The Day of Dumplings
For Yule, I got a book of dumpling recipes (because ... piragi). I decided to try one yesterday.
This book has recipes from all over the world, but most of the dumplings are the pasta-like ones, which are made with a simple dough (usually of flour, water, and egg or another fat), from which you make pockets, fill them, and boil or steam them. I'm an experienced bread maker and I can put together a huge batch of piragi in a relatively short time, but piragi are more like rolls and are baked, so this would be something new to me.
I settled on trying some kreplach, which are dumplings from Hungary (not, as it might seem, from the Klingon home world).
The spiced ground beef filling came first. The recipe said you can do the filling raw or pre-cooked. Since I don't really like boiled ground beef, I decided to cook it up in advance. I broke a major rule of recipes, though. See, it's usually a bad idea to change a recipe you've never made before, since it's hard to tell what impact it'll have. But the ground beef in the recipe was pretty bland. So I added some zing to it in the form of Worcestershire sauce and mushroom soy sauce. Much better!
The dough was ... weird. I cut the recipe in half (because it was huge) and measured out the flour and water accurately, but the dough was really sticky, almost a batter. I slowly added more and more and more and more flour to get it to the appropriately springiness, until I'd almost doubled the amount of flour. I FINALLY got it to the right texture, but this meant I had a LOT of dough. Hmm...
I kneaded it with my Kitchen Aid's dough hook (because I don't enjoy kneading by hand and I know my grandmother would have killed for such machine, so I use one without guilt), cut the ball into quarters, rolled out circles, and ran them through my Kitchen Aid's pasta roller. Such a wonderful machine! A pizza cutter was the perfect tool to score the flattened dough into rough squares. I dropped a dollop of spiced meat onto each and folded them into triangles.
It made a crowd of dumplings, like thirty. (!) Imagine if I hadn't cut the recipe in half!
I brought a pot of salted water to boil and dropped in a couple of test dumplings. Since the filling was already cooked, they were done in less than a minute. I fished them out and tried one. Pretty good. I gave one to Darwin, and he liked them rather more than I did. I thought they might do better fried, though Darwin disagreed.
I boiled up a couple more and slid them into a sizzling pan of melted butter. When they were brown, I took them off the heat. I liked this version a tiny bit better, but Darwin said he liked the boiled ones better.
The original recipe calls for kreplach to be served in beef broth, which I found a little plain, so I added carrots and some leftover lamb. While that was simmering, I divided the dumplings in half. One section I bagged up and put in the freezer. The rest I boiled up. When they were done, I slipped them into the soup and we ate.
Darwin loved it the recipe. It's definitely a winter food. You'd think the soup would be light, but the dumplings are seriously filling and after three or four, you're FULL. We devoured dumplings in the dining room and pronounced them a success.
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This book has recipes from all over the world, but most of the dumplings are the pasta-like ones, which are made with a simple dough (usually of flour, water, and egg or another fat), from which you make pockets, fill them, and boil or steam them. I'm an experienced bread maker and I can put together a huge batch of piragi in a relatively short time, but piragi are more like rolls and are baked, so this would be something new to me.
I settled on trying some kreplach, which are dumplings from Hungary (not, as it might seem, from the Klingon home world).
The spiced ground beef filling came first. The recipe said you can do the filling raw or pre-cooked. Since I don't really like boiled ground beef, I decided to cook it up in advance. I broke a major rule of recipes, though. See, it's usually a bad idea to change a recipe you've never made before, since it's hard to tell what impact it'll have. But the ground beef in the recipe was pretty bland. So I added some zing to it in the form of Worcestershire sauce and mushroom soy sauce. Much better!
The dough was ... weird. I cut the recipe in half (because it was huge) and measured out the flour and water accurately, but the dough was really sticky, almost a batter. I slowly added more and more and more and more flour to get it to the appropriately springiness, until I'd almost doubled the amount of flour. I FINALLY got it to the right texture, but this meant I had a LOT of dough. Hmm...
I kneaded it with my Kitchen Aid's dough hook (because I don't enjoy kneading by hand and I know my grandmother would have killed for such machine, so I use one without guilt), cut the ball into quarters, rolled out circles, and ran them through my Kitchen Aid's pasta roller. Such a wonderful machine! A pizza cutter was the perfect tool to score the flattened dough into rough squares. I dropped a dollop of spiced meat onto each and folded them into triangles.
It made a crowd of dumplings, like thirty. (!) Imagine if I hadn't cut the recipe in half!
I brought a pot of salted water to boil and dropped in a couple of test dumplings. Since the filling was already cooked, they were done in less than a minute. I fished them out and tried one. Pretty good. I gave one to Darwin, and he liked them rather more than I did. I thought they might do better fried, though Darwin disagreed.
I boiled up a couple more and slid them into a sizzling pan of melted butter. When they were brown, I took them off the heat. I liked this version a tiny bit better, but Darwin said he liked the boiled ones better.
The original recipe calls for kreplach to be served in beef broth, which I found a little plain, so I added carrots and some leftover lamb. While that was simmering, I divided the dumplings in half. One section I bagged up and put in the freezer. The rest I boiled up. When they were done, I slipped them into the soup and we ate.
Darwin loved it the recipe. It's definitely a winter food. You'd think the soup would be light, but the dumplings are seriously filling and after three or four, you're FULL. We devoured dumplings in the dining room and pronounced them a success.
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