lougord99 wrote:Fettine di Manzo Farcite - Stuffed thin Beefsteaks from Marcella Hazan. Very simple and basic, but quite good.
Damn, Lou! Those cutlets look awesome!
There are a handful things I've been wanting to try cooking for several months now but for whatever reason, just hadn't gotten around to it. I decided to tackle one of them today and make some pork & cabbage dumplings. I did take one pretty significant shortcut and bought wrappers at the store. Other than that, it's a relatively quick prep that provides lots of nice cutting opportunities . . .
Mise En Place & Yu Kurosaki R2 Hammered Gyuto, 210mmShaoxing wine, scallions, toasted sesame oil, light soy sauce, coarsely ground pork, finely minced Chinese celery, white pepper & Sichuan peppercorn, grated ginger & minced garlic, wrappers and minced napa cabbage
(with 1% salt).
I combed the internet and ended up with a recipe that incorporated good-looking stuff from a bunch of online sources. Before mixing this all together, I let the salted cabbage sit for about an hour, then squeezed as much moisture out of it as I could. Once mixed, I let the filling sit in the fridge for a couple of hours before filling the wrappers. I used to do quite a bit of high-volume, assembly line cooking back in the day, so putting together ~60 dumplings was a nice way to reminisce without feeling overly taxed.
Wrapped DumplingsHmmm . . . .I wonder who the jokester was who made the tortellini-shaped one.
Had to make a dipping sauce, too . . .
Sauce Mise En PlaceSesame seeds/gochugaru/salt, minced garlic, scallions, black vinegar, soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, veg oil and granulated sugar.
Everything in the front row gets the veg oil, heated, poured over it. After a quick stir, the top row items and some water get mixed in.
For the cook, I went with a pretty standard pan-cooking technique: browned, then steamed, and they turned out pretty good . . .
Plated UpPan Fried Dumplings with Dipping Sauce. Crispy on the outside. Flavorful and juicy on the inside.
Then, at the very end, after I'd cooked and eaten
a lot of dumplings, I tried one batch, adding a cornstarch slurry to the pan in an attempt to create a lacy, connective veil that tops the dumplings after they're cooked and inverted out of the pan. That was only partially successful . . .
Corn Starch VeilIt was a light, solid mass and it was crispy but it didn't brown evenly. I'll take another shot at this next time but for a first effort, I was pretty happy with the overall outcome.
=R=
Same planet, different world