Chinese dumplings are often misunderstood by people who didn’t grow up eating them. One example is what the Independent wrote on its Sunday New Good Life booklet. It tells you the “simple skills and pleasures for the credit crunch era” and in “Part 9 — Staying In”, one of the indoor activities you could do is “Dumpling Parties”.
It goes:
“Giving Dinner parties instead of eating out sounds like an attractive idea, until you consider the financial implications of buying all the food. Dumpling parties are a cheap and cheerful alternative. It costs next to nothing to make piles of delicious Chinese gyoza: just buy a pack of gyoza wrappers from a Chinese supermarket (never more than a couple of pounds for a round circular wraps), and make up the filling with minced pork (one of the cheapest cuts of meat) or tofu, spring onions, ginger and garlic. Get your guests to sit with you (along with the wine they’ve brought), piling the filling into the centre of each wrap, and attempting to create delicate dumplings. They may not succeed aesthetically, but it’s great fun, and once you’ve steamed them, the taste is the main thing. For a step by step guide, see:
To be clear: Gyoza seems to be a Japanese word to me rather than a Chinese word. In Chinese pinyin — our spelling system, we call dumplings Jiǎozi. And in standard Mandarin, we pronounce it this way:
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And if you are interested in Beijing accent, you can click on this, and actually most northerners, like people from the northeast of China, also tend to say Jiaozi this way:
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So as you can see the correst way to say this is similar to how this person in youtube performs, but it’s not really the same.
Of course Chinese is a very complicated language and not every non-native-Chinese speaker can pronounce it right. But a more important point I want to demonstrate is what is shown in the video tends to mislead people’s perception on real Chinese dumplings.
First, we mostly boil dumplings instead of steaming or frying them. (I assume this is where the English word dumpling come from — you dump the stuff in the boiling water.)
Second, which goes together with the first, is that the kind of circular wrappers you buy in the supermarket are not really suitable for making dumplings — they are not stretchy, soft or moist enough as what dumpling wrappers are supposed to be. And that’s why you can only steam or fry the ones you make from commercial wrappers because otherwise, the dumplings would fall apart upon boiling. Hence, when making real dumplings, you never dip water on the edge of dumpling wrappers — that looks totally amateur.
But of course, if you just do it for fun. I am in no position to be against it. Just try to clarify what is real Chinese dumpling.
I have also written the philosophy of dumpling-making below.
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