My Favorite Japanese Gyoza Dumplings | Kenji's Cooking Show

Hello everyone, I'm Kenji, I'm going to make some guza

dumplings

, actually, Japanese guza, this is something I have, this is what I made more than anything else in my life, probably um, I started making guoa when I was like a little kid like, you know, four years old or something, maybe younger, you know, my mom is Japanese and what we would do is, she would sit me and my two sisters in front of the TV, you know, in the living room and then about once every two months or so, maybe once a month we would sit there, she would make the dumpling filling and she would take the skins out of the dumpling and we would sit there and we would make

dumplings

and then put them in the freezer so we would have dumplings. all month long, cook them straight from frozen, very convenient, um, oh, so what I'm doing here I have equal parts pork, a pound of pork, nice and fatty ground pork, and ground cabbage, You can also use it as ground chicken if you want ground. turkey um and ground and uh and a pound of cabbage this is just a green cabbage um normally I use something like napa cabbage or maybe like a Hong Kong style cabbage, but this is what the green cabbage is what I had in my refrigerator today, so I'm using that which might just be a pound, but you want about equal parts of cabbage and pork for this.

Now the cabbage doesn't just act as a flavoring agent, it actually acts the same way that, for example, breadcrumbs would. in a meatball or in a meatloaf, you know it's a uh, it adds volume but it also keeps the inside of the dumpling filling from becoming like a sausage, you know we don't want sausages in there, we want them to be tender and juicy. . Filling well, so I cut it into you, I roughly chopped it, you can do it by hand like I just did, you can do it in a food processor, it doesn't really matter what I'm going to do now is take my cabbage.

I put it in a bowl, my cabbage has a lot of water, you know, like most vegetables, it has a lot of water, that's what makes it so FID, so I'm going to get some of that water out, we want to get rid of it . so I'm going to take about a teaspoon of kosher salt, sprinkle it over the cabbage, give it a few spins and then through the power of osmosis, that salt will draw liquid out of those cells of the cabbage and the cabbage will no longer be uh, from tumescent to flaccid, it's going to take about 15 minutes, so I'm going to set it aside in the meantime I'm going to start working on my other ingredients, so these are garlic chives, no need to use this kind of special. chives, you know, I only use them because I found them yesterday at the Chinese market.

You can use regular chives. You can use regular chives if you want, but these happen to be garlic chives. A couple ounces of them. to finally cut them if you were making chives, what I would do is cut them into segments, you know, three or 4 inches and then split them lengthwise a couple of times and then line those pieces up lengthwise and cut them widthwise. Do them this way so that they are very finely chopped. I like my chives to be very finely chopped. Sometimes if I'm really feeling really special and I really want to put a little extra effort into this, I'll do it. my garlic chives or my scallions and I'll blanch them briefly, very briefly, in boiling salted water, which will help them lose some of their moisture, ironically, they lose moisture when you blanch them because then you can squeeze them and the C's collapse.

It will help them lose some moisture and give them a slightly milder flavor. um, it's really kind, you know, it's one of those things that requires a lot of extra work and really just, you know, gradually increases the quality of the finished dumplings, so if you want your dumplings to be a 3 or 4 % better, you can briefly blanch the chives with garlic or the scallions, squeeze them really well and then add them to the pork, okay, so this pork, um, I know I had a pound which is about 450 G to that. I want to add 2% salt, so 9 G of salt, so for that I'm going to use a scale, but it's about a couple teaspoons of kosher salt or about a teaspoon of regular salt, close enough.

Cabbage, but obviously you won't need to add additional salt to account for the cabbage because cage C is already salted, and then I'm also going to add white pepper. You can use any type of filling. I wish they were these meatballs. I'll stay with mine. I like to keep mine very, very simple. Some people will add. You know, soy sauce. You can add sesame oil. It is not so common in a Japanese dumpling. In a Japanese dumpling. In a guoa to add soy. sauce or any other flavoring, mainly the flavor comes from the meat, salt, white pepper, uh and uh, any vegetables that you add, in this case, cabbage and chives.

Now, if again you want me to have everything, you can make your own dumpling skins, um, but Japanese dumplings, um, are often made with store-bought skins, you can buy these round guoa wrappers, um, and that's what we always used growing up, that's what my mother used, my grandmother used, uh, and that's what I use now sometimes. I will make homemade skins, but I usually reserve the homemade skins. If I make more, you know, Chinese style dumplings, okay, this cabbage will sit for about 15 minutes, you'll see the liquid come out, actually, you won't, but you will. look at the LI, the cabbage after the liquid has already come out, so I'll be back in 5 minutes or so, you know, I'm back.

I decided today on funsies for funzo. I'm going to add a couple more things. I'll add a little. some garlic here, again, not necessary, but I have a lot of garlic in the refrigerator and I'm leaving soon for Christmas vacation, so I want to finish it, okay, garlic, hit it, you know my mom when it grows. In fact, most of the time we ate meatballs, because my mom was very frugal and, you know, we lived in Morningside Heights, in an area of ​​Harlem which, at the time, you know, was the early '80s and mid 80's.

It was kind of a meat packing district, you know, there's a lot of butcher shops, um, a lot of meat packing facilities there, uh, and sometimes I'm sure I've told this story before for people who follow the channel, but sometimes, what would happen? is that we would be driving and we would stop at the light at 125th Street and uh Broadway and uh at that light there was always someone who would wash your windows, you know, always someone who would want to clean your windows uh and Then, a lot of times there would be a guy who would come with a cooler of frozen meat and I think the guy worked at one of these meat processing plants and would know how to steal it from the loading dock and come sell it. on the street, um, and then we often bought, you know, steak or ground beef or whatever, from a guy with a cooler at a stop sign at a traffic light, um, so my mom always had a lot of land.

The beef in the house while she was growing up was like the main meat was ground beef. Oh, for a couple of cloves of garlic, I'm going to cut this ginger. I'm not going to bother peeling it because this ginger peel is very, very tender. but I'm going to smash it until it's destroyed and then you're just going to cut it up, so we had a lot of ground beef anyway, my mom would sometimes use it to make things like, you know, spaghetti with meat sauce, meatballs, whatever, but uh, very often she used it for dumpling fillings, mapo tofu and dumpling fillings, that's where it usually ended up and those were my two

favorite

dishes growing up and they're still my two

favorite

dishes now. um mapo tofu is traditionally made with beef um yoza normally not, but We made them done, we made them with beef because that's what we had now we're going to need a couple more minutes so I'll come back in a few more minutes late, okay, so it's been about 15 minutes total, by the way, the last thing I did.

I'm adding to this dumpling filling, I apologize for doing this in steps, a little bit of sugar, um, okay, so dumpling filling just as a reminder, a pound of pork, a couple of ounces of chives or scallions, a couple of slices here, a couple of garlic. cloves about a teaspoon chopped ginger about 9g salt a little less 9g salt it's going to be quite salty so you can do less than that if you want, you know you can do something more like 6g if you like just a level moderate salt and then finally about a teaspoon of ground white pepper, plus a teaspoon of sugar.

Here I have another pound of cabbage that I seasoned with about 6g of salt, okay and that salt is going to draw out the liquid and now what I'm going to do is squeeze it, so there are a couple of ways that you can juice the cabbage, one one of them is to clean it. dish towel, you know, spread it out, put the cabbage in the middle, twist the towel, that works, it's also pretty rough on towels, so you know, I've torn dish towels doing that before, and they don't come off. very clean in the end um so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to take a potato masher, I'm going to put my cabbage in it and once again with the power of physics, this in this case, what is it?

Lever class two I think I'm going to squeeze out all that excess. Okay, a class two lever. Class one is a seesaw. I think this is a class two where the fulcrum is on one end and the work is on it. one end and the load is in the middle, the idea is that we really want to concentrate the flavor, we don't want to introduce too much extra water in here, so we will squeeze out as much moisture as possible if ever By the way, I want this recipe written down or at least a version of this.

You know, I never follow exact recipes for this on the YouTube channel, but if you want a written, tested and published version of this recipe, you can find it. free on Serious Eats I always encourage people to do things for free if they can't to support me in other ways. You can find it for free on receipts. You can follow it in the video. Or you can find it at uh. my book The Walk, which also has many other worthwhile recipes, at least according to the reviews on Amazon, everything is worth the price of admission in this book, okay, that's my add-on for the day, okay, now We're going to come in here with our hands and we really want to knead it all together, do you need to knead it?

Uh, yeah, you need to do it. We're doing more than just completely combining it here, you know, the idea is not just to evenly distribute the pork and the cabbage and all the seasonings and other things that are part of this, but we actually also want to make sure that the proteins in the fork start to get sticky, you know, the more you buy The more you work on it this way, the more mechanical action you take on them, the proteins that are like, you know, little tangled bottles of thread, as you knead them like this, they start to unravel and they start to stick together and that's what will ensure that the filling is cohesive now if you were to make this without all the filling, you know, without all the cabbage and the other vegetables and stuff, you would end up with something like sausage, You know?

Sausage is mostly meat and fat, some seasonings, but it usually doesn't have a lot of so-called inclusions, you know, other plant matter, things like that, um, and sausages end up actually very, very sticky because the proteins bind together. very strongly and that is. Why does a sausage have that kind of stretchy, springy texture? It's all due to the action of meat and salt. In fact, even the sausage's name comes from the word salt. You can't make a sausage without salt, at least not one. well, okay, there's our dump filler. I'm going to transfer it to a smaller bowl, actually, I'm going to use this bowl, so at this stage we're going to start making the actual dumplings, uh, and do that. we're going to grab our masks, so if you work fast, you don't really have to do much with the masks, if you don't work too fast, what you want to do is have your masks, um, make sure that they're completely covered at all times, so either with a piece of plastic wrap, or with this original packaging upside down, like that, but if you work pretty quickly, you can leave them unstacked.

I know I work pretty fast, so I'm leaving. them, so I'm going to

show

you the first actual type, like I normally would, so add a little bit of water around the outside of the edge, so it's going to add a spot of uh, the the filling is okay and then starting with this end, I'm going to give it a little pinch and I'm trying to make seven pleats here, okay, so I do it. I'm pleating just one side, so just this side of the edge, uh, of the filling. of the wrapper will be pleated while this side will stay flat, so I pinch it here's one 2 3 4 5 if it's too full, you can take out some sixes and finally seven, okay, so one side is pleated and the other.

The side is smooth and what that does is force it into this sort of crescent shape, so when you put it down you can fatten it up like this, you see, and then give it a nice little squeeze and there you end up with a perfectly pretty and za I don't know why seven folds um that's what I was always taught as a kid to make seven folds you know um and that's how I do it but uh I don't know it's probably because when you make seven folds you end up with eight sections and you know what?eight is a uh it's a lucky number maybe that's what it is.

I'm completely speculating, but a spot of filling that probably fills too much even eye on things sometimes water one two 3 four five six seven N I didn't go overboard with the perfect dumplings, you know, the tendency is to overdo things the same way. It's like the trend is to overstuff burritos, you know, and when they're overstuffed, especially if you haven't done this a lot, it's hard to make those folds, so you end up not being able to put in as much filling. um so start with a minimal amount of filling and go from there if you want to make them a little simpler this is what you do okay do the same thing wet the edges okay now instead of start on one side? just fold it in half like this, pinch it right in the middle and then working from each side make a fold like this and then another fold, a fold and then another fold, you'll find it's a much easier way to do it.

Well the dumplings don't end up looking like I expected them to, but that's perfectly fine, it's a perfectly useful dumpling, in fact I think it's a pretty dumpling if you want to make it even simpler, of course, always can. just make something like this Boop just like you would make a I don't know a perogi like this fold it in half okay and if you want to make it a little bit prettier or if you say you're going to put it in If you turn it into a soup or something like that you'll boil it or You'll steam it and not bother frying it.

Otherwise, you can make it prettier. Start by putting a little bit like this. a little bit of water in there and then bring these ends together and pinch them in there and you'll get essentially what you have like a capalini, you know, or what they would call a form of water caltrop, um, that's fine, um, and if not If not If you don't want to do any of those things, you can do like what my daughter does, which is just fold the dough randomly into various shapes with a certain amount of filling or sometimes no filling, um and uh, yeah, you know, no.

It matters how you do it. Do it, it will turn out delicious um I'm going to finish making these dough balls you'll see I'm going to put them in this um uh in this tray right here what I'm going to do is I'm going to line I lift this whole tray with dough balls and then I'll put it all in the freezer and leave it there for a couple of hours and then tonight I'll go pick up the dough balls, put them in a bag and they'll be ready to go. I know they will be fine in the freezer for about a month and you can cook them straight from the Frozen brand.

You know there are some variations on the brand, but generally you stick with what you can find in the supermarket. I know, just go with whatever, go with whatever you can find, uh and uh, it will work. I have never found something that you don't know literally doesn't work. Some are thicker than others. um and honestly, no. I don't necessarily have a preference for um whether I prefer super thin dumplings or thicker, cheerier dumplings. I would like both, so honestly, I've never found a brand of dumpling skins that I don't like, so, um. It doesn't matter too much at least to me, so to cook these meatballs in a nonstick pan you can use carbon steel if you have a really good, well seasoned carbon steel pan, um, but I like to use nonstick just because it's completely infallible. non-stick frying pan reasonable amount of oil enough to cover the bottom okay, we're going to fry, we're going to do this in what's called the pot sticker style, so, the bases are going to fry, the top is going to fry steam

cooking

, so you get that combination of hard and soft, crispy and tender textures, if I was using carbon steel I would let it preheat a little bit, but in a non-stick pan you can throw them in even when the pan is heating up and as I mentioned absolutely You can make this directly from Frozen, if you want, and you can also feel free to make Crow in the skillet.

I don't because I'm only making six, but you can do it, as long as the meatballs touch the bottom of the pan, uh, you can put as many as you want in there, it won't ruin them if you try to cook too many at once. I'll make a couple more of these while I wait for that. I think I already have another video on the channel where I

show

you how to cook these meatballs, maybe I even showed you how to make the meatballs. I probably have an older video that shows you how to make meatballs and I know I definitely have a recipe. or a video somewhere that shows you how to make dumplings from the crispy fried wings.

Basically, what you do is while you fry them. Once they start to fry, you pour in a U mixture, either cornstarch or a corn mixture. starch and maybe tapioca starch or wheat starch um and flour uh and water uh you pour it in there and then as the water evaporates it leaves this kind of layer of starch on the bottom that binds all the dough balls together and The fries come out nice and crispy. um I call them dumplings um they're um in Japanese they're called um you know, they're literally called winged dumplings in Japanese, so hanuka is like that, I think that's okay, let's see how this Browning goes.

Alright, very nice and brown, it looks good, so at this point what we're going to do is add a little bit of water until it rises about 1/4 inch or so we'll cover it. Turn up the heat and now, what's going to happen? The water is obviously evaporating bubbling, uh, and as the water evaporates, it will vaporize around there, cook the dumplings, and eventually all that water will evaporate leaving just the dumplings. into the oil one more time and at that point we'll break it up, which will probably take 4 to 5 minutes, so I'll come back in 3 or 4 minutes, so I can hear by the sound that most of the water. has evaporated, I'm starting to sizzle and sizzle now, um, so I'm going to take the lid off, actually, yeah, the water has all evaporated, so at this point shake it a little bit and make sure the dumplings They are separate from the background and what I do.

I'm looking now for the meatballs to be fully cooked, so all I'm looking for now is to make sure the bottom is crispy again and they're almost there. You know, I'm going to go get some. saucepan I'm going to make these um for dipping I'm going to make a little combination of soy sauce and rice vinegar, which is the way we did it growing up, although you know you can use something like Chinese black vinegar just a little bit more soy sauce than I wanted, but it's okay. I would usually do about 50/50 soy sauce, rice vinegar, that's how we made it at home.

You do not have to do it. It's that way, of course, okay, let's take a look at how crispy they are, look how beautiful, let's look at that, okay, let's turn that off, let's put it on a plate. I like to place them on a plate with the crease, the crease and the uh, the crunch. the pieces face up and fit together that way the crispy pieces stay crispy the pretty side the pretty side shows and everyone is happy woo it inflated a lot eh, I have a small balloon, they will look bigger when they are in the pan, obviously because they're hot and then as they cool a little bit, they're going to lose some of their volume because, that air, it's going to lose volume as it cools, okay, I ate a bunch of these and I accidentally closed them. off camera um so I'll eat some more and make the same comment okay um.

You can see how crispy they are, crispy bottoms, tender tops. I'm going to give it a little dip in the mixture, here's the filling. springy, juicy and tender, with a lot of good flavor thanks to the cabbage and chives, I'm dipping it twice and I'm aware, man, yeah, meatballs are so good, there's a reason these are my favorite food, right, okay buddy you can have the last bite okay

japanese

. wow very simple very delicious boys girls non-binary Friends see you next time bye I think you see, someone just farted