I am fascinated by steam cooking. In my eyes it is several levels above “ordinary” boiling and stewing. It is definitely a classy, fancy cooking procedure. So I was truly happy when a friend surprised me with a gift of a simple steamer insert. Even the insert looks magical, opening up like a shining, steel flower. Naturally I wanted to test it out, but I could not find a recipe to my liking. So I combined several internet sources and some my own testing, to get something that I liked. And I wrote it down here for future reference
Dumplings dough
There are several recipes out there and I was looking for an easy one. This one looked simple and straightforward. Just mix 2 cups of flour, an egg, some salt and enough water to get a soft, elastic dough. After 10 minutes of standing, the dough could be easily rolled in fine, thin sheets of desired sizes. And after steaming it was firm, robust, but still nice, soft and chewy. Perfect
Dumplings filling
For the filling you can probably take whatever you like. I wanted to prepare vegetarian and meat dumplings, therefore I separated the meat from the vegetables. On two spoons of olive oil I fried some finely chopped onions, added minced beef meat, seasoned with salt and pepper and fried the meat. Real simple. Next, on two spoons of peanut oil I lightly fried some sesame seeds, added chopped leek and diced carrots and fried some more. At the end I added diced broccoli and mushrooms and fried until the mushrooms softened. Everything was seasoned with soy sauce and a five spice seasoning mix. The end result was heavenly! NOw for the actual feeling everything was opened: only meat, only vegetables or the mix of both. Around 1:1 mixture was perfect for my taste. The base fullness of meat and crunchiness and freshness and spicy taste of the vegetables.
Dumplings cooking (steaming)
Well, that was the problem – I could not find any good data about the cooking time. And I believe it is strongly dependent on the size of your dumplings and the thickness of your dough. After some experimentation, I determined that for my style around 6-8 minutes of steam cooking was perfect. The only problem is that the dumplings cool down fast and should be eaten practically immediately. But we overcame this problem, as you can imagine :).
