We haven’t had wantons in a long time since the pandemic started. I really miss having cute bite-sized dumplings whenever we go out for Chinese or Japanese cuisine. I wonder how easy it would be to make them ourselves…at least, until we can find another place. I remember back when I was an undergrad making jiaozi during a Chinese new year competition with some of the other party guests.
You take your wrapper, put a teaspoon of filling inside, dab water on the edges, fold it up and pinch it closed. “Crazy Rich Asians” used a story to remember, Put the baby into bed, cover him with a blanket, tuck him in and kiss him goodnight.
It was a lot of fun racing against the clock trying to stuff as many as I could in only a minute. I won; not bad for a North American. If jiaozi were that easy, how hard could wantons be?
Keep in mind, Jiaozi are not the same as wantons though; jiaozi have a long saucer shape and are served with dipping sauce. Wantons are ball shaped, served in broth.
We started off with raw ground chicken mixed with your typical Ginger, garlic and green onion. Since this is a soup dish, over-seasoning the meat in a salt bath is off-limits, but you don’t want to neglect the filling either. Like I say in the kitchen, “Bland is Boring“. We threw in a few mushrooms too because, why not? Mushrooms are everywhere in Japanese cooking. That’s the fun part of cooking. You can innovate whatever kind of dumplings you want.
We tucked them in to bed using store-bought wrappers. Having practiced with a few test dumplings we found that if we used too much water to seal them in, they tended to get waterlogged despite them being boiled. We boiled them only for 2-3 minutes before throwing them into a hot skillet to finish off cooking the filling. This brought in some sweet caramelization, enhancing the flavor and texture. It’s that nice little crust like my dad’s side does with their meatballs. By the way, this recipe makes ~30 wantons, so please, make sure you have room to place them down or make an assembly line with your friends and family. This sounds like a great way to get teens and those in-between to sit down and have a working conversation and quality time.
While all this was cooking, we made the broth like good multi-tasking professional chefs would have done. We’ve never had any luck with any of our Asian sauce ideas. There was always too much salt or the sugar hoisin sauce took over, so we stuck with plain old soy sauce and sesame oil. We found that making a basic chicken soup broth worked out the best . We spiked our broth with some garlic, onion, celery seeds, and soy sauce, brought the whole thing to a boil and simmered until the flavors all had a chance to get to know each other. Onion, don’t be such a stinker! Sheesh!
This latest iteration was very nice but still had some room for growth. I need to work on my seasonings since these still ended up being a little bland. (I know, we LOADED everything, but yet nothing! How is that even possible?) Maybe with our next cook I can work on this.
