Dumpling Dough

by Pauline Chavannes de Senerpont Domis · Published December 22, 2017 · Updated June 20, 2020

If you make dumplings yourself, why not make the dough too? It’s not difficult and it will impress your guests. 😉

I make dough in exactly the same way as Chinese pancakes for Peking duck. I only fold and cut them differently.

I show you how in this dumpling video. Watch this or read in for the recipe in text and pictures.

Ingredients

250 grams of plain flour
140 ml of just-boiled water (still hot)
1/2 teaspoon of salt
cornstarch to sprinkle on the countertop while rolling out the dough

chopsticks – to mix the hot batter
plastic foil – to let the dough rest
bamboo steam baskets

Preparation

Mix boiling hot water through the 250 grams of plain flour. The hot water makes the dough firmer in texture. Ice cold water makes the dough sheet more crispy, like a tempura. But for a dumpling a firmer and stronger package is needed.
I use chopsticks to mix the dough with 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 140 milliliters of hot water because it is impossible to touch with your hands immediately.
After 5 – 8 minutes of kneading, roll the dough into two equally thick and long rolls.
Wrap rolls in plastic and let them rest for at least half an hour in the fridge.
Chop the dough into 9 pieces.
Roll the pieces into balls on a countertop sprinkled with cornstarch.
Roll the dough out into a thin sheet.
Cut the dough into a round shape with a bowl or cookie cutter.
Fill it with your meat or vegan mix.
Fold the dough close (with a little bit of water).
Steam for about 6-8 minutes.
Serve warm and with a to dip.

After 5 – 8 minutes of kneading, I roll the dough into two equally thick and long rolls.

If the dough remains too dry, I add another tablespoon of water, but I will make sure that it does not get too wet. The dough needs to stay pretty firm and shiny.

I wrap my rolls in plastic and let them rest for at least half an hour in the fridge. The dough becomes more dense it seems.

I chop both roles into 9 pieces. Because the dough sheet needs to be cut neatly, in the end, I have some leftover dough that I kneed again and I can make 2-3 extra sheets out of it. So in total, I end up with about 20 pieces of dumpling sheets.

Keep your dough in a bamboo steam basket or another container with a lid. Otherwise, the sheets will dry out quickly.

Now roll the pieces of dough into balls on a countertop sprinkled with cornstarch.

I roll my dough with a small rolling pin from front to back. Then I turn it a quarter turn and roll it out again. this way you get a neat and even shaped pretty round sheet.

I do not have a big cookie cutter to cut the sheet into a perfect circle, so I use a Chinese small bowl with a slightly sharper edge. It works well and the size is perfect.

I pile up my sheets with enough cornstarch in between or (that works better) parchment paper in between.

Freeze

Dumpling sheets – also my homemade ones – can be easily frozen. I stack them neatly in a well-sealed plastic container with parchment paper between each layer. While defrosting I keep them well covered (with the lid on for example) so that they do not dry out.

Fold

Now the origami part of dumpling making. 😉 There are many ways to fold dumplings. Each way tells what the content is. Some ways of folding are also specifically for the way the dumpling is used. In a soup for instance. the way it is used (in a soup for instance). I have not tried all the different ways of folding. But I’ve made a Pinterest board you can admire all kinds of variations.

Here I show you two ways to fold dumplings with round sheets.

Potstickers or Gyoza

Place a small amount of filling in the middle of the sheet and wet the edges. Loulou (5 years) can do that very well.

In this example, it is a meat-shrimp filling for a Japanese gyoza. Go to recipe here.
I also made a vegan version with black fungus mushrooms. Go to recipe here.

Loulou picks up one side of the dough and folds it neatly to the other side to close the edges. She pushes gently the air out of the filling.

Now place the dumpling upright and fold the edge by making three pleats with. Wet your fingers to let it stick together.

This is how I make another shape: I flip the top edge (rim) towards me and gently pick up the dumpling and stick the corners (on the other side) to each other with a wet finger.

Then you get a dumpling like this.

Dumplings can be steamed or boiled or (like with potstickers – gyoza) bake in the pan and then steam.

Steaming

I steam on a piece of parchement paper that I place in the bamboo steam basket. I deliberately cut it too small, so that the steam has room enough to flow easily through the basket. I steam dumplings (depending on their size) 10-15 minutes.