Food Lab: Dumplings

Lordy, y'all, we did a Food Lab this past weekend (more on that later), and it alerted me to the fact that we did a Food Lab back in March that I never documented.

Oops.

It's been a busy spring.

Anywho, for my birthday back in March, we did Food Lab: Dumplings (gyoza style only - no shumai). 

This has been on Chef Spouse's wishlist for a while. One, he loves dumplings. Two, it can be good garde manger, since fillings can really be whatever your lil ole heart desires. Three, they seem like a good option for parties. Four, you can make them in batches, freeze them, and then have them ready to serve in minutes because they can go straight from the freezer to the pot. 

So, dumplings.

It's now been several months, so do I remember most of what we learned? 

Nope.

Here's what I do remember:

Most filling recipes call for cabbage. You may be thinking: "What is cabbage actually bringing to the party? It's not terribly flavorful on its own. Hell, I don't even like cabbage. I'll skip it." Do not skip it. The cabbage acts as your binder for all the other ingredients, like breadcrumbs in a crab cake (or meatballs).

Yep, we used all that cabbage

You need way less filling than you think, both in your individual dumplings and overall. We overdid, as usual, with four separate full batches of filling (pork, shrimp, veg, and pork+shrimp). This resulted in a grim assembly line of "Good God, how much more filling is there?" and cramped fingers. Make less. No, less than that. No, still less.

Use wonton wrappers, preferably the circular ones. Many websites will tell you you can use square wrappers, too. They are lying. Square wrappers are BS. So is making your own. Chef Spouse has subsequently tried making the dough from scratch, and he's an ace dough maker (makes fresh pasta of all types all the time), and he can confirm: just buy the wonton wrappers. Less fuss and better results.

2 packets = good

2 packets = straight-up evil

See those janky dumplings on the left?

Square wrappers

Just say no

I could not master the cute little ruffled folds, even with eleventy-billion dumplings to practice on. Chef Spouse and The Executive Committee did great, though. So I stuck to plain half rounds, which are not as pretty but taste the same. 

See my boring half-round dumplings v

the cute ruffled dumplings

(But they were all tasty)

Since then, we've all had bags of individually frozen dumplings residing in the freezer (and you do have to be careful to fully freeze them individually or you end up with a Giant Squished-Together Multi-Dumpling Blob and then no one is happy), which have been excellent for a quick snack or first course.

Yummy dumplings, fresh from the freezer, 

ready in minutes

And yes, you could just buy bags of frozen dumplings from your favorite grocer, but that would be un-Food-Lab-ish of you, now, wouldn't it?

Food Lab 25: Smoked Mollusks

We knew it had to happen sooner or later. And it's not like we haven't had previews: the bourbon eggs, attempts to make cheese, homemade rice paper, lobster thermidor, gluten-free pizza crust...I could go on. But this is the first time that the main lab idea was a total #FAIL.

The day started so well. Mad Kitchen Scientist, Chef Spouse and I gathered at the Maine Avenue Fish Market to stock up. We bought big and little clams, mussels, oysters, head-on shrimp, crawfish, some octopus and a piece of salmon for The Empress and Chef Spouse, who's not huge on bivalves.

Upon arriving back, the first thing we did was put the mussels in a brine, consisting of:

4 qt water
1/2 c kosher salt
1/4 c brown sugar
Bay leaves
Dried hot peppers
1 dozen allspice berries
Fennel seed
Mix of peppercorns

Looks promising (and pretty), doesn't it?  Just you wait....

Chef Spouse then valiantly started opening the oysters, even though he'd never done it before and we had no oyster knife. It did not go well, to the point that, after destroying the shell on one, semi-successfully opening two more, and determining that there was no way to open the rest without the right tools, he left to purchase an oyster knife. While he was gone, the IAs arrived. Turns out, Papa IA is a man of hidden talents, including the fact that he worked as an oyster shucker at one point. Once Chef Spouse had the right tool and a good coach, he dispatched the rest of the oysters in quick order, and we proceeded to slurp them all down poste haste.

In the meantime, the octopus went into a marinade of:

Shallots
Garlic
Olive oil
Lemon juice
Hot peppers
Chopped fresh rosemary
Chopped fresh sage

And Mad Kitchen Scientist fired up the Big Green Egg.

Next we par-boiled the crawfish in a simple Old Bay and salt mix, since we were planning to smoke them. Why did we par-boil them first? Visions of still-live crawfish scattering the second they hit the grate in the smoker.

Then it was out of the brine for the mussels, out of the pot for some of the crawfish, and onto a slow smoke heat (around 225) until the mussels opened up, signaling that they were - or should have been - ready to eat.

Here's the thing. I've had smoked mussels before. I know it's possible. But it wasn't this weekend. Instead of forming into tasty, juicy little pockets of chewy deliciousness, the mussels were rigid and nearly impossible to pry fully open and, when we did, there were two flat bits of flesh against the inside of each shell that were kind of the consistency of pate. They didn't taste bad, exactly, and you could taste the smoke, but they were profoundly disappointing. The crawfish fared a little better, although you couldn't really taste any smokiness.

After that, we cranked up the heat in the Egg (I still think it needs a name), and put together a sort of clam bake in Mad Kitchen Scientist's new 9 qt cast iron dutch oven. It included:

3/4 L white wine
2 fennel bulbs, quartered
1 onion, chopped in eighths
Head on shrimp
2 red and 2 yellow tomatoes, also in eighths
6 ears corn halved
all 3 dozen clams

Once again, looks pretty good, right? Oh my, were we wrong.

So we kept the Egg closer to 400, smoked until the clams started to open, then popped the lid on to steam briefly.

The clams were not terrible. They were a little tough, but not inedible, and again, you could taste the smoke. The shrimp overcooked to the point that they fell apart. I couldn't eat the corn - banged one of my teeth slightly loose in an accident earlier this summer, and it's still not 100% - but the tomatoes, onions, and fennel were not great, either.

Thank goodness we had those oysters, that octopus, which we grilled, and salmon, which we also grilled, or we would've had nothing to eat but the cheese and olives The Executive Committee had put out for us.

So our first disaster. Doing a little additional research now, I realize we left out the key step with the mussels: that they needed to be briefly boiled and de-shelled THEN smoked. Same thing with the clams. The shrimp should have also been removed from their shells and dry-smoked, preferably after being treated to a rub or marinade of some sort. To paraphrase The Wedding Singer, this is information I would have found useful YESTERDAY. Fortunately, we had plenty of champagne, sparkling wine, and white wine to console ourselves with.