- Honestly, growing up, one of my favorite Korean
foods was dumplings, mandu, you know.
These little pockets of deliciousness,
and you know, I would make it at home with my mom.
I would go out, and anytime it was on the menu,
I would order mandu.
Now this place that we're going to go to
specializes in just making handmade dumplings
totally from scratch and they make over a dozen kinds.
It's called Dumpling House, but in Korean,
their name, Tanemando,
actually translates to Dumpling Heaven.
And that's where we're going.
We're gonna go to Dumpling Heaven right now,
right in the middle of K Town in Los Angeles.
I am super hungry right now.
I am excited to have all of this.
I'm going to start out with...
Okay, I'm going to go with the fried one.
They're actually crimped in the traditional
Korean dumpling style, but they're fully deep fried.
Let's just take this apart.
You can see the filling is gently cooked off,
a mix of cabbage, and onion, and you can see that
nice fat shrimp coming out.
Just a gentle dip.
Mmmm mmm.
I love how browned the dumpling skin is.
I mean you can tell that this thing is just
wonderfully deep fried, especially the ridge
right here is where you really get that optimum crunch.
And the wrapper itself gets bubbly and mmm.
The inside, the filling, it's not super packed in there.
And the vegetables kind of dissipate into these
little wisps of gentle aromatics.
It's very well seasoned which I think can be
problematic with a lot of dumplings is that
they're kind of bland, but this one is very
well salted, very savory, it almost doesn't even need
the soy sauce dip, but it always helps.
These can end up being a lot larger,
but this is how big they are here.
These are called king dumplings, or Wan Man Du.
My mom used to bring these home in packs of two
in these styrofoam containers and man,
if I saw them on the counter after school, I would kill it.
I mean look at this thing.
Just chock full.
So I got the one with meat and vegetables.
You can also just get a straight vegetable one.
But inside they have Korean vermicelli or tam yung.
It's a sweet potato vermicelli.
Cause they put some pork in here,
they always prepare anything with pork here,
with a little bit of chives to balance it out.
The owner said that they also put some mushrooms,
cabbage, green onion, and what they said that was
unique about their method is that they don't put
any soy sauce in the meat.
You get a little bit more of the
integrity of the flavor of the ingredients.
It doesn't get masked with
any extra sauces in the marinade.
Even though this is a Korean style dumpling,
it's really kind of adopted from China, right?
The bows that they have there, like chin jen bow,
which is a pan fried bow.
I'm going to take a little kimchi pallet cleanser.
Got this stuff here.
It's good.
Oo, just got dank.
That's dank.
The kimchi mandu is just beautiful.
Look at this.
You can see that just slightly translucent
so the red color of the kimchi comes out.
So it's just kimchi and vegetables.
No meat here.
Good contrast.
I love the crimp here.
It's just very elegant.
Oh.
It's got some heat.
That is super intense.
Almost in the way that you--
When you take garlic and the more that you chop it up,
the stronger that garlic flavor is.
With this kimchi, it's really well chopped up.
I would say it's about a three out of 10 in spice,
but that's a little bit more than I was expecting.
But if you love kimchi, especially really funky,
fermented, intense, like profoundly Korean kimchi,
this is for you.
And the wrap is good because it has a
kind of a hefty pliancy.
You see how it doesn't even pull apart.
I'm giving it a lot of give here.
And I think that's because when it steams,
it has little more structure to it.
I would say that this is probably my favorite dumpling here.
(mellow percussion music)
I'm going to go for the pan fried dumpling.
These are filled with pork and a little bit of chives.
It's also nice because you get a little bit of
that contrast, you know?
One side of it is pan fried, so it's crispy, brown.
The other side hasn't been touched.
So you get to experience both sides of the wrapper.
Let's try this.
Mmmm, mmm, that's very good.
You can instantly tell that the pork
and the chives are much denser.
They have more of an intensely meaty flavor.
My parents would buy bags of this stuff frozen
and it would be super easy to throw into a pan
fry it, add a little bit of water,
cover it so that it cooks the inside,
so if you are going to buy frozen dumplings,
come to a restaurant like Dumpling House
and you can probably ask for them, take some home.
Four down, two to go.
I think this is one of the most comforting,
you know, something grandma would make.
Boiled dumplings.
And what I like is that because they're boiled,
the wrappers have a pasta like quality to them.
I mean, this is basically tortellini, right?
It's Korean tortellini.
These are filled with beef, unlike the pan fried ones
which had pork and chives.
I love these because they retain a lot more juiciness.
You get a balance of the chewy vermicelli
with the ground beef, it's not too heavy on
aromatics, so if you're a little bit of a meat purist,
this is the one you want to get.
(upbeat techno music)
Not a traditional Korean dish, but here it is,
in a Korean restaurant, pan fried,
basically it's a meatball.
It's beef that's been compressed and placed
into this really dense, fried on both sides.
Mmm, that's good, wow.
Because if you were to go to a Beijing style or
northern Chinese restaurant, and you get the meat pies,
they're just like, basically meat patties.
You know, they're like breakfast sausage density.
Coupled with a pretty thick wrapper,
I would say that they've done a nice job of
adapting this northern Chinese dish into
kind of a Korean state of mind.
This is a good innovation.
Mmmm, mmm, yeah.
Thank you so much for watching this episode
and if you want to see more of my adventures
in K Town, click right here.
Oh, I mean you can't ask for duck to be cooked
any better than this, and roasted any better.
Just the right dark meat for turkey.