensure all the ‘grains’ are aligned in the same direction. I’ve not cared enough to test this.)
   
2. In one hand (your non-dominant), you should have a dumpling wrapper flat on your palm. Using the other (dominant) hand, use a teaspoon to scoop out a heaped teaspoon (2-3 teaspoon’s worth) of pork mince, place it in the middle of the dumpling skin. Over time you’ll get used to figuring out how much is enough to put inside a dumpling depending on personal preferences.
   
3. Wet the inside edge of the dumpling with water. Fold the skin in half wrapping up the meat, pressing the half-edges together.
   
4. Choose 5 evenly-spaced locations around the edge. At each location, pinch the edge to bind the skins together, and then hold the pinched area on both sides, and push towards each other so that the pinched area makes a “z” shape. Picture below. If you prefer dumplings that sit nicely on their own, feel free to push down on them a little bit vertically so that they have a flat base.

6. If you’re cooking dumplings, set them aside. Pack excess dumplings into freezer bags/containers to freeze, separate batches using baking paper.

7. Cook using your preferred method, boil, pan fry + steam, spray oil all around and pop into the air fryer. Enjoy with soy sauce, vinegar, chilli oil.

Upgrades/Adjustments & Discussion

Ingredients

Fillings

What you put inside a dumpling is largely due to personal preference, but I’ll go through a couple of common ones, but the general split of how I discuss things here should give you a better idea of how to think about each ingredient.

The obvious asterisk to all meat/filler adjustments is that they will impact on how many dumpling wrappers you’ll need in total.

Meat

Obviously doesn’t have to be exclusively pork, you can mix in or use chicken mince instead. I’ve not heard of beef mince in dumplings but if that’s your thing, go ahead.

Some people like to add in prawn pieces (with either pork or chicken mince, I’ve seen both variants), obviously it’s easier to get pre-cooked (frozen) ones and cut them to size.

I know I’ve made vegetarian dumplings once but I honestly don’t have much of a recommendation nor insight on what to include.

Flavour

There’s way too many to list here so I’ll just mention my personal favourites:

• Spring onions – Grab a small bundle (which is usually ~5 stalks for me), chop them (both greens and whites) into small slices, and toss into the pork mix. Save the ends because you can easily regrow spring onions in a small bowl of water.
• Soy sauce – I’ve never measured this, but if you have a soy sauce pourer, then I’d say “pour while circling the bowl two times per 500g of meat”. Salt can work, but it’s not quite the same.
  (One thing that annoys me about dumplings is how they’re usually served with the soy sauce separate, and sometimes I just want to bite into a juicy dumpling on its own, so why not include the soy sauce in it?!)
• Chicken bullion powder – One heaped teaspoon per 500g of meat. Any Chinese grocery should have a large tin of chicken bullion powder that is always handy to keep aside.
• Fish sauce – Umami booster. Couple of squirts.
• White pepper – Shake enough to lightly cover the meat.

Fillers

Shiitake mushrooms are common for filler and also add some umami flavour. In the same Chinese grocery as you get your dumpling skins you can also get packet of dried mushrooms that you can blend a little bit to chop them down to size. Since they’re dried they’ll be good for absorbing any liquid within your dumpling filling mixture.

Any kind of crunchy veggie (cabbage, wombok, bok choy), chop into small pieces/strips, blanch and then squeeze all the liquid out of it with your hands before adding to the meat mixture – the idea I’ve heard here is that they’re good for absorbing water and flavour. Frankly, this is borderline on the amount of additional effort for me.

Dumpling Wrappers

I have NEVER made my own dumpling wrappers nor do I think it’s worth the effort. However the base ingredients are literally just flour and water so it’s not difficult to do, just time+effort consuming, made easier with a stand mixer. However, there will be people who want more control over the quality of their wrappers, and that’s understandable.

Other dumpling designs/shapes

Arguably the dumpling shape below is much more better for the pan fry + steam combo (and for storage) because the base is more flatter and thus more of the meat is likely to be cooked.

However I have no idea how I’d describe doing this shape in text, recommend watching a video. You’re basically holding one half of a dumpling’s edge and then pulling back second half bit by bit to make those creases that you see above.

Kitchen tools/aids

It’s easy for me to preach about doing things manually and by hand but I can accept there are people with physical limitations of which using relevant tools to make certain repetitive and physically straining tasks easier is completely understandable.

Stand Mixer

I have no experience using one, but using it to mix the filling and prepare the dough for making dumpling skins is completely understandable.

Dumpling Maker

I don’t have any specific recommendations, but it should be easy to find cheap plastic dumpling makers like the ones below (image is of the Avanti brand ones, usually a touch more expensive). Just make sure they match the size of your dumpling skins!

My personal opinion however, assuming you don’t have any physical restrictions that prevent using your hands repeatedly, is that learning how to fold/bunch dumplings by hand allows you to experiment with various dumpling folding patterns in future.

Where to watch for more

The only series I’ve bothered to scrutinise is Adam Liaw’s video series on Youtube. Here’s the first video, and it’s all legit:

I’m sure any other reasonably competent chef (e.g. Kenji Lopez-Alt) also do a good enough demonstration, but I have no desire to be prescriptive about how you make your dumplings to scrutinise. The intention of this and all other “minimal” recipes is to let you know what the base ingredients are, and help you think about how you want to vary things up to your own liking.