Jiaozi
Because I don’t think you can figure out how to make jiaozi from just reading the recipe, I found a few youtube videos showing how to make them. Everyone’s technique is just a little different, so I’m showing several of them.
This guy crimps both sides at once. This keeps filling from squirting out the left side as you crimp the right side. We also get to see how you roll the dough and cut it and flatten it here, too. She makes it look a lot easier than it is when you first try it.
There is a little more explanation in this one, though you can’t really see her technique so much:
Talk about an expert at rolling the dough. Wow. This gives a closeup of how they have the flour on the table to help keep the dough from sticking to the table.
Okay, so that gives you an idea of how jiaozi is made. I found a bunch of videos of Chinese families sitting around putting them together, but they didn’t really show technique so I didn’t put them here. I noticed that one of them showed one person who picked every single one up and re-crimped the edges before sitting it on the final tray. That one made me laugh out loud, since we generally have someone assigned to do that, too.
January 10th, 2009 at 10:21 am
RQ, thank you for these fantastic posts about Spring Festival. I’ve been wanting to learn how to cook Jiaozi.
A question about your celebrations….do you decorate the house, and if you do, what do you use? CM
January 10th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I have to admit — I make the filling from scratch but then I cheat and buy wonton wrappers instead of making the dough. Some day I’ll find the time to figure out the dough, but not until DD is quite a bit older!
January 10th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
wfcelia: I don’t make the wrappers either. I actually prefer the thinner, more noodle-like store bought wrappers. And working with dough is not my forte.
January 10th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Boy this is all bringing back memories of my preteen years working in my Auntie’s restaurant in Hawaii. It’s all multi-cultural so she had Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian and American food on her menu. She asked me to fold wonton for the soup, gave me some pork mix, some dough and walked off. I tried my best but it was DIFFICULT as I could not work with dough either. She came back to inspect my work and as Asian Aunties are prone to do, chewed me out big time for making them look like little Behinds. (As if it was intentional!) It is not easy to make these dumplings look nice. My punishment was next being assigned to clean & shell about a hundred pounds of shrimp. As many decades have passed, I should try again and I won’t have Auntie to mircro manage me any more. Thanks for all the coaching on this RQ. By the way, I think I should make up a master list for all my holiday cooking and parties…it is tough to manage two kids and a large meal for lots of people at one time. Great idea!
January 12th, 2009 at 11:38 am
A while back I found a good site for making dumplings – no video, but lots of pictures and good explanations: http://jenyu.net/fd/photorecipes/
Scroll down to the Chinese Cooking section to find the link to making dumplings.
Jenny
January 13th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
It looks just like Polish pierogi! Cool!