Gyoza... Kind of.

If you've never ordered a gyoza appetizer at a Japanese restaurant, you're missing out. Nate and I have been watching "The Mind of a Chef" (originally on PBS) on Netflix. We are on season one which features Chef David Chang and there is lots of awesome looking Asian food being made. It's really a great show and has both of us fired up to make more of the dishes we like to eat at restaurants, at home! I searched a few recipes on Google and liked the one from The Steamy Kitchen, found here the best. I forgot to add the grated ginger, and I subbed out some chili oil for the crushed red chili pepper, but otherwise followed the recipe (scaling it way down from 40 to 10). I used the wrapper recipe suggested in the filling recipe, found here. Without further ado, my partially failed experiment making gyoza haha.

Here is my flour, water and salt mixture.

I needed to add almost double the water in the recipe to get things to even a crumbly texture.

I squeezed a handful of crumbs and they stuck together, so I figured it was wet enough.

I rolled my mixture into a ball, which was a crumbly sticky pain in the butt.

And left it to rest for one hour under a wet cloth.

Regrettably I do not own a rolling pin. Something that maybe contributed to the lackluster quality of these wrappers. I used a tall drinking glass to roll out 10 wrappers, cutting them with a 3.25" circle cutter.

This took me a while. I don't think I'll be doing this again without a proper rolling pin! I couldn't get them as thin as they needed to be. Honestly, I kind of just said "good enough" and moved on.

All my filling ingredients, sans ginger, ready to be mixed.

I wet the edges of the wrapper by dipping my finger in a small bowl of water and running it around the outside.

I put about a teaspoon of filling in the center. Below proved to be a little too much and I removed some after this picture.

Then press the edges together. Traditionally there is a cool way to "pleat" the edges together to get them to stay closed. However, since my wrappers were too thick, that wasn't really working.

I just squeezed them shut and folded in the ends.

I put the dumplings on to sear according to directions. They didn't stand upright like they should because of the wrapping style I used.

The final steaming part is weird, and violent to pour water in a super hot pan! Make sure you have a lid handy to protect yourself from splatter.

While they were steaming I made the dipping sauce. 

In future I will skip the hot chili oil in the sauce. It really over powered everything. Since it was oil it just sat on the top too, coating the dumpling as you dipped so it was hard to get any soy/rice vinegar mix.

No suprise, some opened up during the steam. But they were all fully cooked!

And aside from the too thick, gummy wrapper, these were good. I probably shouldn't have eaten all 10 myself though (heartbuuuurrrnnnn). I want to buy wonton/dumpling wrappers at an Asian grocery and try again!