Soup dumplings

It’s been a while since I blogged about what I’ve been cooking for the past few weeks (on the weekends only). So I’m posting multiple entries at once to catch up.

It’s been pretty much the same temperature in Portland since we moved here three months ago. High 50s and low above freezing. But the rain and lack of sun has made me crave comfort food. To me comfort food is typically carbs-laden and steaming warm. Kenji from Serious Eats was featuring Chinese dishes for a week. One of them was soup dumplings, which are small doughy dumplings with ultra juicy filling, so much so that you need to be careful when biting into a hot dumpling as to not burn your mouth with hot juice bursting out of the dumpling.

I decide to do a version with less fuss. In Kenji’s recipe he’d stuff a chunk of gelatinous “soup” in the dumpling. The heat of cooking would melt the gelatin and create the soupy goodness. But that’s a lot of work. Basically I made soup dumplings without soup. You’d say “would that be plain dumplings?” In Chinese dumplings refer to this other thing. So mine is really soup dumplings minus the soupy part. Make sense? I didn’t think so either…

I made the wrappers and the filling all from scratch. You can follow Kenji’s recipe on both components. I stuffed mine with a mixture of ground pork, shitaki mushroom and lots of chopped scallion. The wrapping of these dumplings isn’t too different from the “pork buns” from the previous post. 

The steamed dumplings have glistening exterior that's both soft and chewy at the same time, if that makes any sense. 

These yummy bites are juicy even without the additional soup gelatin.

The whole process of making the dumplings took about 2 hours. But it took no more than 15 minutes for us to eat them all up. Mmm, carb-y comforting goodness. Now I’m really for a nap.