I’ve written cooking posts before- my first official one being my Ramen post, but I’ve taken pics of food before that, too.

Anyway, when there’s Ramen, you gotta have Gyoza, so I decided to post my Gyoza recipe on here for you all to enjoy! This is a lab favourite, and I’ve made them a couple times for annual lab dinner (we had those before COVID-19).

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The stuffing:

Gyoza is, generally speaking, a pork-based dumpling. You can substitute it with chicken mince if you want to, but I strongly recommend pork. Don’t bother with beef- it was nasty.

Meat mix:

• 500 g pork mince
• Few cloves of garlic
• Ginger (adjust amount based on how much you love ginger)
• A healthy splash of rice wine/Sake (drinking grade)
• An equally healthy splash of sesame oil
• A dash of soy sauce

Vegetable mix:

• Half a wombok/Chinese cabbage
• A quarter of a green cabbage
• A giant bunch of garlic chives (spring onions will also do, but add more garlic if you use this instead)
• Shiitake mushrooms (Only add maybe five or so large fresh mushrooms, or 6 small, dried mushrooms – rehydrated – so as not to overpower mix)

Do feel free to adjust quantities to suit. I’m just listing what I put in this evening.

Roughly chop wombok/Chinese cabbage into small chunks. Don’t worry too much about chopping them super fine. It’ll still work if they’re in big chunks. I actually like the texture when they’re chunky.

Roughly chop green cabbage- chop these finer than the wombok, because these don’t lose as much moisture and become super mushy like the wombok does.

Add these to a mixing bowl, and salt fairly liberally. Mush them with your hands (get in there!) so as to rupture the cells and help release as much moisture as possible. The salt is there to help with that. Leave the cabbage mix to sit for a while.

Finely chop garlic chives and shiitake mushrooms and set aside.

Mince ginger and garlic, and place in mixing bowl. Add rest of seasoning for meat mix, then add the pork mince.

Now, this is really important- you have to mix the meat so that the texture of it becomes a smooth paste. You can pretty much mix the crap out of it.

Once you’ve got the meat mix ready, get a good cloth or towel, and drain the cabbage mixture. You’ll note that a whole lot of liquid will come out (this is good). You’ll never be able to remove all of it, and you don’t need to have it super dry- just try and wring it out as much as possible, then plonk it and the chopped garlic chives and shrooms with the meat mix.

This is really important:

Don’t over-mix the combined stuffing

If you over-mix this, it’ll change the texture of it into a meatball. You don’t want a tough meat ball. Just mix until roughly combined.

Pastry/skin:

The real stuff uses low gluten flour (<8% gluten), but I actually just use normal plain flour (~10% gluten) to make my pastry. This is mostly due to laziness, but I also like the more chewy texture you get from normal plain flour. I’ve never used high gluten flour before, but hey, you do you.

You can also use corn flour/potato flour to help keep the pastry smooth, dry, and crispy when cooked, but see how you feel. These days I’m too lazy to bother with all that fancy stuff.

• Flour
• A pinch of salt
• Warm water

I never measure these things out, so I just dump flour into a mixing bowl and sprinkle a bit of salt into it. You could probably just add the salt to the water as well, but I slowly pour water in and slowly incorporate it into the flour, until I get a tactile dough. After that, you just knead for a minimum of ten straight minutes, and… you can rest it if you want, but I tend to never have enough time so I just go straight to rolling it out.

I used to use a rolling pin, but these days I use a pasta machine to flatten the dough into sheets, then a ring to cut circles out of them.

The folding part is too hard to explain in a blog (there’s heaps of YouTube videos, I’m sure), but so long as the bottom of the Gyoza is nice and flat, the edges are sitting at the top, and you’ve avoided any holes at the bottom… you’re pretty much good to go.

If you want super crispy bottoms, make sure to coat the bottom surface of your Gyoza with corn flour or potato flour.

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Triple cooking:

It sounds way cooler than it actually is. All you need to do is line the Gyoza up in an oiled pan, and let them fry until the bottom is golden and crispy. Then you add hot water to the mix (watch out for the sizzling/spitting water), so that the Gyoza are at least 1/3 immersed. Whack a lid on the pan, and then let it steam until all the water has evaporated, which will then cause the Gyoza to start frying again. Fry until the bottom is crispy again, then serve while hot. You can drizzle more sesame oil over the top for more flavour.

Dipping sauce:

Usually it’s just 1:1 vinegar and soy sauce. If you can get your hands on some chilli oil (sesame oil with chilli), you can add as many drops of this as you like.

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And there you have it! My crowd-pleaser Gyoza recipe. It’s pretty fun to make this together with a group of people, so if you want something to do for your next dinner night… Just make sure you don’t cross contaminate anything. Raw pork mince is still raw pork mince- even if it smells amazing with all the added seasoning.

Categories: General

Tagged as: cooking hobbies

ABugsLife

A Ph. D graduate in Microbiology, residing in Victoria, Australia. Currently working in multiple locations but still in the STEM field. 👀 🦠 🧫 🧬