Xiǎolóngbāo – Day 3 – version 1.1
OK. So, I made the wrappers too thick. This makes sense…not only did they taste not quite right, nor did they feel wuite right in the mouth, the quantity of dumplings was off. Katie’s recipe says enough for 200. I halved the recipe including the wrapper dough. Using half the dough recipe, I ended up with almost 30 dumplings as opposed to something closer to 100 as one might expect if the recipe is right.
Today, I used the last of the filling that I had left. I did not alter it to test to see if the wrapper thickness would affect the broth content of the dumplings. I made a wrapper dough batch using just 1 cup of flour or one-sixth the recipe. One might expect that this would yield 33 dumplings. I ended up with 20, so definitely more then last time given the quantity, but still not on track to make 200 with a full recipe. Nonetheless, I made much thinner wrappers, although a few were too large, so I probably could have been more careful and ended up with 25. Even at 20, that’s twice as many as before.
So, after all this math, were they better? Turns out, yes they were much better. The dumplings were not pouring out broth like the ones I had in Shanghai, but they were clearly “wet” inside, and I could see a little broth pooling in the spoon as I bit them open.
Next time, I’ll try increasing the aspic to meat ratio, and working on even thinner wrappers. Like some comments I read on a blog Katie referenced, I may need to pull out my pasta maker and use it to roll the dough even thinner…but I’d rather not have to resort to that if possible. Maybe brute force (ie just add more aspic) will do the trick.