Week 25 - learning how to make Dim Sum

Any food opportunities, as any of you will know and I'm there.  Learning, making, cooking and eating - its all wondrous and delightful to me.  I'm pretty much bang on half way through the year (yipppeeeeeee) and I've still only done two food-related weeks, cheese and pasta.  Bread-making is also coming up soon but before then I thought I'd tackle something a little more exotic.  This week Dim Sum is on the menu.  Yum.  

I have to confess, I'm not the biggest Dim Sum fan and actually, a couple of you readers will be surprised I went for this because when you ask me endlessly if I'd like to go for Dim Sum, I always say no.  But its not so much because I don't like it, its just not at the top of my list (and its a long list).  Also Dim Sum tends to be very "porky" and I don't dig on swine so it means the options are a little more limited for me.

Nevertheless I loved the idea of learning how to make the scrummy little dumplings so I found a class through the Funzing website and went last weekend. Eight of us sat around a large communal table at the London Cookery School and our teacher, Peter Wong began by telling us what Dim Sum actually is.  Its really a style of delivery rather than a style of cooking.  So the meaning of Dim Sum is "sharing" - its not the food.  Its all about ordering lots of little dishes and sharing amongst friends.  

It all looked super organised with lots of sauces, condiments and ingredients all in wooden boxes across the table ready for us to use.  

We were also offered some Chinese tea to have before we got started as drinking tea or "Yum Cha" is at the heart of eating Dim Sum.  We were given a few tips about the etiquette of Dim Sum too.  You should always pour your dining companion's tea before your own.  You don't need to save dessert for last - there's no set order to eating Dim Sum, so you can dive in with the sticky-rice sesame balls!  You mustn't point at people with chopsticks and interestingly, you shouldn't stick your chopsticks into food so that they stick up - apparently that look like incense offerings to the dead.

So, Peter told us that we would be making three different types of dumplings; Har Gow (prawn dumplings), Chi Chow Fun Gwor (Chiu Chow steamed dumplings) and then Sui Mai (open top pork dumplings).  Mine would just be substituted with delicious vegetables.  We would make the fillings for all three dumplings first and then make the dough.

The fiddly mincing of all the vegetables and prawns had been done for us and everything was laid out prepared so we didn't have to fanny on, wasting time with chopping and what not, which was good.  Some of the key ingredients in the three dumplings were salted radish, Chinese mushrooms, water chestnuts and ginger - all of which were there for us to just spoon into our mixtures.

We started off by making the filling for our Har Gow prawn dumplings by mixing together raw king prawns, water chestnuts, ginger, salt, sugar, cornflour and a little bit of white pepper.

Then everybody moved onto the Chiu Chow Fun Gwor dumpling mixtures.  These traditionally have pork, salted radish and mushrooms in (as well as all the seasonings) but my veggie filling was a lovely mix of beans, asparagus, mushrooms and aubergine.

Then we moved onto the last dumplings, the Sui Mai open top pork dumplings, which are a mixture of pork and prawn. I used a mixture of prawn, peppers, mushrooms and aubergine.

Once we had our three fillings ready, it was then time to make the dough.  It is made from a combination of wheat starch, tapioca flour, cornflour, sugar and salt.  Once everything is combined, we then had to pour a little boiling water over the flour.  This sort of cooks it: essentially it is a cooked dough when it comes to be steamed.  

It takes a bit of time to become a workable dough.  After the water is poured over the mixture, it looks more like a bowl of cottage cheese.  But after covering the bowl for a couple of minutes and letting the heat in, it starts to form something resembling a manageable dough.

Using a little mini rolling pin and cookie cutter, we rolled out our dough and cut out as many circle pieces as we could.  Then it was just a case of spooning in a small amount of our first two mixtures and making the gorgeous little parcels.  Well, I make it sound easy but its really rather fiddly and my heavy handedness made it quite difficult to make a perfect dumpling.  I kept over-filling them and then the dough breaking, so some of them just looked a bit "schmooshed".  However, I did manage to pull it together and make a few that were quite pretty!

To save some time (the class had already been two hours at this point) the dough for our Sui Mai dumplings had been prepared already.  This is a more traditional dough made from egg and all-purpose flour.  These ones were a little easier to make, we just had to pull up the dough around the mixture and make little crown-like parcels with our fingers.  

Finally, all the hard work was done.  Each of us put our dumplings into a steamer tray and Peter stacked them all up ready for cooking.  We all poured ourselves some more tea and some wine, grabbed some chopsticks, eating trays and sauces and in no time at all the dumplings were ready.  All in all, I think we had each made around 15 or 16 pieces of the three different types.  I have to say, they were utterly delicious, just melt in the mouth, super tasty, gorgeously scrumptious.   

I really enjoyed this class and would definitely recommend the London Cookery School.  It was priced well at £35 and Peter was a good teacher who was patient, clear and helpful.  Plus after all the learning and doing we got to eat a massive dinner.  What is not to love?!  Rachel, Jenny, next time you ask me to go for Dim Sum the answer will be yes.