Pan Fried Dumplings (Sheng Jian Bao)

Happy Chinese New Year! Tomorrow is the first day of the new lunar year so I felt it was appropriate to create a traditional Chinese dish to share. As any typical Chinese family, parents show their love through food and each year my mom would create a huge feast for CNY to celebrate with us. I’ve told my mom countless times that I’m more than happy to eat out at a restaurant so she wouldn’t have to slave away in a kitchen all day (and sometimes 2-3 days ahead of time) to make a meal that we’d only devour in minutes. My mom replies that this is what she loves to do for our family and doesn’t mind doing all the hard work. Now that I’m married and passing out red envelopes instead of receiving them, I suddenly have an odd sense of adulthood and wanted to make a dish that was labor intensive to show my family that I love them too.

This recipe took me two tries to get all the textures and consistencies accurate. During the first attempt, the dough wasn’t quite as fluffy and the filling was too loose. The dough was quite easy to remedy; it was too wet to rise properly so I cut back on some liquids and it turned out amazing. As for the filling, contrary to popular belief, a Chinese bun or dumpling filling is normally handled much more than someone would handle an American burger patty. A patty is generally barely mixed or handled to keep the tenderness of the meat. Unfortunately, lack of handling creates a dumpling filling way too loose and loses the mouth feel of the whole dumpling or bun. When my first batch buns left me with dissatisfaction, I reached very deep down in my memories to figure out what was the problem. I remember once when I was a child, we were having wontons for dinner and my dad was helping my mom prep the filling. He mixed all the ingredients together in a large bowl and proceeded to “throw” the meat for almost 15 minutes. My dad would grab a handful of the meat mixture and throw it back into the bowl repeatedly. Out of curiosity, and hopes that he’d let me throw food around, I asked him what he was doing. He explained to me that he was making the meat yummier by throwing it. As the filling is thrown, it causes the meat to get sticky, thus creating a denser and chewier filling. Now that I remembered this cooking lesson from my dad, I threw my meat during the second attempt and the filling turned out amazing.

I have never made dumplings or buns from scratch on my own before. I was always lucky enough to have the help of my family to do the pleating. So I definitely needed to learn the basics very fast. After a couple of YouTube videos, I found the one posted by Elaine Luo to be the most informative and easiest to follow. Your first couple of buns might not look very good (mine definitely did not), but don’t despair! It’ll only improve and by the end of the batch, the pleating will totally be on fleek.