Mince Your Meat: Gyoza or Guo Tie or Pork Stickers or Chinese dumplings

We went to see Julie & Julia last night, and as Johan phrase it - it's a 'sasa' movie. Indeed!It was about a girl who decided to blog about her endeavor to try all the recipes from Julia Child's book about French cooking in 1 year.It's an entertaining film - wish I've thought about it too!

The following recipes all came from Fushia Dunlop's book, and this is probably the book I think I would have tried everything in her book if not for the difficulty of finding some of the ingredients and the fact that I don't fancy dishes made with innards too much.

I added minced cabbage to the recipe, this makes about 25-30 dumplings, you can freeze the extra and have them just as a meal by itself:

For the pastry wrappers
250g plain flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
150ml boiling water

For the filling
20g piece of fresh ginger unpeeled, 1 spring onion with the white part only, both crushed and soaked in 50ml of cold water.
150g minced pork
60-70ml of cold chicken stock
1.5 teaspoon of Shaoxing wine
3/4 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of white sugar
6-8 twists of a black pepper mill or a couple of pinches of white pepper
1-5 teaspoon of sesame seed oil
50g of cabbage, minced finely

Mix the pork with the soaked ginger & spring onion water, stirring in 1 direction only until it is absorbed. Do the same with the chicken stock, then the rest of the seasoning and the cabbage. It should be a loose mixture, so don't worry if it seems too watery.

Steps

1. Mix the flour and salt first and make a well in the middle of the pile while you add the boiling water in with a wooden spoon quickly.
2. When the dough mixture is cool enough to handle, transfer it to a work surface and knead it into a smooth dough.
3. Let is rest under a damp cloth for about 10 minutes, then working in a lightly floured surface, divide the dough into 3 pieces.
4. Roll each piece to a long sausage strip about 2cm thick, and break them up into 15g pieces. You can use a weighing machine to be exact about this as this can determine how thick or thin the wrappers are, unless you are already a Jiaozi expert. I just break them up and weigh them on my digital scale, 1 piece is 15g, 2 piece is 30g etc, so you don't have to remove one to weight another one.
5. Flatten each piece with your hand or a small cylinder-shaped bottle and roll them into circles around 6cm in diameter. Cover the remaining dough with a damp cloth so they don't dry up.
6. Place about a teaspoon of stuffing into the center of each dumpling, and put the skin on the gyoza mould (which you can get from Daiso for SGD$2) and fold into half by pressing the two sides of the mould together.
7. Heat up a flat pan with enough oil to coat the surface generously and arrange the dumplings in neat rows in the pan when it is nice and hot. Drizzle them with warm water (about 2-3 tablespoons every 5 dumplings) and cover the pan with a lid to cook /semi-steam over medium heat for about 4-5 minutes.
8. Remove the lid to allow the steam to escape, now drizzle about 1/2 teaspoon of oil for every 5 dumplings, replace the lid and fry it for about 2-3 minutes until the bottoms are toasty and golden brown. Move the dumplings around as they cook to brown them evenly, serve them with the golden brown side up, with some julienne ginger in Chinese black vinegar.

Gyoza mould