Last week I made the Pork and Shrimp Dumplings recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook.

I make dumplings not infrequently already. I’ve tried several from The Woks of Life, but my family consistently prefers this recipe from Alton Brown. Alton’s pot sticker technique is very similar to what Kenji describes.

In the introduction to the dumplings, Kenji describes four cooking options: boiling, steaming, deep frying, and panfrying, and then, for panfrying, he describes three methods: panfrying, potsticker, and “dumpwings.” It's the potsticker method that is similar to Alton’s recipe.

Usually I make a big batch and the potsticker method just takes too long. So I usually boil half and potsticker the rest. This time, however, I decided to try steaming, all because Kenji says “steaming is also quite simple, provided you have a bamboo steamer for your wok (if you don’t you should).…Another advantage of steaming is that with multiple stacking baskets, you can steam a huge quantity of dumplings at once.” With his admonishment for my lack of bamboo steamer, I picked one up at Super H-Mart.

For the Pork and Shrimp Dumplings, Kenji instructs to “vigorously” mix ground pork, roughly chopped shrimp, white pepper, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, chives, sugar, cornstarch, and baking soda until it feels “slightly tacky.”

I followed his Homemade Dumpling Wrappers recipe for the wrappers. I’ve made The Woks of Life homemade wrappers before, but more often I use store-bought wrappers. I’ve found the store-brought wrappers often too dry, and homemade wrappers too pliable. It’s hard to get right.

The stuffing went fine. Megan rolled out wrappers as I filled them. Kenji says this recipe makes about 40 dumplings. We made 29. I got nine in each tier of the steamer and froze the final 11. I think the wrappers gradually got bigger, and I gradually increased the amount of filling.

Steaming with the bamboo steamer was very easy. I took one tier and panfried them according to Kenji’s basic panfrying method, which is just panfrying steamed dumplings until crisp. The bamboo steamer kept the other tier hot while the panfrying happened, so I was able to serve all 18 at once.

I thought these dumplings were very good. The steaming worked very well, and the post-steam panfry was very easy and delicious also. I’ll probably make this filling again.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.