Hey!, this is Mana reporting from my hole in the wall, in my personal quest to avoid takeout food and acquiring more cooking knowledge I decided to try doing gyoza and hotteok from scratch this past weekend.
I have always heard of gyoza through anime and other Japanese origin media, and the same time I get them confused with things like dim sum, bao zi, etc., at the same time some of these are the equivalents between cultures with some exceptions on ingredients, some dough can be simple as flour and water, but others have yeast to make it more fluffy and chewy.
With that said I started preparing myself to make them, googled some things around, checked some online videos for it, specifically Ethan Chlebowski's video for gyoza fillings and Flavours of Asia's gyoza wrappers, Ethan's video included a great infographic for ratio of protein, vegetables and seasonings, I ended up going for whatever vegetable I had more on my fridge, and I'm fond of Zucchini, so I shredded a zucchini and a half and let it with some salt the day before, so it could let out most of the moisture, left some chicken breast to thaw in the lower part of fridge and that was all for my pre-preparation (?)
The next day I proceed to squeeze all the moisture with some sort of cloth colander I got in a shop (actually, lots of the kitchen tools I used for this endeavor come from that same shop, gyoza mold included), and put them aside in a container where the rest of the vegetables went, next, I shredded a little carrot, cut up some pepper and proceed to mash/chop the chicken breast with a knife until a ground meat consistency then mixed with a cup of hydrated soy meat.
Left it at the fridge and then went on the dough, it was more streamlined on this part, mixing flour and hot water turned out to be a very wet like glue dough at first, most likely as result of the ratio of water/flour was mediocre (I will get a measuring cup soon I swear) so I sprinkled more and more flour until it wasn't sticky anymore, kneaded it until there wasn't more clumps of dry flour and let it rest for 40 mins approx. Enough time passed and pulled out the dough, grabbed with my hands and manually started stretching it, making sure to add a hole in the middle as the instructions specified in the aforementioned videos, rolled into a long thick strip and cut them in portions (eyeballed), once I started rolled them and putting in the gyoza mold I figured out I was making them bigger than my mold could handle, the video said 10 cm in diameter but my mold holds 8 cm, so any excess I rolled it back in more portions and form 13 discs I formed I actually got 25 gyozas.
Stored them in the freezer, so they become easier to handle and proceed to make the hotteok.
As you can see in the corner of one of the pictures, there were some boiled potatoes already on the table, og hotteok is made with glutinous rice flour and filled with either savory veggie fillings or sweet like brown sugar with nuts, but I followed One meal a day's variation with potato dough and cheese, after mashing them to a malleable consistency, mixed a tbsp of cornstarch per potato used (so 3 tbsp in this case), gave them shape by hand and dropped some cheese cut into the size, once I used some gyoza filling as well to try.
As I fried them, some cheese escaped in the sides of it, some weren't that bad, some had to be eaten right there, I ended up making 9 hotteok from different sizes, they didn't survive the night, so I couldn't experience the tip I read somewhere else of freezing them after cooking and reheating them on the microwave, but I plan to buy more potatoes next weekend to keep doing these.
Enjoyed my night's feast after cleaning the mess and called it a day, the next morning I brought the leftover filling to my mom's place and made some for "not quite-lunch anymore but more like tea-time" gyoza, also made hotteok for her as well since I was feeling motivated, we inhaled all of the gyoza and the remaining hotteok would last until her next lunch tomorrow.
Overall it was a success, I want to try making big batches by doubling the dough's ingredients next time, cabbage season won't be around until May I believe, in the meantime I have already looked other's people combination for them, as for hotteok, I need to better tools to mas the potatoes and learn to be more smart with placing the cheese but overall very good as well, hotteok is good for making them in an afternoon for visits, but gyoza can be made on weekends on my own and fill my freezer with them for having an easy lunch side or having them as night snacks.
That's about it for now, cheers!
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Noé
This all sounds delicious. Gyoza is one of my favorite japanese dumplings, it's really delicious.
But just a comment, your last photo didn't load for me.
Thanks for pointing it out!, changed it to another hosting site, but not sure if that solved the issue tho, cheers!
by Krusnhiak; ; Report
It fixed it! That looks delicious.
by Noé; ; Report