Dumpling Galaxy

During our Girls’ Outing two summers ago, my sister, my Brooklyn sister-in-law, and I spent the better part of the day outside of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Our first stop was the miraculous Spa Castle in College Point. We relaxed in the myriad of spa pools and sauna huts, ordered a drink or two from the swim up bar, and had ice cream for lunch. Since it was midweek and threatening rain, the spa pools were only lightly crowded, so the three of us were actually able to relax and enjoy ourselves. At some point, my sister suggested we go to Dumpling Galaxy for a meal; it was too early for a proper dinner, but since we had only eaten ice cream for lunch, some type of sustenance was in order. She followed her GPS to Flushing, and then parallel parked on a side street. Then she led us up to a busy main thoroughfare and to what seemed to be a deserted old-style mall. We wandered through the mall for a bit and then found Dumpling Galaxy, which was also fairly deserted. I was skeptical, but so happy to be proven wrong! The food was fantastic! Between the three of us, we ordered dozens of dumplings. It was easy to do because each order had six dumplings, and there seemed to be at least one hundred different offerings. The dumplings kept appearing, and we kept eating until we couldn’t possibly eat any more. Then we rolled out of the mall, across the busy street, and back down the side street to the car. Good times…

Since I have such fond memories of our outing to Dumpling Galaxy, imagine my delight when I found out that the owner published a cookbook. Despite the mixed reviews on Goodreads, I just had to have it. So I added it to my Christmas list and waited patiently until the big day. Once the treasure was in my possession, it wasn’t until the week before Chinese New Year that I had the free time to actually dive into it.

Without even skimming the introductory material, I flipped through the recipes to get a sense of the galaxy of dumplings represented. Although I am more of a fan of the crispy pan fried dumplings, I had to take a strategic pause at the recipe for Pork Soup Dumplings. I just had to know how they get the soup inside the dumplings! It looked to be quite easy – less than two full pages of recipe instructions, and most of that was the instructions for cooking and shaping. Right then and there, I decided that I MUST try to make soup dumplings during the upcoming weekend, regardless of how much real work I had to accomplish. As I continued to flip through the recipes, I decided that I needed to make one more type of dumpling so that I wouldn’t overindulge in soup dumplings for dinner. Eventually, I settled on the Crab and Chive Dumplings, because that filling looked to be quite easy as well.

The next morning, I was so excited about my decision to make dumplings over the weekend that I brought Dumpling Galaxy to work with me. My intention was to take a few minutes at lunch to compose a grocery list for the dumplings and the house. Unfortunately, I was booked solid between the meetings that I had to attend and the phone calls that I had to make. But I survived. After I logged off for the evening, I sat at my desk with the cookbook for a few minutes and wrote a very odd grocery list before I headed out for the weekend.

“Soup” for the Dumplings

The first step of Pork Soup Dumpling had to be done the day before the rest of the dumpling recipe. According to the recipe headnote, a soup dumpling is nothing more than ground pork mixed with a thick pork aspic. Aspic is a savory jelly made with meat stock; making soup dumplings the traditional way involves boiling pork skin, fat, and feet for hours so that the protein rich stock will congeal when cooled. When the dumpling is steamed, the aspic melts to a liquid, forming the “soup” in the dumpling.

Lucky for me, making soup dumplings the Dumpling Galaxy way only involved a lot of Knox gelatin. Of course, I did a double take when the first step in the recipe instructions was to bring fourteen cups of water to a boil. That is a lot of water!!! Especially considering that the recipe only called for one pound of ground pork. I toyed with calling it a typo and only using four cups of water instead. But then I read the standard recipe on the box of Knox gelatin: that called for a ratio of one envelope of gelatin to one cup of water. Since the recipe called for 32 envelopes of gelatin (that’s eight boxes!), fourteen cups of water actually seemed a little short.

Once I resolved the water question, the recipe went quite quickly. I mixed a little sugar and salt into the water, turned the burner on high, started my laundry, and came back to a boiling pot of water. Then I mixed in all of the gelatin, turned the heat down to low, and stirred until most of the gelatin was dissolved. I set the timer for fifteen minutes to let the gelatin finish dissolving and moved my Christmas decorations into the basement. When I came out of the basement, the timer was done. So I set a new timer for thirty minutes, which was how long the book said it would take for the liquid to thicken into a rich stock. I struggled moving some wall mirrors out of the living room and into the laundry room. (They were supposed to go into the basement, but I decided that I couldn’t make that happen by myself.) The timer finished shortly after that task was complete. I was lucky enough to own a glass bowl large enough to hold all of the liquid to cool, but finding room for it to chill in my refrigerator was a challenge.

With the “soup” done, I curled up on the couch to officially start reading the cookbook.

Crab and Chive Filling

Because work went out of control, it wasn’t until two weeks later that I could re-engage the dumpling project. By then, all the fresh ingredients had turned. So on a Saturday, I headed to the giant Asian supermarket a few towns over to get some garlic chives and a small Asian rolling pin. The place was mobbed! Especially the produce section! So I started out in frozen foods to try to find my parents the frozen bao that they enjoy. No luck there, so I went to the non-food aisles to find my rolling pin. Those aisles were confusing, but fairly uncrowded, so I could take my time and find what I needed. The first bin of rolling pins that I found actually contained large wooden pestles. But the bin next to that had small Western style wooden rolling pins, which I figured would suit my needs. With that task accomplished, I went back to bob and weave through the crowd in produce to find garlic chives. There was a bin of unlabelled produce that looked like giant chives and a bin of produce labeled “Leeks” that looked more like giant chives than Western leeks. Since I couldn’t remember what the book said about how garlic chives may be labeled at the Asian grocery store, I picked up a bunch of green stuff from the unlabelled bin and smelled it. It smelled like I’d imagine a garlic chive to smell, so I bought two bunches. Of course, when I looked at my receipt later, I discovered that they were called “choi flowers.” Oh well. They smelled right, so I was going to use them.

On my way home, I stopped at the local grocery store for the less exotic ingredients: cod, crab, ground pork. The cod and the ground pork were no problem, but the crab gave me pause. There was nice crab in the Seafood department that I hadn’t noticed the first time I gathered ingredients for the fillings. But that was only an eight-ounce container. Last time I bought two six-ounce cans from over by the canned tuna. Since I couldn’t remember how much crab the recipe called for, I decided to do exactly what I did last time and buy two cans from the canned tuna section. While at the grocery store, I also picked up a few things for the house and some treats for the software testing team that I was leading at work. Because I was tapped out when I got home, I settled into the couch to read a new cookbook from Blogging for Books rather than immediately starting the dumplings.

When I finally motivated off the couch, it was late in the evening. Because it would take almost two hours to make the fillings, make the wrappers, fill and shape the dumplings, and cook the dumplings, I decided that I would only make the fillings and finish the rest of the steps in the morning. The crab and chive filling came together super quick – once the garlic chives, scallion, and the cod fillet were chopped. All I had to do was drain the cans of crab and measure some crushed ginger, salt, and sherry. Of course, the recipe said to mix it all with your hands, but I opted for a wooden spoon because of the raw fish involved. Once I had that complete, I sealed up the bowl and wedged it into the refrigerator.

Pork Soup Filling

The filling for the pork soup dumplings was a little more complicated. First step was to take out the bowl of aspic and inspect that it was still good. It was! So that went back into the refrigerator to wait its turn for use in the recipe. The second step was to puree 5½ ounces of ginger with 4 scallions and 2 tablespoons of water. Since I was using almost two full four-ounce tubes of crushed ginger, I decided to skip that step and just finely chop the scallions. It was late and I didn’t feel like hauling out and cleaning special equipment for this recipe. Once that decision was made, the recipe came together quickly. All I had to do was add some sauces and seasonings to the ground pork, finely chopped scallions, and crushed ginger. Again, the recipe called for mixing with my hands. That seemed awfully messy, so I opted for the wooden spoon again.

The next step of the recipe called for chopping the aspic into cubes and stirring that into the pork mixture. Since I had definitely decided to finish the recipes the next morning, it seemed more prudent to postpone the combination of the pork with the aspic until the morning. With that decision made, I sealed up the bowl of pork mixture and wedged that into the refrigerator as well. Then I brought my new cookbook from Blogging for Books up to bed with me and called it a night.

Pork Soup Dumpling Wrappers

To make my life easier, I did search for wonton wrappers (or other appropriate wrappers) while at the Asian supermarket. Having no luck, I set about making my own. Based on what I had learned by reading the cookbook, I knew that I would have to make two separate batches of dumpling dough: one kind for the steamed soup dumplings and another kind for the boiled crab dumplings. Although each used basically the same amount of flour, the dough for boiled dumplings was a sturdier dough that contained an egg white.

Since it was almost 9pm on a Sunday when I started making the dough, I decided to just do the dough for the steamed pork soup dumplings and leave the sturdier dough for the crab dumplings to the following evening. Making the dough for steamed dumplings was actually a lot simpler than I had feared. It required mixing a portion of the flour with boiling water until that formed a translucent ball. Easy enough! Once I had that accomplished, I folded the remainder of the flour into the mix until it formed a rough dough. Then all I had to do was knead it - a lot! - but I got into a rhythm so it wasn’t as challenging as I thought it might be. The cookbook said that kneading was over when it felt like a gummi bear. I couldn’t tell whether I had gotten to that point, but I had been kneading for about ten to fifteen minutes, so I decided to move onto the next step and let the dough sleep (Yes, that is exactly what the recipe said). Since the recommendation was for fifteen to thirty minutes, I chose to set a timer for twenty minutes.

While the dough for the steamed dumplings was sleeping, I coarsely chopped the aspic into cubes using a wooden spoon. Then I stirred it pretty roughly to bring to the surface all the cubes that needed to be cut in half. Once the aspic was closer to a jelly than stiff cubes, I added the pork mixture and roughly stirred that into the aspic. The mixture seemed a bit out of proportion, as it looked like aspic cubes coated with pork rather than pork with aspic cubes running through it. Only time will tell how that works out for me!

The next step with dough was more kneading, this time until it felt like a gel shoe insole. (Seriously, that’s how the recipe described it!). That went fairly quickly as the book recommended that it would only take about ten kneads to get there. I just did ten kneads and called it good enough to go on to the next step, which was to divide the dough. First, I rolled the dough into one log and divided that into four equal pieces. Then I took one of those pieces, rolled it into another log, and divided that into six equal pieces. For each of the three remaining sections, I rolled it into a log about the same length as the other, then used that as a guide to cut six equal pieces. Of course, I repeated that with the two remaining pieces until I had twenty four even pieces. I rolled each piece into a ball (which was supposed to be one inch diameter, but mine were hit or miss). Since it was 1030pm, I counted out six balls and set aside the remaining eighteen to play with another evening.

The remaining three steps went fairly quickly, probably because it was late and I was hungry. I rolled each of the six balls into circles of approximately four inches in diameter. I actually did measure the first one with my bench scraper, and then I used that as guide for the remaining five. The recipe went into a big explanation of how to rotate the dough and use the rolling pin to get the right size circle of the right thickness. I just faked it, and they seemed to turn out fine. Once I had a stack of four inch circles, I filled them one by one with the pork mixture and tried my best to seal them up with fancy pleats like the recipe described. I wasn’t entirely successful with that. However, I did attempt to seal up all the holes in the wrappers so my soup wouldn’t leak out. As I completed each little package, I carefully loaded it into my cabbage leaf lined steamer basket, aiming for about an inch in between each dumpling. The final step was to actually steam the dumplings. The recipe recommended six to seven minutes, but the timer on my steamer was only marked in increments of five minutes. So I opted for a ten minute timer.

When my steamer timer dinged, I was surprised by what I found in the steamer basket. Each dumpling looked like a little deflated lump of dough, out of which all the soup had leaked. There seemed to be ample soup in the drip pan underneath the steamer basket. However, when I tried the first one, I did get a mouthful of hot soup, which was unexpected given its appearance. The wrapper, unfortunately, tasted thick and doughy. I couldn’t tell whether that was because the cooking time was off or because I didn’t roll it thinly enough. I did roll the wrappers quite thin, and it was a struggle to keep them from tearing when I was pleating them closed around the filling. So my guess was that I needed to play around with the cooking time when I did my succeeding batches. But that night, all I really had time to do was devour the remaining five dumplings - taking care not to be surprised by the hot soup filling - and rinse out the steamer basket in preparation for the next batch the following day.

Because I thought the dough was the root cause of the leaking soup dumplings, I bought a package of commercial wonton wrappers at the grocery store after work the following day. It was a surprise to find them; the wonton wrappers and egg roll wrappers were with the kimchi on a top shelf in the produce cooler, right next to the fresh herbs. Not a very logical spot!

When I got home from the grocery store, I was hungry (again) so I pulled out the pork and aspic mixture from the refrigerator. It was like super Jell-O; it was so stiff and wiggly! I took a small scoop of the mixture and put it into one of the wonton wrappers, which were much stiffer than the dough wrappers that I had made the night before. They had absolutely no stretch at all, which I though would be good to help keep the soup sealed inside the dumpling. Unfortunately, the wonton wrappers also had no stickiness, so I couldn’t get them to seal! With two strikes against them, I put the wonton wrappers back in the refrigerator.

The night before, I had sealed my bowl of dough balls with plastic wrap and put them in the oven to rest overnight. I didn’t turn the oven on, I just wanted an airtight place to store them. And when I pulled them out, they were just fine. Since I was hungry, I only had the patience to roll three balls into circular dough wrappers. I gently stuffed each wrapper with the pork and aspic mixture and then set the three to steam. After the steamer dinged, I discovered that two out of the three had completed deflated and leaked out, and one had a decent (albeit scalding) mouthful of soup in it. I made two more baskets of three dumplings apiece, and each turned out the same way: two deflated and one with a mouthful of soup. But at least I wasn’t hungry any more!

The Verdict

Since I was planning to leave for an overseas trip over the weekend, my weeknights got out of control with preparing, packing, and socializing. So I never got around to making the crab and chive dumplings. Which was actually a sacrifice I was willing to make in order to get out the door in time for my trip. I can do it again another day, maybe after I do more research and reading about dumpling wrappers.

While I would be willing to experiment with crab and chive dumplings or another type of dumplings, I don’t think I will try pork soup dumplings again. The aspic took a fair amount of effort to concoct, and I couldn’t get it in the right proportion to the pork. Never mind the fact that I could never figure out how to keep the soup inside the dumpling as I was steaming it! No, I just suppose my sister will have to come back north to take me and my sister in law back to the real Dumpling Galaxy, so that I can gorge myself on as many properly made soup dumplings as I would like.