welcome to hot thai kitchen so today i'm going to share with you a recipe that i've been working on
for quite some time i'm really excited to finally have an awesome version to share with you that is
gyoza or pot stickers or dumplings or whatever you want to call them but today the recipe is going to
lead japanese so we're going to call them gyoza so if you think that gyoza or potstickers is just
a bunch of pork with vegetables and seasonings stick it into wrappers and you're done no no
no no today i've got secrets i've got secret technique secret ingredients to share with
you to make sure that these are gonna be the best dumplings you ever had all right let's get started
so first we're going to start on the filling which is really the only thing we can start
on because the only thing we're making because we're not making wrappers today yeah spoiler
alert we're not making a wrapper today okay so i'm going to start with a herb paste or
spice paste rather with lots and lots of white peppercorns i'm going to get that ground up
garlic and ginger and just a tip on the ginger you do not need to peel the ginger some people
like to peel ginger but when you're smashing it and putting it in something like gyoza
filling no one's gonna see the peel just put it in of course you can just finely grate the
garlic and the ginger as well but i'm thai in just a mortar and pestle is just how you roll
okay there you go so you want quite a fine paste just like that no big chunks so secret number one
is dealing with vegetables now some people like to use regular cabbage i actually prefer napa cabbage
which is more tender and is a milder flavor and i think it's easier to work with in general but
my secret is going to be how i prep with it so the first thing i want to do cut this and separate the
thick stems from the leaves okay and the reason why we're going to do it this way is because
we're going to wilt down the vegetables so that it will fit nicely into our filling
and the stems and the leaves take different amount of time to wilt down you want to cut
these finer than you think just julian's okay and then after that fine dice smaller than you think
okay and then we want to keep the stems and the leaves separated now for the leaves i just line
them up like this and then you just go sort of you know ribbons thin ribbons once you get to
the firmer part you can be a bit thinner i like to just run my knife through it one more time to make
sure there's no long stringy pieces and i like to run it the opposite direction of what we just did
go crazy so the second vegetable we're going to add is garlic chives also known as
nira in japanese or guichai in thai or gaochoi in cantonese for some reason i just know
garlic chives in so many languages the only thing about these we're going to remove the
root end because the root end can be quite chunky and again chunkiness is not something that we want
if you want to save these you can just finely dice it thrown into omelettes or stir fries or whatever
but you want to only use the part where the leaves are flat okay so here's the
real secret of this recipe is we're going to actually cook the cabbage with the herb
paste which most dumpling recipes will not have you do in order to wilt down the cabbage some
recipes will have you salt the cabbage massage it and then squeeze all the water out of it
or they have you blanch it in some boiling water and then juice squeeze all the juice out of it
but i thought you know what cabbage and vegetables have a lot of really nice flavor sweetness not to
mention nutrients if you squeeze all the water out of it you just end up with flavorless fiber why
not just saute it and then take that opportunity to saute out garlic and ginger and develop flavor
even more and turns out this i mean this really does the trick makes a much more flavorful filling
and i'm going to give a shout out to lisa lynn i'll link to her instagram below she's like the
queen of dumplings and i got this technique from her i'm going to go in with the garlic ginger and
peppercorn paste so you can imagine that normally if you just add raw garlic and ginger into your
pork it's only going to get minimally cooked when you steam the dumplings right but now we're really
sauteing it and we all know that sauteing garlic and ginger really develops a flavor and i just
got the heat on medium low because you don't want to burn the garlic perfect okay so once this has
had a couple of minutes you're smelling really good you might even start to see a little bit
of golden developing in the garlic we're gonna add the cabbage stems yes and this is why we separate
the stems and the leaves because the stems are going to take quite a bit longer to wilt down
and to help that build down even more i'm going to add some salt and the salt is going to draw out
water from the cabbage and so it will wilt down more quickly we're going to give this maybe like
four or five minutes so that's looking good to me i can double check by tasting for crunchiness
okay that's good now i'm gonna add
pepper the leaves which at this point will only take just a couple of minutes because again the
leaves cook down so quickly okay so now that is looking good i'm going to just turn this off and
just leave this sitting here on a pan so that it can dry while it cools and then you know while
we wait we have other things that we got to do anyway so you want again maximum evaporation
secret number two we've got the vegetable secret this is the pork secret the park secret is you
do not want to use lean ground pork if you use something lean there no matter what you do your
filling is going to feel a little bit dry a little bit rough right but if you've got fatty pork that
is the secret to juicy juicy filling i mean you're halfway to winning if you start with fatty ground
pork if you do one secret from today this is the one right here okay so we're gonna season
this with some soy sauce some toasted sesame oil and a little bit of sugar it's not gonna
end up tasting sweet but that slight sweetness will balance everything you want it trust me now
more secret ingredients tapioca starch so this is my other secret for keeping things
juicy some fillings will not have you put any starch in it the problem is when you cook
meat juices come out right we've all seen that we stick a burger patty on the pan a lot of liquid
comes out this starch adding just a little bit and you can use corn starch potato starch totally fine
will help keep that moisture in so that it's not all coming out of the pork my last secret is for
extra umami this is like the thing that's unique to me i think is to add dashi powder so this is
hondashi or dashi powder and it's basically the japanese base soup stock that they use in a lot
of different things like their miso soup they use dashi as the base and most people just use
the dashi powder the same way you would use like bouillon cube or the better than bouillon chicken
broth paste thingy right so the japanese use this and it's got lots of umami a little bit of a smoky
flavor and this right here really takes this up to the next level if you're not going to use it for
whatever reason you need to add a little bit more salt so just taste and adjust technique
secret number five you want to knead this a lot so not just mix mix mix it's done and you're done
you want to knead it to really until it goes from sort of like this chunky coarse paste into
something quite smooth that's developing the protein that's in here which will make for a
slightly bouncier texture i talk about this a lot in my meatballs my asian meatball episode where
we really want to process the heck out of those meats because that's part of what's gonna make
a nice bouncy texture so i like to give this about five minutes of kneading and you start to
see the texture looking a little bit different and hopefully you use gloves that is your size
and not trying to wear someone else's latex gloves that's way too big for you here is texture
that we're going for you notice that it's a lot sort of stickier pastier than it was going in
okay so that's what we want and now we're just gonna mix in all the vegetables so that includes
the garlic chives the vegetables which make sure has cooled enough so that it's you know
lukewarm a little bit is okay but you definitely don't want this to cook this pork room temp would
be better and do not make the mistake of adding all the vegetables in in the beginning because
then by the time you're done kneading the pork you get vegetable paste
so at this point you're just gonna mix it so that it's mixed you don't need to knead by the way for
food safety reasons if you're gonna make the filling and maybe like let it sit in the fridge
for a while and you're not gonna cook it just yet you wanna make sure that it's cool cool cool okay
because if you add something lukewarm to meat it really shortens the shelf life of raw meat
significantly but if you're gonna like make it cook it then it's okay okay so now that that's
well mixed what we wanna do and you wanna do this every single time is taste it not raw like this
um you want to cook just a little bit of it in the microwave or you can pan fry like a little patty
or something just so you know where the seasoning is at because once you know there's no fixing it
right once you've made it into a dumplings i'm just going to put a little bit in a bowl
microwave it for literally 30 seconds at the most just until it's cooked through and we'll see what
it tastes like so here's our cooked filling and i just want to point out something notice how
we have very little if like any at all liquid pooling at the bottom of the bowl and that is
because we added that cornstarch or tapioca starch if you didn't add that when you cook the filling
you will notice more liquid coming out of it and that's why our filling is going to be extra juicy
oh it's perfect hot but it's perfect no need to wrap just eat like that just make patties
wrapping time my favorite part just want to quickly touch on dumpling wrappers this is
probably something that's going to be like a local brand because it's a fresh product
so just pick something if it works great if it doesn't pick a different brand next time
just don't get wonton fillings at wonton wrappers that's different if you get those you'll end up
making wontons instead and not gyoza okay so i'm gonna show you a few different ways ranging from
lazy to having way too much time on your hands so with the lazy way is no pleat not only do you get
to do no pleats you get to do only water on one half of the wrapper and then with the filling i
like to use a standard coffee spoon you know like tea dessert coffee spoon and then just plop it on
and then super easy you just pinch the middle to seal if you've got filling trying to escape
make sure you just kind of push them inside a little bit and then just squeeze and squeeze
and bend it as you do it so it has this crescent shape that gyoza is supposed to have there you
go it's not the prettiest but you know what it works and it's fast okay so if you have a
little bit more time on your hand you might want to start pleating and with pleating i do find that
if you wet the whole sheet it will help the pleats stay together better because the pleats kind of
have to fold on top of itself the more pleats you do the less filling you need because you sort of
need that extra room for the pleats pinch the top you just pleat i like to pleat towards the
center you can do this a million different ways and if you're feeling hardcore you can
do four on each side when you pleat you're just gonna get a natural sort of crescent shape so you
don't have to like with the no pleated one you kind of have to bend it but if you pleat it'll
just naturally develop this cute shape now if you don't have that much time on your hand you can do
two pleats on each side one pleat on each side three pleats on each side just depending on how
dedicated are you if you've got hungry children who's gonna like devour this in five minutes just
don't even bother so let's say i wanted to do only three one two three and then one two
three so i'm gonna go and make more dumplings a final tip you either wanna cook these or you
wanna freeze these okay you do not wanna make them stick it in the fridge cook them tomorrow because
this dough is raw and eventually the filling the moisture from the filling will turn the
dough soggy so if you're not going to eat them all right now cook them all within like a couple of
hours you want to freeze them freeze them in one layer so they don't stick to each other as well
cooking time we're going to do the standard crispy bottom method which means we actually
fry and then steam okay so i got a big skillet here you want nonstick if possible it will
make it a lot easier for you you don't have to actually wait for the oil to get hot you
just go in and line these up neatly if you wait till the oil gets hot then this part you're like
because it's going to be spattering and then they're browning so fast so just take your time
these will be okay a couple in the middle and then i'm gonna wait for these to start sizzling and
browning about three to four minutes depending on your heat checking every so often how the
browning is coming along because in my experience they round a lot faster than you think oh by the
way if you've got frozen ones you just do exactly the same way you cook them directly from frozen
you don't need to thaw it it'll just take you a little bit longer to steam them that's all
maybe i turn the heat on no then we're just asking for trouble asking for trouble i'm gonna live on
the edge and turn the heat up a bit more okay that's starting to look nice see that a little
okay i'm gonna go in now it's gonna be a little uneven just because
most pans are now you got about a quarter cup of water
turn the heat down a bit
that's a little more aggressive than i would recommend but maybe turn the heat
down before you add your water but that's what you do you add your water you cover it most of
the time it's not going to be that aggressive that's as aggressive as as i've ever seen it
it doesn't do this at my house and then you're gonna let this steam if it's not
what's going on here if it's um not frozen it will take about three minutes
if it's frozen i would do up to five minutes to make sure the filling is completely cooked
and to check doneness you can just go by timing but to be absolutely sure i like to use
a instant read thermometer and you can just stick it in and you want to go for 160 at the
very least which these are definitely so they are done and then what you want to do now is
if you've got any lingering water you want to cook it so that the water all dries up yeah see so easy
for plating if you want you can just put them on a plate and be done with it but to
show the nice golden brown bottom you might want to try something a little riskier and
flip it out onto a plate which is what i am going to do so okay you ready one two three wow
look at that it's a little risky a little scary at first but if you've got a plate that actually fits
these properly they'll sit a little bit nicer but i'm going to go and rearrange them a bit
yay all right let's eat dipping sauce so this recipe i've made the filling flavorful enough
that you can actually enjoy it without any dipping sauce but i think a little bit of
vinegary dipping sauce is nice a nice balance to sort of the salty filling so it's a really
simple sauce you just want soy sauce in here use good quality soy sauce if you've got some
and then equal parts rice vinegar you want the filling to be tart if you were in thailand
you'd probably want to add just a pinch of sugar because we always like a little bit of sweetness
to balance but you don't have to i don't feel like it needs it what i will add is
some chili oil so this is um my secret number six or whatever i've lost track of how many
secrets now this is my other secret is i like to add to my dipping sauce some
ryu and you can just drizzle it onto the gyoza you can serve it on the side but i like to actually
just put it into the dipping sauce okay let's eat i want to try one first without any dipping sauce
so good juicy filling perfectly seasoned and you can really taste the hondashi
on the sesame oil the garlic ginger i mean you can really taste
all the extra spices and seasoning that we add to here now a dip
even better and i find that that doing the vegetables this way the sauteing instead of the
wringing out all the life out of the vegetables you can actually taste
the napa cabbage flavor in here which is nice and sweet and it gives a little bit more
complexity to an otherwise you know just pork filling right so it really does make a difference
when you go through that little saute step so the recipe as always will be on hotthaikitchen.com and
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thank you as always for watching and i will see you next time for your next delicious adventure