Sunday, June 14, 2009

Potstickers for now....and later

In May, we Daring Cooks over at the Daring Kitchen were given the challenge of making home-made potstickers. Our challenge was hosted by Jen of use real butter. She dictated that we must make the potsticker dough from the recipe given (as opposed to buying pre-made wonton wrappers). She provided traditional recipes for pork and shrimp fillings, but encouraged us to go wild with our own filling ideas.

I wasn't that excited. As much as I like dumplings and potstickers, I've had problems preparing the frozen ones at home. There is always a lot of hot oil smoking and spattering. I thought potstickers were supposed to be stir-fried in a wok with lots of oil. Turns out there are much better ways, as I learned during this challenge.

The dough is just flour and water. It comes together easily, requires some kneading and then some resting. There has been a lot of kneading and resting in the challenges lately (strudel dough, lasagna dough). The dough rests, but you don't. The resting time (15-30 minutes) gives you enough time to put together a filling, making it possible to get potstickers for 4-6 people on the table in a little over an hour. The rested dough gets divided into four pieces, rolled into logs, and cut into 1 inch pieces. Then each piece is quickly rolled into a circle and filled. Filling and pleating the potstickers took some practice. Below are my first five dumplings. You can see that I'm just getting the hang of pleating the dough to fit around the filling by my fifth one (on the right).
I wanted a vegetable filling but wanted something different than tofu. I found a good recipe using quinoa, shitake mushrooms and vegetables. I made the recipe as written, and added 1/2 cup grated carrots. Making the filling was easy, but there is some serious chopping and mincing required. When making a large batch, you are going to want help in the kitchen. The recipe made exactly enough filling for the dough recipe in the challenge--24 large potstickers. I love when that happens!
I'm the only potsticker lover at home.  So, I rolled and filled only eight of them. Then I cooked them, following Jen's instructions for pan frying. I heated a couple of tablespoons of peanut oil in my 12" cast iron skillet, over medium high, put in the potstickers (flat side down) for a few minutes until very brown. Then I added 1/2 cup water and covered the pan and let the steam do the rest of the work.The finished potstickers were very brown on the bottom (the way I like them) and perfectly cooked on the inside.
I liked these so much that I decided to follow the advice in the challenge recipe for freezing uncooked potstickers. I went back and rolled and filled the remaining dough. The dumplings were set on a tray and put in the freezer for 20 minutes until hard, and then bagged for future use. I'm so happy to have my own brand of frozen potstickers in the freezer! 

Thanks to Jen for such a great challenge. This was certainly not a recipe or skill I would have come up with to challenge myself. As always, special thanks to the many Daring Cooks (especially Audax) who posted pictures, questions, suggestions, stories, humour and help at the Daring Kitchen Forums.

11 comments:

  1. Quinoa potstickers...delicious and ingenius! They came out beautiful and I'd love to try them that way! Kudos!

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  2. That first is so good I printed it out to show a few of my friends just love the shadows and the red colour across the pix. Most excellent that you have some for a potsticker attack. Pity that you are the only potsticker lover at home just means more for you lucky you. Thanks for the mention in the posting - Ta (thanks in Aussie slang). And thanks for all the nice things and comments in the forums you do. Cheers from Audax in Sydney still cold and wet for the moment - the bush turkeys are very busy outsidemy flat building their 2 metre mound nests - very interesting to watch and I only live about 5 kms from the centre of the city there is a lot of bush in Sydney.

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  3. Sorry I forgot to mention Ta for the almond extract you are so kind and I really find this is such a gracious and elegant offer. Thank you.

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  4. I'm impressed, your dumplings (even your first few) look so pretty and pleated. You did a great job!

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  5. Wow, you really tell a great story in the blog posting! Your pictures are excellent and the idea of using quinoa is really inspired.

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  6. Love your filling idea - so creative! Great job on this challenge!

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  7. Great idea on making the filling while the dough is rested...wish I would have thought of that.

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  8. Very nice post.Your dumplings look delicios and you filling was unique.

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  9. Very nice photos! Your dumplings look very tasty. I especially love the bottoms.

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  10. Way to rock the challenge. I'm so glad it turned around your ideas on dumplings/potstickers! Your filling sounds awesome too. They look terrific!

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  11. Fantastic job. I also end up with a full box of frozen potstickers =)

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