Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 10: Sakhoo!

It's been a hard few weeks for the project. Well in fact, for two weeks I didn't even make an attempt to make noodles - noodle apathy! - and furthermore I suddenly got so busy I started to think about giving the whole thing up. I've had fun trying these different noodles, but it didn't seem so pressing anymore to keep going. Then this Saturday worked its habitual cooking magic and suddenly I was trying what's probably the weirdest one so far for the Western palate - sakhoo or Northeast Thai/Issaan-style tapioca dumplings.

Making the dough is very simple and yet was a little nervewracking. All you need to do is boil water, pour a packet of tapioca pearls into a bowl, and stir the water in bit by bit. That's it! But then the recipe (from Alford & Duguid's Hot Sour Salty Sweet) calls for "kneading to a smooth paste". Well. I wasn't sure if the pearls were supposed to dissolve or what, but all that happened was that I turned them out onto the counter and had a therapeutic hand massage pressing down on the pearls, while the liquid gradually thickened and got stickier - not so much of the smooth or the pasty. Eventually I gave up and returned as much as I could to the bowl, letting it rest for the prescribed hour. I figured if it proved impossible to work with I could do something else with the filling.

The filling. The recipe is for sakhoo sai moo, but of course my version would have to be mai moo since I don't eat pork. So, sakhoo sai phak. There were lots of things starting to look a bit sad in the vegetable drawer, so I ended up with a large pot of beet greens, red cabbage, carrot, oyster mushroom, tofu (pressed this time!), and flavoured with onion, garlic, ginger, green onion, fresh chile, rice vinegar and fish sauce. I wasn't entirely happy with the result but it wasn't bad either.

Moment of truth! I returned to the bowl of dough and to my surprise it was a cohesive entity, albeit a frail-ly bonded one of separate little white balls. Still, I was able to turn it out onto an oiled surface, divide it in two, roll it out to a tube and slice it up into 32 rounds. From there, the assembly: each slice is patted out to a disk between oiled palms, then stuffed with a small teaspoon of cooled filling and sealed into a little round ball.

It's a good thing that the recipe urges patience, saying that little cracks will seal up in the pot, because my dough was cracking and falling apart all over the place. I only managed a few dumplings that were fully sealed with no filling on the outside, but somehow each dumpling managed to stick to itself as a little unit.

I lined a steamer tray with cabbage leaves and put the first 8 dumplings into a pot, and hoped for the best. And, miraculously, it all worked! In about 15 minutes, the dumplings turned translucent and though some did fall apart a bit, I was able to pry them all off the cabbage leaves and cook the remaining three batches.

The result was one of the weirdest things I've cooked in some ways, and it was also really yummy. The tapioca was a dense chewy outer layer that set off the strongly flavoured filling very well. Though I didn't actually serve them in any formal sense, just brought one upstairs to be sampled and otherwise ate at the counter while cooking and cleaning up, I did eat them South-East Asian style in method at least. I got some ginger mint from the garden, wrapped each dumpling in a lettuce leaf and sprinkled it with the mint and some nam pla prik, fish sauce with chile. Oh man. I'm a little homesick for South-East Asia right now.

Anyhow, weird and wriggly they may be, but I feel revitalised by sakhoo, and whether I catch up on the three weeks I'm behind on, or just sally on, the project isn't dead yet.

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 6: Dumplings!!!

These were amazing. Fun, easy, they came together without a hitch, and most importantly they were delicious. Avanti!

I wanted to make something different, but to begin with they were the same - same as last week that is, since I decided to use the Kazakh noodle dough that I had made the stretched noodles of the previous week. Once the batch was made and resting, I turned to the question of fillings.

The recipe I was working from, Savoury Boiled Dumplings (jiao zi), from Beyond the Great Wall, gave two fillings, both with pork in them. I decided to make two different fillings as well, but vegetarian of course (actually, I put some fish sauce in them, so not really veggie, but oh well). A rummage through the vegetable drawers ended up in a densely flavoured stirfry of onion, garlic, carrot and shiitake. I reserved a bit of this and used it as a flavour base for my second filling, otherwise composed of yu choy and tofu. I made these up as I went along based on memories of my Viet cooking mentor's dumplings, and happily they turned out well, except that in my slapdash cooking ways I didn't bother to press the water out of the tofu before I combined the ingredients. It worked out ok as I was able to just take from the drier bits at the top when assembling, but straining it would have been better as too much liquid in the fillings makes the dumpling wrapper fall apart.

Since the fillings were so easy I also had time to make a tomato-ginger chutney whilst the dough reposed - a Tibetan recipe from the same cookbook. It was tart, gingery, intense, and redoubled my enthusiasm for expanding my sauce repertoire. Mmm.

It was time to shape! After putting on a pot of water to come to the boil, I divided the dough in 8 pieces, and then each piece in 8 again, for 64 dumplings. It was so quick and pleasant putting them together that I could easily imagine a marathon dumpling-making session, especially sitting with a couple of friends chatting and drinking tea. If the idea appeals, just let me know...

There was no need for a rolling pin - I tried patting and stretching the dough and both worked. It stretches easily, but much more so in one direction, as cutting it severs the gluten strands that give it elasticity. So patting it out allows you to shape the piece more regularly, but stretching is faster. The results were about the same in the end - a piece more rectangular than round, but easy enough to fold into a half-moon shape, with dappled pinched edges.

The dumpling wrappers were much thicker than the commercial ones I'd used before, but they were actually easier to work with - they sealed better, didn't stick to the surface as long as I kept it floured and worked swiftly. Even my liquidy filling problems were solved by patting in a bit of extra flour to persuade the dough that it didn't want to give into structural anarchy. It wasn't long until I had shapely little rows lined up for the boiling.

I had been a bit apprehensive about the cooking, since I know dumplings are prone to falling apart, and the recipe called for boiling, not steaming. But I prefer to follow directions at least the first time through, so I tossed the first 8 into the salted rolling waters and hoped for the best. And - perfection! None of them collapsed, and though the cooking times, dumpling sizes, and dough thickness, were all slightly uneven, each dumpling had chewy bite without being either hard or soggy. They were seriously good. My only cooking complaint is that I hadn't fully precooked the yu choy, and I think it would have been better that way - the fillings were heated through, but they're not cooked for long enough to work any chemistry on the innards.

I decided to only cook half, freezing the other 32 (my nefarious plans for them include dumpling noodle soup, something I love but can never find vegetarian versions of in restaurants). Soon they were in two bowls, divided by filling type, and I was calling my mother up for a taste test.

I had put out three dipping sauces to accompany them - the tomato-ginger chutney, and then two simple traditional accompaniments. One was just soy sauce and sesame oil; the other was just fish sauce with sliced thai bird chiles. We dipped and sampled all six combinations, and then just kept eating. The verdict was unanimous - the shiitake-carrot filling was the tastiest, having much stronger flavour, but the tofu-yu choy went better with the intense taste of the chutney. The chutney was probably the overall winner, as everyone who passed through the kitchen that day found excuses to help themselves to spoonfuls of it on its own. I think my favourite pairing was the fish sauce-chile one, though. It's funny to remember my initial reservations about fermented fish condiments as contrasted to my love for them now. They add so much more than a salty flavour, especially when paired with chile.

I was amazed by the texture of the dumpling wrapper. Even though it had just been boiled for a minute, it was much more like a steamed bread, very light. In the photo if you look closely you can see little air bubbles in the dough, especially at the pleated top. Thickness didn't at all equate to heaviness.

These were so much fun to make, and not that much work, especially if you had a leftover sauce or stirfry you could recycle as a filling. Most importantly they were also a lot of fun to eat. They were out on the table with their sauces and before I knew it they were all gone. I found an interesting recipe for tapioca dough dumplings, so that might be my next dumpling foray. Miam!