Dumpling Atlas · Starter
Har Gow
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 100g wheat starch, not wheat flour
- 25g tapioca starch
- 3g salt, for the dough
- 150g water at a full rolling boil
- 12g lard
- 300g raw prawns, peeled and deveined
- 60g tinned bamboo shoot, finely diced and blanched
- 25g pork back fat, finely minced
- 4g salt, for the filling
- 6g sugar
- 1g ground white pepper
- 5g toasted sesame oil
- 10g potato starch
Equipment
Parchment
The skills inside
Pleating dumplingsSteaming: basket, leaf and lidSalted water & the float testBlanching & shocking
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · shellfish · sesame
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Chop two thirds of the prawns into 1cm pieces and mince the rest to a paste. Combine with bamboo, pork fat, salt, sugar, pepper, sesame oil and potato starch, and chill 1 hour until the mix is tacky and stiff enough to stand on a spoon. 60 min
- Whisk the wheat starch, tapioca starch and salt in a metal bowl, pour the water on straight from the boil in one go, stir hard for 10 seconds, and cover for 2 minutes. 2 min
- Add the lard and knead the hot dough on an oiled bench until it is satiny and smooth, like warm marzipan. Keep it under a cloth: it is workable only while warm.
- Press 12g pieces flat with an oiled cleaver blade into 8cm discs. Fill with 15g and pleat 8 to 10 folds on the near side only, pressing each onto the flat far side.
- Steam on oiled parchment over a hard boil for exactly 6 minutes, until the skins are white-clear and taut and the prawns have turned through. 6 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Pleating dumplings 8 recipes
- The seam is closed along its whole length with no gap at either end of the pleat run: hold one up to the light and no filling shows through the join. A dumpling that opens in the water was sealed against a wet or floured rim.
- The rim is clean and dry where it meets itself. Filling smeared onto the sealing edge is the single most common cause of a burst, and it cannot be wiped off once the dough has taken it up.
- The pleats are even in size and count across the batch, so every piece holds the same weight of filling and cooks in the same time. A tray that ranges from eight folds to eighteen will not finish together.
- The wrapper is thicker at the centre than at the rim, so the base carries the filling without tearing while the pleated edge stays fine enough to eat. A disc rolled evenly flat splits at the bottom.
- It stands up on its own base without slumping, and the pleats still read as pleats after cooking rather than having relaxed into a smooth seam.
Where it goes wrong The rim was wet, floured or smeared with filling, so the seal never took: the dumpling opens in the pot, the filling leaves, and what surfaces is a slack empty wrapper in cloudy water. Uneven pleat counts across a tray compound it, because the batch stops finishing at the same moment.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Albariño
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Shellfish sweetness meets acid, salinity, and bubbles, precision instruments for delicate meat.
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