How to Make Northern-Style Dumplings from Scratch

longer the wrapper sits out, the more flour you dust over it, the more the wrapper can sort of separate from the filling and rob you from that satisfying uniform bite. Now of course, to continue the analogy, just like you can pick up a loaf of sandwich bread, the busy homecook in China absolutely will, at times, reach for store bought dumpling wrappers. But just like how roast beef between two slices of Wonderbread is… fine… a fresh delicious Italian roll is gunna be a different beast entirely, right? And further, while sandwich bread is often good

enough for government work, store bought wrappers can often come up a bit short. For whatever reason, store-bought’s often missing a bit of bite, and because they’re so uniformly cut they’ll often lack the necessary body. Not to mention, because they have to sit around for so long at the grocer, they’re often pretty dry and seem to have that aforementioned separation issue. So while there’s no shame in reaching for store bought wrappers – we all got lives to live, after all – just know that making it yourself is definitely worth it, and

with a bit of practice, can all be sorted in under an hour I promise. But. Before we can get started attempting to mimic the wrappers of a Northern Chinese grandma, we do have to have a quick chat about the flour that they would use. See, the flour in the North of the country here is rather high in protein and importantly quite finely milled, which means that if you were blindly charged forward with your Gold Medal AP you might not have the greatest time. In our experience, the best substitute for a Northern Chinese flour would be something like an

Italian 00 – in our old Lamian video we used some Caputo’s Chef Pizza Flour which worked brilliantly. But for this video, because I know calling for fancy Italian flour can be kinda annoying in its own right, we also wanted to try some other internationally available options. What we’ll use today is Bob’s Red Mill’s AP flour – while it wasn’t quite as good, with a bit of hydration tinkering we found that it still absolutely did do the job. Second, while we can’t buy it here in China, our enormously talented Patron jeneric also helped us

try out some King Arthur Flour for this recipe and she absolutely raved about the results. King Arthur is a pretty thirsty flour though, so you will also need some hydration tinkering in the other direction, but her final results looked absolutely fantastic. And… lastly, that Gold Medal? Unfortunately in both our tests and hers for whatever reason it just didn’t seem to make for a satisfactory wrapper, we might just be missing something, but for this recipe let’s just use one of the aforementioned four. So then. Before we get started, let’s do a

quick high level overview. We’re gunna be starting off our dumpling dough with a bit of an autolyze – if using Chinese flour or that 00 this step wouldn’t really be required, but does seems to help using Bob’s Red Mill. Then, while that’s resting, we’ll start our filling, which today’ll be some pork and cabbage – first, by prepping some ginger-Sichuan peppercorn water for the meat, and second, by purging some napa for the vegetable. After that, we can swing back to the dough, knead it, and let that rest for about fifteen minutes. Then,

swinging back to the filling, we’ll season and mix up our meat using that ginger-Peppercorn water… then we’ll just divide and roll out all our wrappers, and finally mix together that pork and vegetable to make the final filling – reason it’s mixed at the very end is to make sure the cabbage won’t release any more water. Then just… wrap up your dumplings, boil, and that’s… pretty much it. If you’re in a groove you can actually sort all of this in the space of about 45 minutes, or even a half hour if you’re using one of those Chinese

or Italian flours. But right. Because we’re using that Bob’s Red Mill though, let’s.. do the autolyze. To do so, to 305 grams of flour add in three quarters of a teaspoon of salt, and slowly start to drizzle in 140 grams of water. Patiently mix that in, incorporating the water in with the flour, until you get these scraggily bits called ‘suizi’ in Chinese. Then just really press that all into a ball, and let that rest for twenty minutes. Then. For the filling, first thing to sort will be that ginger-Sichuan peppercorn water. We’re gunna be

adding a whole bunch of this to the pork to moisten things up, so to make it just toss a half tablespoon of Sichuan peppercorns together with an inch of smashed ginger into a bowl and fill that up with about two thirds of a cup of hot, boiled water. Let that steep for about 30 minutes or so, and once the waters no longer hot, strain out those aromatics, and let that chill til you’re ready to use it. Next up, our Napa cabbage. Now there’s generally two ways to crack this nut – blanching and purging, and we personally prefer the texture of the

latter. To do so, first mince up about 300 grams worth of napa cabbage and toss that into a big bowl together with a half tablespoon of salt. Mix that real well, and let it sit for about ten to fifteen minutes. Then, after that time, just squeeze out some of the excess moisture, and toss in a tofu or cheesecloth to finish the job. Just squeeze and really wring it out to make sure you got every last reasonable drop, toss it all in a small bowl, and set that aside til you’re ready to wrap. Now. Our twenty minutes of resting should be about done, so open

things up and get to kneading. You do want a strong dough so do be a bit patient with this – knead for about ten to fifteen, and a stand mixer on speed three would also work just as fine. Now.. interestingly, when working with Bob’s Red Mill, we found that we never could quite get it to that smooth stage that you tend to shoot for when working with Chinese doughs - it always ended up kinda pockmarked. But for dumplings, no need to obsess, as long as things are strong and uniform it’ll still make for a nice wrapper. So just cover, and let that rest

for about 15 minutes. Now, let’s tackle the meat. This was just 300 grams of pork belly ground for us over at the market – the ham cut would also be ideal, but in a pinch you can also use supermarket mince, just aim for something north of 30% fat. Then, to that, just toss in one teaspoon each salt, five spice powder, chicken bouillon powder, cornstarch, soy sauce, and liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine. Give that all a real good mix, then slowly start to drizzle in your Sichuan peppercorn water from before, stirring constantly. And while you don’t have

to be, like, Cantonese-Dim Sum level paranoid with your stirring here, you do want the filling to develop some spring and consistency, so I would recommend spending at least three to five minutes at this step… you want the filling to feel a bit sticky in the end. Dat a couple times for good measure if you feel like it, and set that aside. Now. At this point, our dough should be done resting, so we can divide things up. To do so, slice your dough into four logs, and cut each of those logs into about twelve even pieces, between nine and ten grams each

for 48 wrappers or so in all. Flip each ball over to the cut side, press it down with your palm to get something disc-like, and work through all your little balls. Dust them all with flour, and then we can roll out our wrappers. Now, the idea for dumpling wrappers is pretty much the same as bao wrappers - you want to roll from the center out to the edge in order to make the middle ever so slightly thicker so that it can hold your filling. So roll,, center out, slightly twisting the wrapper as you go, about sixteen times or so in all in order to get a

dumpling wrapper that’s about two and a half inches in diameter. Just work through your wrappers, and then these are ready for filling. So then, it’s then at this point that we can finally add together our pork and our purged napa. Do a good job really mixing that all together, then toss in two tablespoons of oil together with a teaspoon of toasted sesame. Quick note though that opting for a seasoned oil here is also quite common and tasty, so if you do want to go that route instead we’ve also got a recipe for that guy down for you in the

description box. Either way, to wrap then… we’re not going to be going for anything fancy here, just a simple bog standard wrap like you could find at a bog standard dumpling shop. Just toss about ten grams of filling into the center of your wrapper, pull up the sides up like a taco, and pinch them together. Then go around and seal everything closed, and to give things a little shape use your thumbs to sort of press and smush things to the center. Now, just in case, if that wasn’t super clear, we’ve also got a quick little uncut video up here if

you want to see things a little slower… but regardless just work through those dumplings and then these are ready to boil. So. Pot of rapidly bubbling water – stockpot if you don’t have a wok, toss in your dumplings and for our pot today we’ll need to do this in two batches. Just cover that up and once it’s all returned to a boil, add in about a half cup of cool water. Uncovered now, let that come back up to a boil, and then hit it with another half cup or so of cool water. So then, once that’s up to its final boil, just take them out, and

these are ready to devour. So a couple years ago we did a dumpling video. While the filling in that video is all good and tasty… the dough itself is… wrong. We did a hot water plus egg dough, which just doesn’t make sense. While you can do a hot water dough or you can do an egg dough, both are legit doughs for dumplings… but none of those are actually correct for Northern style dumplings. So that’s what prompted us to do this video again, and now at the five year mark of doing our channel, we did a little reflection on our previous videos and

recipes. So if you’re curious to see what we think of our previous work, you can check out the pinned note to see our little essay. So right! As always, check out the recipe in the description box, a big thank you for everyone that’s supporting us on Patreon, and of course, subscribe for more Chinese cooking videos.