Scallion pancakes and shumai

January 21, 2025 5:36 PM

One of my friends got me The Woks of Life cookbook for Christmas, and I've been wanting to try something from it. I decided to start with something really simple: a dipping sauce. Not just any dipping sauce, an ultimate dipping sauce.

I don't know what makes it so ultimate, but it is a pretty tasty dipping sauce.

I actually bought some frozen scallion pancakes the other day, and I thought it would be a good breakfast. When I've cooked scallion pancakes in the past, I would just cut it up into little triangles (kind of like a pizza or a quesadilla), but I've heard that people like eating it with eggs so I made some scrambled eggs to go on top.

I wasn't really sure of the best way to eat this. Do I wrap it up like it's a tortilla? That seemed too cumbersome, so I grabbed a fork and a knife and cut a piece and dipped it in the sauce. It was delicious, but after the first bite I switched to ripping pieces with my hands. Very good breakfast.

For lunch, I went with something that was a bit more challenging, pork and shrimp siu mai. This is the first recipe in the cookbook, and while the author claims that it's really easy, I'd say it's still on the more difficult end of things that I make. I did make shumai a few years ago, but I used a completely different (much simpler) recipe. I did say I wanted to try the Woks of Life recipe, so here I am doing that.

I had everything I needed for this except for white pepper. It happens to be the coldest day of the year, and it's something like 10 degrees outside, but I decided that I would walk the half mile to the Japanese store (and back) just for white pepper. I bundled up and the walk itself wasn't too bad, but they didn't even have white pepper! So I just ended up using black pepper instead.

This recipe has you mixing the filling for a very very long time (that or use a stand mixer, but I don't have one of those). And you have to mix in stages. I tried, I really did, but my hands were getting tired. It also didn't help that I forgot about the pork in my freezer and didn't thaw it overnight. So it was still a little frozen when I was mixing.

I honestly feel like I did a better job at wrapping these when I made them years ago. I also realized halfway through wrapping that I completely forgot to add cornstarch to this! At that point it was too late. Oh well.

Steaming the shumai was probably the easiest part of this whole process. I added some water to a large pan, brought it to a boil, and then added the bamboo steamer and cooked the shumai for about 10 minutes. Taking the steamer basket out of the pan was a bit harder (do people use tongs for this?), but I just picked it up using oven mitts.

And then when I tried to pick up an individual piece, I noticed that it had extra liquid and the wrapper was not sticking to the filling at all. Apparently this is a pretty common problem and it sounds like...I just needed to mix this more and squeeze it more while wrapping it. (Or maybe it was the lack of cornstarch) But I don't think I had this problem when I made shumai years ago. Maybe I'm just out of practice when it comes to dumplings.

Okay, so I need to leave myself notes for the next time I make this:

• Mix mix mix, mix a lot, and make sure all the meat is actually thawed before starting
• Maybe try to spread out the filling all over the wrapper before forming it into the shumai shape (like you're spreading peanut butter on a piece of toast. a commenter on the Woks of Life post mentioned this and it sounds like something I should try!)
• Really squeeze the filling to the wrapper so there aren't any gaps
• Don't overstuff them. A rounded tablespoon of filling per dumpling is probably enough
• I still think some dark soy sauce would be good in this

Yes, this was a lot of work. But it did taste good, especially when I dipped it in chili oil! I gotta try making it again and see if I can make it better next time.