Last week I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s My Mom’s Beef and Vegetable Filling for Dumplings recipe from his The Wok cookbook.

This dumpling filling is mostly ground beef, spinach, and carrot. Kenji calls for frozen spinach, which he directs, after thawing, to squeeze out the moisture the same way as the cabbage in the Japanese-style pork and cabbage gyoza filling. Those ingredients get mixed with soy sauce, ginger, scallions, sugar, cornstarch, and white pepper until tacky.

I used Kenji’s homemade dumpling wrappers recipe again, which probably went better than homemade wrappers have ever gone for me. I used a scale to get my 40 dough divisions precise, and I used a ruler to make sure I stayed within the 3–4 inch diameter range. It’s smaller than I think.

I cooked them the same way I have been: two tiers in the bamboo steamer and then pan frying one of the tiers for pot stickers, leaving the other tier just steamed.

The dumplings were, again, good! They had a bit of sweetness to them that I don’t think completely came from the one tablespoon of sugar. My son happily ate them even knowing they had spinach and carrots in them.

I’ll keep this one among my dumpling filling options.

I had 17 dumplings that wouldn’t fit in the steamer, so froze them. Later in the week I cooked six of those following Kenji’s “dumpwings” instructions. I was most worried about the starchy layer sticking to the pan, but that wasn’t a problem at all. I think I should’ve let them cook even longer to get a browner and crispier starch layer. As it was, the top of the starch layer had a bit of gummy-ness to it.

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