Tea Leaves

Dear Cooks Illustrated

I was interested to read the article titled Perfect Pot Stickers in your most recent issue. The beginning of the article, which described the pleasures of the perfect Chinese Dumpling put into words exactly why I have spent a large part of my adulthood trying to reproduce what I used to eat as a child.

I was disappointed to find that the recipe that followed this glowing description included a chart outlining which pre-fab frozen skins were best. Let me elaborate. If you have a Chinese store in your area that will sell you decent frozen dumpling skins, that same store, in the same freezer case, will have bags and bags filled with metric tons of frozen pre-fab... wait for it...Chinese dumplings!

Your recipe, which suggests making the filling and hand-filling the dumplings is basically telling your poor readers to do fully 2/3rds of the total work needed to create a tray of yummy hand-made pot stickers. But then they get none of the real benefit, because after telling them to do all this work, you then tell them to basically chuck it all and stuff their hard-won bounty into frozen skins.

If you want easy pot stickers, I have a better suggestion: just buy the frozen ones. They are zero work, and trust me when I say that you can find some that are good enough for you. My parents, who always ate the hand made ones (fully hand made), even eat the frozen ones now. They are even cheap. Buy five pounds and go nuts.

But, if you want perfect pot stickers (your magazine was unclear, on the cover it said "easy" and on the inside it said "perfect"), then read on. I have a few tips.

The key combination of factors that make for a good pot sticker are the texture of the dough and the taste and texture of the filling. The dough should be thin but substantial and just a bit chewy, but not doughy. Most of the frozen dumplings that you can buy come pretty close to this standard, but none are really as good as hand-rolled dough.

Making the dough from scratch is really not that much harder than using the frozen. It certainly is not an all-day affair once you have some practice. The dough is just flour and water, not too hard, not too soft. You divide this up and roll out each skin with a small pin. Think of it as a few dozen small pie crusts.

The second part of the picture, the filling, should be meaty, but not dense, and it should have a variety of textures and flavors in each bite. When my mom made pot stickers growing up, she would use about a pound of meat to make 50 to 60 dumplings.

Therefore, I'd suggest that using 3/4 of a pound of meat for 24 pot stickers might account for why you found your fillings to be too dense and meaty. I also noticed that you use a pretty small amount of ginger in your recipe. One and a half teaspoons is barely visible at all, and certainly will not have much impact on the flavor. I would suggest increasing the amount to three or four tablespoons for a little extra kick. A bit of sesame oil in the filling also helps the filling from becoming too bland.

Generally, you don't need eggs in your filling if you handle the cabbage correctly. The key to making the meat lighter is to not only squeeze the liquid out of the cabbage (as you figured out, good job!) but also to put some of that liquid back into the filling itself to loosen it up a bit.

The ideal filling will have the texture of a light meatball, but with the crunch of the cabbage and scallion. In addition, the soy, scallion, sesame and ginger should mix all around in your mouth, making a dipping sauce that is any more complicated than a bit of soy and vinegar almost redundant. Still, I like hot sauce to dip them in.

One more tip: put a tiny bit of vinegar in the steaming liquid when cooking the pot stickers. It makes them nice.

Finally, the real chinese dumplings are the boiled ones. Ask anyone, the boiled ones are better.

I hope you will take my suggestions into consideration and perhaps amend your article. I have the raw material for a recipe that is pretty close to what my mom does elsewhere on this web site. Feel free to take a look.

Maybe next time you work up a piece like this, instead of all that exhausting testing you could just call up my mom and she can show you how it is done.