My first post – both exciting and scary. What better way to kick this off than to start by sharing one of my favourite recipes – pork dumplings.

I’ve been making dumplings for a while now but last year I went to a cooking class where we were taught some techniques which made a massive difference to the finished product. (If you’re in Wellington I would highly recommend Asiana Cooking School).

Makes approx. 40 dumplings

Ingredients

Dough
2 cups flour
3/4 cup of boiling water

For an easier option, you can buy pre-made dumpling skins. I like the Oriental Cuisine Chiao Tzu skins. These can be found in some supermarkets or your local Asian supermarket. Another option is wonton skins.

Filling
300g pork mince
2 spring onion (chives also work well)
1 clove garlic
2cm ginger, peeled and grated
80g canned water chestnuts
3 tbsp water
3 tsp soy sauce
3 tsp rice wine
3 tsp sesame oil
3 tsp chilli paste with soya bean oil (substitute for chilli paste if you can’t find this. Chilli paste will be spicier so adjust to your own taste.)

Dipping sauce
5 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp garlic
1 tsp ginger
1 tbsp chilli paste with soya bean oil
1 tsp brown sugar (optional)

Start by making the dough. Put the flour in a food processor or mixer with the dough hook and slowly add in the boiling water while it mixes. If you don’t have a food processor or mixer you can do this by hand by putting the flour on your work surface, make a well in the centre and start adding the hot water and mixing by hand. When the dough starts to come together, pull it out and knead for two minutes. Put this is in a lightly oiled bowl and cover with cling wrap for an hour at room temperature.

While the dough is resting start on your mince mixture. Finely chop the spring onion, ginger, garlic and water chestnuts. Put this in a large mixing bowl with the pork mince, and remaining ingredients. I mix this by hand (generally with a glove on because I can’t handle the mince getting in my nails). Mix for a good few minutes to get the pork to a smooth consistency, you can add more water to help with this process.

Once your dough has finished resting divide it into four parts. With the first quarter, roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to approximately 3mm and using a circle cooking cutter or a glass start cutting out circles of the dough. You should be able to get approx. 12 wrappers from each quarter. Continue this process with the following three quarters.

Once you have all your dough cut out you can start making your dumplings. Hold a wrapper in your hand and fill with approx. 1 tsp of the pork filling, place some water around one side of the wrapper (I dip my forefinger in water and run this along one side) and seal by either pushing the sides together or pleating the dumplings. To pleat the dumplings make four pleats on one side of the dumpling then put water on the other side and seal. Another option is to seal the dumplings and then pleat after sealed.

Once you have prepared all of your dumplings pop them in a large pot and cook them until they float to the top of the water (approx. 5 minutes). You can eat them like this, or you can place in a frying pan and brown for panfried dumplings – I like both, so it just depends on your preference.

To make the dipping sauce combine all sauce ingredients together, easy as that!