Handmade Potstickers

Potstickers, yay!

I have tried making Xiao Long Bao twice, with results that almost drove me to tears. You'd be traumatized too if you've:

- gotten strange looks from your butcher when asking to buy pig skin- scraping the skin to get rid of the residual hairs

- boiling it up with the chicken carcass, pork bones and lots and lots of ginger to kill the smells

- setting it in the fridge, skimming off the fat, giving the dish a good shake and watching it wobbleAll this has to be done at least the day before.
- Hand-mincing the pork for the filling
- The dough, oh, the damned dough for the wrappers. SO MUCH effort to knead and roll and wrap, only to have the set up soup melting into my wrappers because of the hot weather (and unformed gluten)

After all that effort, what a letdown. I still shudder at the amount of sweat and effort that went down the drain.

That was more than a year ago.

Now I feel compelled to try again, but with something a little less ambitious this time. No soup that can seep out or anything like that.

And what results! Happiness is making your own potstickers, skin and all :) truly
Recipe is from this gorgeous blog for the wrappers, and Eileen Leong-Blonder for the filling, a simple, winning combo of hand-minced pork belly (with the fat that melts during the cooking process, thus resulting in a really juicy bite, wilted Napa cabbage, spring onions, seasoned with soy, sesame oil, Shiaoxing wine, a teeny bit of sugar.

Filling recipe:
- 300g pork - lean if you want a good hearty mouthful; pork belly if you want a really juicy bite

- 3 cups Napa cabbage, finely shredded

- 2 tbsp salt

- 1 tbps finely grated ginger

- seasonings - 2 tsp soy, 2 tsps sesame oil, i tbsp Shaoxing wine, pinch of sugar

Mix the cabbage really well with the salt, cover and leave for 15 minutes for the cabbage to wilt. Then rinse off the salt, drain and squeeze out as much water as possible. I still found my cabbage soggy after squeezing, so I spread them out on a platter and directed my stand fan at them for 10 minutes. Mix the cabbage with everything else, leave the filling to marinate for at least half an hour.

Homemade wrappers -sigh, getting it right is such a magnificient feeling. And the eating - "toothsome resiliance" - I cannot find a better way to describe it. All I can say is that it IS worth it. Thanks to this site for the recipe - it's a revelation in itself. A dream to work with, it didn't stick to anything, yet was easy to seal, and I could even make those little pleats you see here. Am definitely going to get me a copy of Fuschia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery for more tips and inspirations.