Making the dough for dumpling skin (London)

 

I threw a farewell party for one of my MA Bilingual Translation students in 1998 when she had to leave the course early to return to Beijing.

    It was a course for Chinese speakers only, so the cohort was made up of people from (alphabetically) China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan.

    Given my poor cooking skills, I thought it’d be best for everyone if they were to make a dish each — with ingredients supplied by me and made at my place.  More interesting too, as they were from different geographical regions.

    The Beijing student chose to make 餃子/饺子 jiǎozi / dumplings, which is a northern Chinese thing.  (The north of China, being dry, grows wheat, rather than rice, which needs a lot of water, so the diet of northern Chinese people is more wheat-based.)  

    I grabbed the opportunity to learn, starting with asking her for the ratio of the ingredients (flour and water in this case), which is how Western-style baking works (the right ratio of flour, butter and eggs for cakes and cookies, e.g.).

    Her answer was:  “No need to know the ratio.  Just keep adding water to the flour, applying the 三光 sān guāng / ‘three light’ principle: 盆光、手光、面光.” 

    盆光 pén guāng / “basin bare”

    手光 shǒu guāng / “hand bare”

    面光 miàn guāng / “dough sheen”

    光 guāng means “light” (e.g., daylight, sunlight, moonlight), also “bright / glossy” — think shining a light on a smooth surface, hence both “light” and “glossy” for the same word.

    At the outset, as one dribbles water onto the flour while mixing it all up with the hand, the mixture will be gooey and stick to the inside of the mixing bowl (the 盆 pén / basin), as well as to the hand.

    Keep mixing and adding water until, as if by magic, the gooey mixture will come off the inside of the bowl and the hand, leaving them bare (光 guāng), and form a lump of dough.  

    Stop adding water but carry on kneading until the dough has a sheen to it (the other meaning of 光 guāng here: glossy).  That’s when it’s the right consistency.

    Try it for yourself if, like me, you find it incredible.  I did, the next morning, thinking, “Well, she’s a northerner, so of course she’d get it right just like that.  Not me, so rubbish at cooking,” but hey, it did work for me, too!

    The above account is not a cookery lesson, just sharing a moment of magical discovery for me, reducing the element of fear when making the dough for dumpling skin.  

    So, you will of course need to know what type of flour to use, and how much flour to use for the number of dumplings you want to make — which will, in turn, depend on whether the people you’re feeding are big eaters or not, whether there’ll be other dishes or not, etc.

    Finally, the above is about dumplings northern Chinese style, called 餃子/饺子 jiǎozi (these days, Westerners know it more by the Japanese for it: gyoza for 餃子), which is different from Cantonese-style dumplings (just to name one, as the list is long).

(London, 1998)