CSA week 20 - steamed scallion and sausage buns

This is not quite an authentic recipe, I think. At least the sausage buns I've seen have also had egg custard or were a bun wrapped around a whole sausage. Also, I doubled the scallions. There's never enough in the traditional ones.

I worked off of the recipe from here. I made some minor adjustments for adding the sausage and skipped the fancy styling, though.

Ingredients:

For the dough:
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
3 cups bread flour
2 oz sugar [down from three in the original recipe]
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk

For the filling:
6 Tablespoons chopped scallions, green part only
1 link lop chong, steamed for five minutes or microwaved for one to partially cook and then sliced thin and chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil [double if you're not using the sausage]

0. Turn on oven to lowest setting.

1. Mix flour, sugar and yeast (or activate yeast in milk if you're using that sort). Mix in vegetable oil and milk until a slightly stiff dough forms. Let rest 20 minutes. Knead for five minutes until gluten forms. Put in clean bowl, cover with moist cloth and put in oven for 1 hour.

2. Mix filling ingredients and allow to macerate.

3. After an hour, remove dough from oven and scrape out onto a floured work surface. Roll dough out to form a 14" by 20" rectangle. A little thinner would probably be fine but that's how big my cutting board is so that's as far as I got. Spread filling over dough. [I used 4 Tablespoons of scallion to start but decided it was a bit sparse so I chopped up a bit more. Another half a sausage wouldn't be a bad either.

4. Roll the dough up along the short axis and slice into two inch pieces. Use a sharp knife and and sawing motion with little downward pressure to keep from squishing the dough. Stand the slices up on baking sheets with plenty of room around each and return them to the oven that I never told you to turn off. Let rise 40 minutes.

5. Start a steamer steaming. When buns are well risen, move to steamer and steam 13 minutes. They'll expand again so don't crowd the steamer. I did batches of four but that only worked because my end pieces rather small. If you did step 3 better than I did, you'll have to do batches of three.

And that's it! Serve immediately with a completely optional soy/chili oil dip or cool and freeze. Reheat 60 seconds in the microwave covered with a damp paper towel.


These turned out very well. I'll put them up against the best I've had in various Chinatowns. The dough is just as it should be: fluffy and light, but squishy and chewy to the bite. Mild, but not flavorless. A lot of recipes didn't use milk, but I quite like the character it added. The scallions and sausage are aromatic and brightly savory, cutting through the sweetness of the buns. Darn good stuff, but I've got to stop eating them so I can freeze some for later. So now I've made gyoza, sticky rice and buns. I think roast pork is up next in my Chinese snack agenda.

CSA week 13 - Lo mai gai

I hadn't realized when the idea of wrapping sticky rice in collards came to me, but the dish I was thinking of wasn't just sticky rice wrapped in a leaf of some sort, it's a particular dish, lo mai gai, with a specific assortment of fillings in the rice. I did know that there was some variation in what sort of leaves were used as wrappers--lotus, banana, bamboo or, Wikipedia says, lily or grape. No reason collards shouldn't work.

Those standardized fillings are chicken, Chinese sausage and shiitake with the occasional addition of dried shrimp, peas and a few other things. I decided against the dried shrimp, but did include the peas and some water chestnuts.

I made two cups of rice. I don't have the right Chinese glutinous rice so I used half sushi and half risotto which I figured would get me in the right neighborhood. Most of the recipes suggested soaking the rice for an hour before cooking. They don't say why, but I soaked my oatmeal overnight last night to make it cook quicker this morning and found that it broke down a bit more when cooked than it would have otherwise. I presume I'm doing the same thing with the rice here.

I soaked and diced 6 small shiitake,
chopped up and marinated one chicken thigh in 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 Tablespoon rice wine and 1 teaspoon cornstarch,
chopped a garlic clove, a couple links of sausage and a handful of water chestnuts,
measured out a half cup or so of frozen peas,
and mixed 1 Tablespoon rice wine with 1 Tablespoon light soy sauce, 1 Tablespoon dark soy sauce, 1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch and 1 Tablespoon water.

Then, while the rice was cooking I heated a bit of oil in my wok, added the garlic and a moment later the chicken. I cooked that for a minute before adding the sausage, mushroom, peas and water chestnuts. After a couple minutes more I added the sauce which immediately thickened up into a glaze. I added more water as needed over another couple minutes of cooking to end up with everything kind of glazed but a bit of thick extra sauce too. A lot of the recipes say to add a little sesame oil at this point; I forgot so I added it when serving.

I set that and the rice aside to cool as I prepared my collard leaves. In retrospect, I should have just cut off the stems at the bottom of the leaves, but I cut them out entirely which left my leaves with a slice halfway up. That caused me some trouble so I double-wrapped each packet to compensate. If I could have single wrapped, I wanted to do six single-serving sized packets. I didn't have enough leaves to do that so I ended up with three larger packets and one really big one to use all the remaining fillings.

For each, I put down about half cup of rice in the center of the leaft, patted it out fairly flat, added around a third cup of filling and spread out another half cup of rice on top. Then I tried to wrap it up and tie it tight with string to get it compacted. That didn't work so well. Full leaves and another set of hands would have helped greatly. The first two were a bit of a mess, but I think the third one was presentable. That's when I realized the leaves should be perpendicular. And then the fourth was overstuffed so I ran into trouble again. For the record, I have a heck of a time rolling burritos too so I still think this is a decent idea; it's just me making it look so awkward.

After all that, it was time for some dinner. The last package looked the least stable so I decided that was the best choice to cook right away.


Here it is after 15 minutes in the steamer.

It held together somewhat, but my poor wrapping job kept the rice from compacting correctly. It's a bit messy but it tastes just like lo mai gai is supposed to so big success there. Another positive note is that the collard leaves are nicely cooked. Honestly, I found that very surprising. Collards are supposed to take a half hour of simmering to cook not 15 minutes of gentle steaming. But these were tender and not even particularly chewy. I found I could treat it like injera and tear off pieces to pick up bits of rice and filling. I fully expected to end up throwing out the leaves so it's a pleasant surprise to be able to have it as a full component of the dish unlike the dried lotus or banana leaves. On the other hand, you don't get that infused floral flavor the dried leaves give you, but it's a fair enough trade off. It's not quite traditional and it's certainly not conducive to good table manners but it tastes pretty good so what the heck.

CSA week five - potstickers, part 2

I stopped by Lucky Oriental Mart on the way home from work today and picked up some dumpling wrappers to substitute for my failed attempt last night. There were four choices: square vs. round and egg vs. eggless (and also, eggless with yellow die #2 so it looks like it has eggs in it). With egg was labeled Hong Kong-style and eggless Shanghai-style. I was tempted to go for Hong Kong as that's the home of dim sum, but I wanted to reproduce what I tried to make so round, eggless it was to be.

Once I had the package defrosted it was time to stuff. I didn't ruin any even from the start but it did take some time to find a method that worked really well.

I understand that fresh dough would stick closed on its own, but this dough I had to wet around the edges. I kept a little bowl of water and would dip a couple fingers and run them around the circumference. I tried a brush (as I had to redip a couple times to make it all the way around), but that spread too much water and made the dough mushy. So fingers it was to be which slowed the process down considerably.

For each dumpling I scooped out about a Tablespoon of filling using a coffee scoop and dislodged it onto the wrapper using a teaspoon so I didn't get it all over my fingers. After a bit I realized I needed to put the filling in the top half of the wrapper and press it down a little to spread it out. Then I could fold the bottom half up and seal it at one spot at the top. Once the wrapper was held in place I'd seal up which ever side had the filling closer to the edge first, pushing it in to even things out, and then the other side ending not quite at the bottom so I could squeeze out any excess filling as if it was a little pastry bag.

Once I had it sealed up I had to make sure it stayed closed so I pleated the edges starting from the top and then a couple times down each side ending with a folded in corner if I had enough spare dough to do it. It's a two hand process so I'm afraid I didn't get any pictures of the process; sorry. Try YouTube; there are video tutorials that are better than anything I could have done.

It's not tricky after you get the hang of it--kind of meditative, really--and my end results look about right, I think. Pretty time consuming, though. I filled up 38 dumplings total which is not a whole lot for the amount of filling I had. They do seem a little plumper than most I've seen. But then I'm not selling them by the dozen so it doesn't pay me to skimp.

I put most of them onto a sheet of freezer paper on a baking sheet so they can freeze individually before I pack them away. I made sure to press them down a little bit to give them flat bottoms so they'll sit up in the pan later.

But several I kept aside for dinner. You can steam them, boil them in soup, deep fry them, but I wanted to do use the real potsticker method. So I lighted oiled a non-stick pan (If you do this right, non-stick isn't necessary. That's how this method developed and how they got the name. The dumplings stick at first and then unstick themselves.), laid in the dumplings and then added enough water to come about halfway up their sides. Optionally, you can use chicken stock, but I wanted to see how my dumplings held up on their own first.

Then I just covered the pan, with the cover slightly askew to let steam escape, turned the heat to medium high and waited for the water to completely evaporate. When the water's gone; they're done. I gave them an extra minute since, as you can see, they bloated monstrously and I wanted to be sure they were cooked all the way through. That was a mistake, though, and I ended up overcooking the flavor out of them. When cooking them from frozen, you need that extra minute and this is the first time I've cooked fresh. I'll know better next time.

I am pleased that, despite the bloat, none of them burst (at least until I picked them up. They didn't stick to the pan, but they did stick to each other). Partially that's thanks to the store-bought, machine-manufactured wrappings, but my seals stayed sealed so there's that. They're nicely crisp on the bottom and soft and chewy on top as potstickers should be. And, even overcooked, they made fine meaty dipping sauce delivery tools. I made the traditional sauce: soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a bit of ginger, a bit of scallion and a bit of sesame oil. I like chiu chow chili oil thinned with a little soy, too.

You know, the pre-made wrappers were just fine and they only cost around $2.29 and I have trouble imagining my homemade would be any better even if I made them perfectly. I'm choosing to be O.K. with not successfully making my own.

Before I sign off here, I'd like to mention that, in a remarkable synchronicity, La Diva of http://ladivacucina.blogspot.com is making gow gee, just about the same dumpling but steamed instead of potstuck. Check out her post about it here.

CSA week six - Potstickers, part 1

Usually I put the non-English name in the subject line to foster a little suspense before you click through and find out what I'm talking about. Not this time, though. Potstickers are both a Japanese (gyoza) and Chinese (jiaozi) thing and my standard method of cobbling together recipe from a bunch of different ones gave me something with elements of both.

The "part 1" is because I decided to make my own wrappers and had some difficulty. It sounds easy enough: mix two cups flour with one cup boiling water (The hot water improves the dough's ductility.), knead briefly, roll out in the pasta machine that's been sitting in the back of a cabinet unused for the last five years and cut into 3" diameter circles. But that two to one flour/water ratio gave me an intractably sticky dough no matter how much more flour I added and now my pasta machine is all gunked up and it looks like it's going to be a pain in the butt to clean.

I should have known better, really. Using a new gadget never works right the first time out and that's just when a dough will decide to defy all laws of culinary science and do whatever it wants. Fine, I need to go to the Asian grocery to restock on ramen anyway; I'll pick up some ready-made gyoza wrappers (or wonton wrapper at least) and finish this up tomorrow.

But for now there's still the filling which turned out fine. I used:

3 cups cabbage, finely chopped
6 garlic chives, finely chopped
2 teaspoons ginger, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 pound shrimp
1 pound pork
6 small dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked
3 Tablespoons light soy sauce
2 Tablespoons dry rice wine
1 Tablespoon sesame oil
1 large egg
salt and pepper to taste

I sprinkled the cabbage with salt and let it sit for 20 minutes to purge a bit of water. Otherwise the dumplings get soggy I understand. But I used too much salt and had to rinse it off so it may have added all of the water back in. But it looked like substantially less volume after I wrung it out, so maybe not.

Everything but the vegetables went into the food processor and got processed to a fairly smooth paste. Then I folded in the vegetables and put it into the refrigerator to firm up and be easier to work with.

One of the recipes I found suggested boiling a spoonful of the mix to check for seasoning before starting the wrapping. Pretty good idea; the wrapper dough has no salt so it's easy to underestimate the seasoning the filling requires. I ended up adding more salt, pepper and sesame oil and I'm still not sure I'm entirely happy with it.

So, that stays in the fridge until tomorrow. The dough I'm saving too--it may not want to be noodles, but maybe it'll make a decent loaf of bread. Right now, I have to order a pizza.