Gyoza

Picture it, Tokyo, 2002, I am cycling through the suburban streets making mental record of every late-night restaurant I pass. Two containers of Jiffy Pop rattle around my bicycle basket and wonder when my next real meal will be.

Dan, the vegan, had invited me over for dinner. Back then I was a lot less progressive when it came to alternative eating and I was convinced I would need a late-night burger to recover from whatever he fed me.

There are few times when it feels good to be wrong, but when Dan’s girlfriend, Yoko, opened the door welcoming me to their gyoza making party, I took in the scent of pork, bowed low, and said Arigato.

So that was the last time I made gyoza from scratch. This time things didn’t go so smoothly. During the final cooking stages I tossed and agitated those little dumplings to within an inch of their lives. Some of them lost their filling and the others stuck together in a protective sticky mass.

Learn from my mistakes. Fry your gyoza in a row with one broad side touching and don’t move them until the cooking process is over. At the end turn them out of the pan like a cake.

Refrigerating for a day or two and freezing are also fine, but the moisture of the filling will make your gyoza sticky so don’t dump them into a Tupperware container like I did. Line them up a save yourself the grief.

Pork Gyoza

2/3 cup chopped cabbage (soaked in boiling water and drain when tender)

4 Tbsp chopped green onion

1 pound ground pork

2 tsp sesame oil

2 tsp sugar

2 tsps soy sauce

2 tsp grated fresh ginger

40 gyoza wrappers

2 tbsp vegetable oil
rice wine vinegar
chili oil

Blend all ingredients in a bowl except the vegetable oil.

Place one teaspoon of filling in a gyoza wrapper.

Fold in half crimping the top.

After filling all wrappers, add vegetable oil to a pan.

Once oil is hot, place gyoza in the pan frying the bottoms until brown.

Add two tablespoons of water and cover pan.

Steam gyoza until filling is 170 degrees 4-5 minutes.

Turn them out of the pan onto a plate.

Use rice wine vinegar, chili oil and soy sauce to create a dipping sauce. The proportions are up to you.

*Substitute the pork with chopped firm tofu for the vegetarian/vegan version.

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What is Soy Sauce: More than Liquid Sodium

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Don’t let those cheap Chinese Food take-out packets fool you. Good soy sauce is brewed like beer, aged like fine wine and is as mold intensive as the smelliest French cheese.

The difference between cheap soy sauce and the good stuff is process and product. Good soy sauce begins with soybeans, wheat, salt and water. It is then fermented, aged and pasteurized. The other stuff begins with something called hydrolyzed soy protein. What happens after that is too difficult to understand let alone explain, but I think you get the picture.

Sweet, salty, sour and bitter are the four tastes we all learned about in school, but soy sauce is a major source of the more recently identified umami. Umami means savory which is why the addition of a good sauce soy sauce can add another level of complexity to your food.

Until living in Japan, I thought soy sauce was nothing more than the Asian solution for table salt. With that in mind, I had no problem pouring it over mounds of white rice which roughly equates to smothering an aged T-bone in ketchup. In Japan etiquette dictates that food should be dipped in soy sauce then lightly touched to rice before it is consumed.

I’m telling you all this for two reasons.

Reason #1:
I couldn’t find gyoza wrappers in my hardcore Latin neighborhood though I did find empanada wrappers. The promised gyoza recipe will be posted Thursday.

Reason#2:
More often than not, our collective soy sauce experience is limited to those tasteless packets, but picking up a bottle of Kikkoman, or another reputable brand, won’t break the bank and will bring a lot more umami goodness to your Asian meals.

Want to know more about soy sauce? Click here.

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Going Vegan

Limitations fuel creativity and I’ve been eating too much cheap meat. On January 1st I will go vegan for an entire month. Consider this your one month warning if you want to join.

The holidays can spark a food hangover that will last for days. It’s like you can actually feel gravy coming straight out of your pours. What better way to shake off some of that holiday glut than giving up meat and dairy altogether?

This is a chance to work with new ingredients and techniques. Cheese is awesome, but won’t it be cool to look for new ways to satiate? I’m curious to know what my body will feel like- lighter, sluggish, energized… Who knows?

Over the next few weeks I will start to study. Stand by.

In the meantime, pork gyoza will be my next post.

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