The Joys of Cooking Without a Recipe; Try These Handmade Vegan Gyoza!

Recipes are everywhere. Blogs with pretty pictures, huge sections in book stores, magazines at the checkout counter, and an entire channel are dedicated to instructions on how to cook delicious meals. While I love looking at food porn in all its various forms, following recipes has never been enjoyable for me. I feel that it’s far more exciting to prepare a meal without having measuring spoons and scales everywhere. There’s freedom in picking and choosing ingredients that you know will go well together, and experimenting with different flavour profiles.

One way I enjoy experimenting like this is to try replicating dishes I’ve had in restaurants. The menu always lists the main ingredients, so the framework is already there. All I have to do is take my time enjoying the dish to pick up the ingredients that may not be listed, take a photo for posterity, and get to work playing with the ingredients at home! Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work out as well as the dish is presented in the restaurant, and that’s okay. Cooking is about experimentation, trying new things, making mistakes, and doing better the next time. One thing to remember, cooking without recipes is fine, but baking isn’t! Baking is basically chemistry with the way all of the ingredients need to work together cohesively, and you don’t mess around with chemistry without knowing what you’re doing. But I digress…

When I was in Manhattan last summer, I had some incredible gyoza (Japanese dumplings) at a little hole-in-the-wall in TriBeCa. I’ve been obsessed with making my own gyoza since that trip, and have found that while it is certainly time-consuming, they are easy and incredibly versatile. The ones I make in this post are vegan, but the beauty of gyoza is that while a few ingredients are kept the same, the filling can be pork, shrimp, ahi tuna (really tasty!), turkey, chicken, or beef if you so desire.

Impress your guests with gyoza!

Ingredients:

Here are a few of the necessary ingredients

• 2 packs of oyster mushrooms
• 1 pack of portobello mushrooms
•  Napa cabbage
• 1 carrot
• A few sprigs of green onions or shallots
• Finely chopped white onion
• Finely minced garlic
• Finely minced ginger
• Sesame oil
• Mirin
• Soy sauce
• Chili oil
• Rice vinegar
• Chili flakes
• Olive oil
• 1 pack gyoza or dumpling wrappers (found at T&T Market)

Preparation:

1. Chop chop chop. After washing everything, the first four ingredients should be chopped into small pieces, as they will be mixed together to form the filling. Don’t cut them too small, since they shrink up a bit when cooked, but you want them to be nice and manageable. No one wants big chunks of any one ingredient in gyoza, every flavour and ingredient should play together harmoniously. Grate the carrot and chop the raw cabbage into thin slices (the width of matchsticks but half the length). Dispose of the lower half of the oyster mushroom stems, and remove the gills from the underside of the portobellos.
2. Warm a large frying pan over medium heat, and add the olive oil, garlic, ginger and finely chopped white onion. These ingredients will

   Garlic, finely chopped onions, and a big dollop of ginger in the middle

   flavour the oil, which will make your vegetables taste delicious. The oil just coat the bottom of the pan, but you don’t need a lot. The vegetables release a lot of liquid, you don’t want to make a soup out of it. I used about a tablespoon of ginger, and a teaspoon of garlic. The amount of onions is up to you. They aren’t meant to add a ton of flavour (you have many other ingredients for that), but they’re always an important background flavour.

3. Add the mushrooms. I had a large bowlful of them by the time I finished chopping, so I cooked them in three batches. The last thing you want to do while cooking is overcrowd the pan, which leads to uneven cooking. Each time you add new mushrooms, don’t forget to add a little more oil, onions, garlic and ginger.
4. Mushrooms release a lot of liquid when they’re cooked, so wait until the liquid has released and evaporates from the pan, about 5-8 minutes depending on how hot things are in the pan.
5. With the last batch of mushrooms,  add the cabbage and carrots. If you opted to make your filling with meat, add more cabbage and carrot to balance the flavouring. With the mushrooms, I only used a couple of handfuls of cabbage and one handful of carrot. I didn’t want those flavours competing with the earthiness of the mushrooms, I just wanted them to add a little freshness and to bulk up the filling.
6. Once everything is cooked, add the first few batches of mushrooms to the pan with the cabbage and carrots and remove from the heat.

   The filling is ready!

   At this point, add the sliced green onions, as well as the chili flakes and oil. I used a large amount of the chilies since I like a good kick to my food, use as much or as little as you want. I also poured a little of the sesame oil and rice vinegar in at this point. You don’t want to drown the filling, this is used to add a little dimension and to help the ingredients stick together inside the wrapper. Add soy sauce to taste, it adds yet another level of complexity and a nice saltiness.

7. Lay your wrappers out on a flat surface. If you have a problem with them sticking together, put a little cornstarch on your counter top and fingers.
8. Spoon a bit of filling on one half of the round wrapper. The key is to fill sparingly, if you use too much filling the wrappers won’t close properly and the filling will squeeze out the sides. Gyoza are more delicate than Chinese dumplings, and are supposed to be easy little bites to eat.

   If you overfill, you can just remove some of the filling and move the extra to another wrapper.

9. Once you have made enough gyoza, it’s time to close them up. With a wet fingertip, rub along the half of the wrapper that doesn’t have filling.

   Wetting the wrapper before closing it up will ensure it sticks.

    

10. Seal up the gyoza. If you want to get fancy, you can add pleats to the dough, but I was getting hungry and just wanted to get cooking!
11. In a heated pan (medium to medium-high heat), add a little olive oil (just enough to coat the bottom) and add the gyoza. Again, it’s important to not crowd the pan. This only takes a few minutes, so keep a watch on them!
12. Once you have a nice sear on the bottom, add a few drops of water and cover the pan with a lid. Doing this will steam the top of the gyoza but leave the bottom golden and crispy. This takes a couple of minutes to make them tender.
13. Eat!

    Store-bought dipping sauces suck. Make your own!

Now you just need a dipping sauce for the gyoza to complete the dish. In a little bowl, I mixed:

• Soy sauce
• Chili oil
• Chili flakes
• Green onions
• Sesame oil
• Mirin (this adds a bit of sweetness to balance the saltiness in the soy sauce)

Seriously, it’s that easy. Delicious, diverse, and fancy! Play around with ingredients. Different meats, different spices, different veggies, it’s whatever you want in a convenient little package. Don’t be scared to experiment!