I totally just made potstickers!
Gluten free potstickers! I know! I’m so shocked it worked. I didn’t even take pictures, other than the end result. These were the second batch, which I didn’t watch as carefully so they burned a bit on the bottom. More of a caramelized thing, so it tasted good, but still. It came across too dark on the camera.
Every once in a while I would think there’s got to be a way to make potstickers gluten free. Because if you think about it, Chinese food is usually made by hand. It’s country cooking, just a different country. I learned how to make fried rice and a few chinese style sauces, but I figured potstickers would be a very long process of trying to figure out what flours worked, what I needed to add as far as gums or maybe a egg yolk to make sure it holds together. But it was just a thought on the back burner that someday I’d give it a shot.
So I was looking at this month’s Fine Cooking magazine and it had a recipe for potstickers. I was curious to see what they made the dough out of. Turns out? Flour and water. That’s it.
Hmm… That is very interesting.. It got me thinking that if nothing else it would actually be a really good way to get to know the properties of the different flours.
So I decided to go ahead and make potstickers with the expectation that they weren’t going to work, but I’d play around with making dough with different flours and I’d probably end up cooking the potsticker filling on its own and just throwing it into the fried rice. No biggie.
So I throw some of the same gluten free flour mix that I use for cookies in a bowl, stir in some hot water until it formed a dough and let it rest at room temperature (I wrapped it in plastic wrap) like the recipe said. Patrick was late getting home so it probably sat for a couple hours before I got to it.
I made the filling from a recipe by Ming Tsai on FoodNetwork.com. The recipes in Fine Cooking were more fancy and I just wanted to see if I could even make them. So I got to work and started rolling out the dough, which was working very well. I had some dumpling presses that I used to shape them. They held together really well when I folded them. I wasn’t too surprised about the potstickers holding together, but I was not expecting them to cook the same as regular potstickers. I expected the dough to do something weird and I’d end up with a mess in the pan.
But they turned out great. I just cooked them according to the Ming Tsai recipe. They look just like potstickers.
Patrick ate five of them. And he’s picky about gluten free food. He said they were “excellent.” They have that kind of chewy/crunchy bottom and the steamed soft/chewy top like regular potstickers. I was blown away.
To go with it, I made Emeril’s Honey Soy Dipping Sauce. I use San J wheat free soy sauce in place of regular soy and I just used regular honey. It was really, really good.
So yea… Wow. I never would have thought…
