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ICSA, and vegan dumplings. Despite not being vegan, I love vegan food, and I ambitiously planned to make 5 different kinds of dumplings for this competition. As I had only made one kind as of friday, I reassessed and reduced the scope of my ambitions. The dessert dumpling and fake dumpling will have to be part of a future entry (I also discarded making dumpling soup). Please ignore the state of my countertops, as they are white, even constant wiping means every picture features oil splatter or staining. First up: Mushroom Medley Madness For this I made what I imagined everyone would immediately jump to: some kind of asian flavor mix with a bunch of mushrooms. I bought way way too many mushrooms because I am chronically incapable of figuring out how much filling I need for dumplings. There's one New Year where my poor wife had to help me make well over two hundred due to a slight miscalculation on filling volume. Anyway, our setup. Oyster, shitake, button mushrooms, carrots, pepper and onions, ginger and garlic. Honestly with these ingredients its almost impossible to go wrong.  For additional flavor, black vinegar, Shaoxing Wine (in the most inconvenient vessel ever invented), mirin, soy sauce, sugar, and sesame oil. The mirin maybe doesn't totally go with the chinese vibes, but I think it adds a little something.  A mountain of chopping later:  Me, internally "mushrooms will cook down, right?" Get the pan going with some olive oil.  Throw in the peppers and onions and let them cook for a bit.  After ~5 minutes, add the carrots:  Three more minutes, and then the ginger + garlic  This is where i realize I may have chopped too much garlic but it's too late to go back Let it cook down further  Then add the mountain of mushrooms:  Have it overflow slightly, don't panic, let the mushrooms cook down.  Eventually, the mushrooms will feel done. At the time I realized, that I hadn't even started on dinner and I've barely finished the dumpling filling, so while that hastily cooled in the fridge I conjured some pad-see-ewe, which might not completely go with these dumplings, but which meant we would actually have a dinner to eat. Cooled filling:  I had thought about making my own dumpling wrappers, but having done the exercise before, it didn't seem worth it:  Laid out some dumpling wrappers  fill them:  Seal them:  Pan fry:   Done:  I made a galic-mirin-soy sauce for dipping, and they were a hit.  Mexican Inspired Dumplings Decolonize your diet has a recipe for Roasted Green Chili and Butternut Squash Tamalitos, and I thought the filling would adapt well to a dumpling. With some slight modifications because I can't resist making some slight modifications. First modification: some dried chilis, and one fresh one. Bit of a "cleaning out the leftovers in the pantry" going on, but I think they'll add some nice flavors.  Made sure to de-seed them first though. The dumplings are already going to have a little kick and i'm not sure how I feel about this.  Throw them in the pot for now  Set out my ingredients... realize my butternut squash has gone bad and I don't have any green chilis. Go to the grocery store. Return.  Bought pre-peeled ones because I loathe peeling butternut squash, and because I have two rounds of dumplings to do this weekend.  Roast the chilis in the gas flame, a thing I find super fun for some reason  Look at those bad boys blistering  While this is happening I *should* be toasting my spices, but toasting, taking pictures, and roasting is too much for me, so I don't.  Allspice and Cumin, toasted for like 90 seconds on a hot pan.   Our butternut squash, onions, garlic water and spices all in one deep pot:  Fill with water:  While that's coming to a boil I peeled and chopped the green chillies, a non-photogenic event i did not photograph because i had my hands full of peppers and pepper skins:  A nice rolling boil for 25ish minutes:  Fish out 3/4th of the butternut squash  Drain all the "broth" minus one cup and throw everything into the immersion blender, minus that 3/4ths of butternut squash we set aside:  Add some secret ingredients:   Chop the remaining squash  Mix chilis, blended sauce and squash together in a mixing bowl:  If you foolishly chopped it way too large, remember you can mush it as needed. (Not that *I*, perhaps slightly under the influence of an edible, would have chopped things way too large) Get your dumpling wrappers out. At this point I drafted my wife to help fold.  Not the cleanest folding job... and while I *tried* some interesting shapes, it rapidly became clear that if I wanted to finish this today, I was going to have to compromise and go with the shape we were already familiar with.    Heat some oil:  And deep fry these suckers   Served with a side of chili oil:  Honestly, these were really good both flavor wise and texture wise. Due to a packing mishap, the ones that went in the freezer fused into a giant block and had to be tossed, the lesson being, please lay them out and freeze them *before* bagging, a thing I already knew but apparently did not internalize. Middle Eastern Bao Honestly, these were a bit out there, even for me. When I was at the grocery store desperately buying butternut squash, I bought some eggplant and cauliflower, with the idea of doing something middle eastern inspired, but no specific plan. I figured a variant of baba-ganush would work well to be "saucy" and the cauliflower would be the firmer filling. In retrospect, tofu or mushrooms would have been much better, and less watery than the califlouwer, but it worked. Anyway, first, bao dough. Water, yeast, sugar. 280 ML water, 1 tbs yeast, 1 tbs sugar  Let it bloom:   600 grams of flour into the stand mixer:  Handmix until it comes together then switch to the kneading attachment:   Ten minutes is enough to produce an amazing looking dough that is silky, and firm to the touch. So we let that rest for two hours and got a nice rise:  Punch that down:  Let that sit while we make the filling. Start with our eggplants:  Stab them with a fork over and over, and then cover them in olive oil.  There's a joke about oiling eggplants here, but we're above that.  Get my ingredients together for the cauliflower while the oven preheats to 450. Amazigh seasoning from penzies is great, paprika always works, and cumin and salt go on basically everything. Not pictured, I later decide to add Zatar.  Coconut oil for roasting  Ready to rumble:  I once again cut things too large and had to take the kitchen sheers to the califlower when it was done cooking. 40 minutes at 450, and the califlower is done:  Eggplant needs to steam in a bowl covered with plastic wrap while it cools:  Meanwhile we assemble our eggplant mix ingredients:  Mix them in a bowl in... honestly pretty arbitrary proportion, I probably went to hard on the salt and not hard enough on the acid:  Gonna adjust after tasting anyway. Cut the eggplant, remove the unpleasant bits, and scoop out the flesh into our mix:   Then beat it with a fork until it feels like your arm is going to fall off.  Now finally we can start on the dough. Weigh out 40 grams of dough, and roll into a ball, then with a rolling pin shape into a flat shape:  Add the eggplant base, and then a scoop of cauliflower;  Do an extremely mediocre job of sealing them, partially because the wet cauliflower seems to be impacting the structural integrity of the bao:  Freeze them correctly, this time, except for the four you're having with dinner. The rest go in a pan, with some water to pan-steam  Throw a lid on and let them cook for ten minutes, and wham:  They look pretty ok:  Flavor wise, a home run, though not as good as the Mexican inspired dumplings. The filling needed a bit more firmness. Anyway, ICSA complete! Three different kinds of vegan dumplings. TheCog fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 01:57
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| # ? May 3, 2024 16:45 |
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Oh, wow, you were busy! I'm jealous you were able to find some premade vegan wrappers, I searched all my local grocery stores and they all had egg white in them. The butternut squash recipe looks amazing! 
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Apr 1, 2024 05:31
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They all look extremely good! I'll probably end up making some of these at some point.
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Apr 1, 2024 11:45
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I love the ambition, all your dumplings look great
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Apr 1, 2024 17:03
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extremely impressive effort!! the Mexican ones in particular look out of this world, i think i will be trying this with some of my leftover wrappers!
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Apr 1, 2024 17:46
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Love Decolonize Your Diet! Except for the one recipe they have for breakfast papaya which is just papaya. That recipe is boring. But the rest of the book is great. All those dumplings look great, especially the mushroom ones IMO.
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Apr 2, 2024 04:41
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Great effort, especially with the help of an edible. The Mexican ones sound particularly delicious.
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Apr 5, 2024 16:55
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| # ? May 3, 2024 16:45 |
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Love the choices you made for the filling, never would have thought to use them and the result looks wonderful. I'll be incorporating these in the future but especially the roasting of chilis, ould surely add another dimension to the flavor.
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Apr 6, 2024 15:46
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