The Art of Making Thai-Style Dumplings: A Step-by-Step Guide

My steamer is one of my favorite tools in the kitchen, and I just can't get enough of it. There's something special about watching those dumplings come together, one by one. And today, we're going to make some delicious Thai-style dumplings from scratch. It's a labor of love, but trust me, they're worth it.

We've got our ingredients ready, and we're just waiting for the moment when we can start steaming those dumplings. I know it's like five o'clock, but it took us a very long time to get here. This is why it's a special occasion thing - you want to take your time and make sure everything is just right. And yes, you wanna steam them and it only takes five to six minutes to steam them, but you wanna steam them right before serving. You can serve them room temperature, but they're so much better when warm.

We have two layers in our dumplings, which means we need to adjust the steaming time accordingly. Five to seven minutes should do the trick for one layer, and six to seven minutes if you're just doing one layer. Look at this little bit of flour that's left on the dumpling - that's probably because I left too much flour. But don't worry, it's okay! What happens is once you brush the garlic oil on it, the extra flour just goes away.

Similarly, we need to brush the garlic oil on our dumplings pretty relatively soon after they come out of the steamer. They dry out quickly, and if we let them sit for too long, they'll lose their flavor and texture. So, there's more work involved in making these delicious dumplings than you might think.

When it comes to serving time, this wasn't enough work - there's still more to do! We need to serve our dumplings with some fresh lettuce, green leaf lettuce is perfect for this. And of course, we can skip the cilantro if you don't like it. But let's be real, a little bit of cilantro adds so much flavor and freshness to these babies.

We also want to add some fried garlic on top - not too much, just a little sprinkle will do. And for those who like a little heat in their lives, we can add some sliced chilies on top. It's all about balancing the flavors and textures in Thai cuisine, so we need to get everything just right.

Now that our dumplings are ready, let's take a look at them! I'm just going to use my hand to feel how nice and elastic the dough is - it's one of my favorite parts of making these dumplings. And yes, the crispy garlic on top is a game-changer. It was a lot of work, but it's so worth it.

As we take our first bite, I want you to experience the texture and flavors of these delicious Thai-style dumplings. The dough is thin enough to hold everything together, but not too thick that it becomes tough. And the filling - oh my goodness, the pork is cooked to perfection, with just the right amount of salt and sweetness. It's a perfect balance of textures and flavors in each bite.

The key to making these dumplings work is in the mix of different ingredients. We need the right type of flour, the right amount of oil, and the right balance of fillings. So, if you're thinking about making these dumplings at home, remember that it's all about experimentation and finding what works best for you.

And finally, don't forget to check out our written recipe on Hatthaikitchen.com - we'll be posting it there soon! If you haven't subscribed to the show yet, make sure to do so. You won't want to miss an episode, and by clicking that little bell icon, you'll get a notification whenever I post a new video. And as always, thank you for watching - I'll see you next time on your next delicious adventure!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso welcome to hot thai kitchen so today i am making one of the most beautiful things  i've ever made so beautiful in fact that it's considered royal cuisine so this is inspired by  recently where i did a live demo with chef farm where he demoed how to make bird dumplings i'll  link to that video below but this recipe is similar except instead of birth we are making  beautiful flowers so these are called chao mong cha means a bouquet and muang means purple and  once you're done it's going to look just like that now honestly this is not something you want to do  on a wednesday night this is something that you will do for a special occasion it is a lot of work  and it takes practice and for many of you this is not something that you'll ever do but i think it's  a really interesting study of thai cuisine every once in a while we do something you know a little  more complex a little more elaborate just as a a part of understanding thai cuisine as a whole  all right let's get started so we're going to make a really delicious pork and peanut filling  i mean this filling is so good i just eat it with sticky rice on its own if you halfway through  give up on making the dumplings which i've done before okay so i'm going to start with our toasted  white sesame seeds and i'm gonna just lightly crush okay so just like that and then this one  is a must-have you have to have peanuts so i've got some roasted peanuts here and i'm just gonna  grind this up until they're sort of nearly not completely powder definitely not peanut butteri'm going to stop here i mean there's going to be some chunks bigger than others that is okay but  you definitely don't want really big pieces gonna be interfering with your ball forming as you will  find out later so the next thing i'm gonna make is what we call sam glow which means three friends  and it's basically the thai mir poi it's the base herbs that go into so many different dishes  starting with white peppercorns and i'm going to grind that up into a really fine powder  okay so now once it's fine and beautiful like this in goes garlic and cilantro shrimps cilantro stems  which traditionally would be cilantro roots but i can't find it so stems  will do just fine and we want to get that all into a fine pasteokay and that smells good you want to get it quite fine definitely no big chunks there so that's  basically it for prep let's get cooking so i've got some lean ground pork here and you do want  lean for this because as you cook if it's not lean you get a lot of oil separation and you can also  use chicken instead if you don't eat pork for some reason and now here's my little trick i'm going to  add my fish sauce to the pork and then i mash it all together because this helps break up the pork  into sort of smaller smaller pieces and it makes it a lot easier to prevent big chunks of pork from  cooking together once you're in the wok because one of the things again that we don't want is we  don't want chunky filling because chunky filling you'll have a hard time forming it into little  balls this also breaks it from the little weird tube shapes that sometimes ground meat comes in  from the grocery store you definitely don't want to pork a little bit of oil in there not too much  okay and the three friends go in and then you want to saute this low and slow oh also onions i've  got some diced onions that i also want to add so low and slow and you want to cook this until the  onions are translucent and become really really soft so really take your time with this part  if it's sticking a little bit you can definitely deglaze my onions are soft now  i'm going to add my pork and again you want to keep the heat low because you want a lot of time  to break up the pork so that it does not chunk up on you and just kind of like chop chop chop  chop the pork up with your pork with your spatula to prevent things from clumping up  okay so once the pork is mostly cooked i'm going to add the most important ingredient in this  and that is palm sugar and yes i am adding what looks like a lot of palm sugar and this will end  up being like a sweet savory kind of it's it's a savory dumpling but it has a prominent sweet note  but the sugar is so important in keeping it sticky if you don't add enough sugar it will not hold  together and you'll have a hard time making the actual dumplings and it's delicious like you'll  see what i mean it's like sweet salty just so good and you want to use palm sugar for this  if you don't have it i guess light brown sugar would do but definitely not white sugar you want  some flavor in there and i'm going to cook this for quite a while until all the sugar  is dissolved and the liquid dries up okay so my sugar is basically all dissolved now i'm  going to add my peanuts and sesame seeds and that will help sort of dry up everything a little bit  but you still want to keep this going until it's not only really dry but you want the  sugar to start to caramelize a little bit and this mixture will turn a nice dark color okay  i am happy with this it's a darker brown now it's dry it's sticky now let's give it a taste  oh hot oh that's good oh it's perfect i think this is my best one yet alright  so now i'm gonna let this cool completely in fact i'm gonna put it out on the balcony because it's  so cold today because i want it as cold as possible all right so the filling has cooled  and it's sticky now and what we're going to do now is form them into little balls okay so for  each dumpling you want to get a ball about six to seven grams it's good if you have thisit's good if you have a scale but if you don't you can also  just do a little bit more than a packed teaspooneight a little much there six or seven like if you get it to seven it's totally fine and then  you're gonna pack it into a little ball pack it as tightly as you can so it doesn't come apart  there you go that's it and then you repeat the process until you're out this recipe makes about  40 pieces so you can do this 40 times and after a while you'll get really good at estimating how  big they are and if it's not a perfect ball it's okay as long as it holds together because that's  what matters so you can pick one up and put it in the dumpling so i've only made 15 because that's  all the time and patience i have for right now and this isn't even the hard part okay  so while we make the dough i want to keep this in the fridge so it stays as cold and as solid  as possible all right let's make the dough which is the hard part of this recipe  so first we're gonna make the purple water to dye our dumplings into muang dumplings  and the color comes from butterfly pea flowers and that is p-e-a not p-e-e as has been previously  misunderstood so these are just blue bright blue flowers i can only find them dry here  and this is like seven bucks really expensive at my house in thailand they literally grow like new  flowers come out every single day so it really hurt me to have to buy this but you can get it  online or i guess you can use food coloring if you wanted to but this is the traditional part so what  i did was i took the dry flowers and i soaked them in hot water hot off the boiled water and  after about 10-15 minutes they give up a really beautiful color and now i want to strain thatand you want to press out as much water as you can because this is a measured amount of water  and the water is going to be sort of like bluish than it is purple i know it looks purple right  now but trust me it's going to be blueish than purple so what you want to do is make it really  really purple by adding some lime juice so the nature of the pigment is it turns purple in acidic  situations and it turns blue in basic situations so to turn this purple you have to add lime juice  and you want it more purple because once you add all the flour it will turn back a little bit into  blue as you see because i guess i didn't know this before but flowers i guess are a little bit basic  so just watch this magic happen lime juice is going in you can do lemon juice  and look how much more reddish it turns now and if you're looking that in the go okay that's way too  reddish don't worry it will not stay like this so the main flower that we're going to use for this  is rice flour this regular rice flour comes in a red bag at the asian grocery store this is going  to make it tender but we want to add other flours to make it a little bit chewy and elastic and i am  going to add some arrowroot starch so arrowroot starch in thai we call it bangtaui mom and it's  pretty hard to find but i have found that like health food stores like whole foods things  like that they do have that in their flower section like places with a lot of gluten-free  gluten-free flour options and arrowroot gives a nice elasticity to the dumplings you can also do  tapioca starch which is a lot easier to find you can get that at asian grocery stores the the  difference is it's small so you don't have to like buy this if you don't want to but i do find having  made both the i like the arrowroot texture just a little bit more it's a little bit more elastic  more tender i should say okay so all that's going in and then we're also going to add a little bit  of glutinous rice flour which is the green bag at the asian grocery store do not get those too  confused and this also will give a tenderness sort of like mochi and this sort of magical combination  of three different flowers will give the texture that we want okay you can do it with just the  rice and tapioca or arrowroot but the texture is just not as nice so i want to give that a stir  with a mini whisk no no sugar no salt no seasoning whatsoever in this dough all the flavor is coming  from our filling so now what i want to do is add our purple water to this and you want to make sure  this isn't like hot anymore because you don't want it to cook right here so lukewarm is fineand give that a stir and just watch it's going to turn a little bit more  to the blue side of purple that's why you want to make the water more purple than blue and you want  to make sure there are no lumps or really take the time to stir stir stir mix mix mix mix mix  and to add a little bit of fat to the dough i'm going to add some coconut milk  keep it a little bit more luscious nice that's a great color better than my water at home your  water is better for this okay so now i'm going to strain this because i want to make sure there's  absolutely no lumps especially because i added lime juice there's always a little bit of lime  pulp so i want to strain all of that so right now we've got a batter can't make dumplings  with batter so we're going to cook this until it turns into a dough so we can work with it  i'm using a non-stick pot nonstick is better it'll just kind of allow the dough to really  just fly right off you can do it with stainless steel you just have to be diligent with scraping  a little bit and then i'm going to turn the heat on just on medium low you want it to cook slowly  so you have time to mix the cooked bits and the uncooked bit together more evenly you do not stop  stirring this is not like oh let's go over here and answer a phone call no you stay and you are  slave to the stove until this is done but it's not very long like five six minutes and you see  the batter almost instantly starting to clump up at the bottom so your job is to just stir  and scrape you're incorporating the cooked bit into the raw bit  okay and then the cooked part will start to look a little bit translucent and so your job is to flip  and turn and really like mash the cooked bit into the raw bit if it's happening faster than  you like and then you're panicking just lift it off the flame a little bit like i'm doing now  and then just take your time working off heat now go back onto the stove so you want to get  this to a point where it's no longer wet looking so imagine you have to roll this into a dough  and wrap it around a filling so if it still looks wet like mud that's not possible  right but you don't want to get it fully cooked either because if it's fully cooked  then it's really hard to work with then it's too stiff so it does require a little bit of you know  experience okay that's good i'm gonna take it out i'm gonna put it on my work surface hereand then i'm gonna knead this until it's smooth and it's going to be a little hot but that's  okay it's not a big deal and you just want to get a more or less smooth dough just fold  it over itself and push it out a few times and that's it you don't need to get it super smooth  by the time you form them into a dumpling the dough will have sort of kneaded itself  this needs to be covered by a very slightly damp towel or plastic wrap otherwise it'll dry up and  become really difficult to work with okay here's the most difficult part turning them into flowers  before we move on i'd like to tell you about today's sponsor skillshare so if you like my  videos it probably means that you love to learn new things and you love to create so i think  you're going to love skillshare which is an online learning community with thousands of classes on  topics like photography interior design cooking classes and even how to build a youtube channel  most classes are less than 60 minutes long and they're made up of short lessons so even for a  busy mom like me it's easy to just watch a few lessons a day and before you know it you're done  one class i really like is called the one yeast though you need to know by julia tertian and i  like that it gives you a really solid foundation for understanding bread baking which is perfect  if you're just getting started so if you want to learn a new skill or explore a new passion check  out skillshare and the first 1000 people to click the link in my description will get a free trial  of skillshare premium membership and then after that it's less than ten dollars a month  for an annual subscription so to turn this into flower dumplings we're going to need some tools so  these are tweezers made specifically for cha muang  and yes they are hard to find you can probably find them online i'll try to look for some links  of some online stores but again as i said this is probably not going to be doable for some of you  but it's a good study of thai cuisine and also you can just make balls if you  just want to know what it tastes like you don't have to turn them into little flowers  so this bowl of rice is rice flour mixed with a little bit of tapioca flour basically you  want about the same kind of flour that you use in the dough for the dough balls you want to keep it  covered so it doesn't dry out and you want a way each piece should weigh seven to eight grams so  it's a little bit heavier than our filling and i'm going to use my mini cleaver to cut a little chunkand we'll see how much that weighs and if i'm good at this this should be  seven exactly see i've done this a few times i'm no by by no means an expert but i have done this  a few times just to practice for this video okay so now we're going to sort of press it out into  a circular sheet about an inch and a half at this point and then you wanna make it to two inches by  crimping only the edges so basically what you want is for the edges to be thinner than the center  because the edges are going to get bunched up at the end so the end result should be at least two  inches a little bit more now our filling goes in and then i'm going to bring the bottom upand pinch it all together and then we're going to flatten the bottom and get a bell shape so i just  tap tap tap the end where your seam was to flatten it so that our flower is on a flat stable surface  just like that and you got like a tiny little almost like a straw mushroom shape or something  don't worry about these little pleats once you turn into flowers it all go away i'm gonna dust  the whole thing with a little bit of flour so that it doesn't stick to my tweezers and then i'm going  to start tweezing this is the hard part this requires practice your first ones will be ugly  but that's okay they will still be delicious every you want to dip your tweezers into the flour  every three times that you tweeze or as needed because what as you know once you tweeze  you're gonna lose some flour to the dough and then this will start to stick to the dough  so i find that one two three dip one two three dip is sort of my rhythm okay go from the bottomand pull out a petallayer one and then layer two you kind of wanna go in between and i'm slanting  my tweezers up a little bit i have two different tweezers here but you don't need two but if you  have two i find in combination it turns out a little bit nicer oh no if you're using just this  one you can finish the top by just pinching a couple on top but this is where i like to  bring on the second one that's smaller and do the final flower final petals on top in sort of like a  round shape and that's it look how pretty these are oh my god i'm so happy okay so now this  has to go on a steamer which i forgot to prepare so  i'll be right back okay now ever so gently put it in my steamer and then we keep going yayso seven hours later i've made 14 dumplings  i know it's like five o'clock it took a very long time um this is why it's a special occasion thing  you wanna steam them and it only takes five to six minutes to steam them but you wanna steam them  right before serving you can serve them room temp but they're so much better when warm and  because we have two layers maybe six to seven minutes if you're just doing one layer five  minutes will be good look at this law see little bits of flour there that's probably i  left too much flour so you want to maybe like blow on it to get rid of extra flour but  that is okay because what happens is once you brush the garlic oil on it it goes away  so that's just extra flour that was left on the dumpling same here and you want to brush  the garlic oil on pretty relatively soon after they come out because they dry out quick so you  don't want to like let them sit and then put the oil on okay serving time like this wasn't enough  work there's more stuff you gotta serve them with okay usually because this is really doughy and  heavy and in thai food it's all about balancing right so you want to serve them with some fresh  lettuce green leaf lettuce i got some cilantro you can skip the cilantro if you don't like it  oh look how cute let's just do five it's a huge plate but i feel like five is good for now oh the  fried garlic you want to put the fried garlic too much just a little bit on top a little sprinkling  just to judge it up a little bit i'm going to place just a couple of chilies on here and if  you want to eat that spicy you can slice little rounds of chilies and then put them on top but  you know what it's enough work as is all right shall we eat go with this one right here  i'm just going to use my hand i can feel that dough so nice and elasticoh i love that crispy garlic you know what it was a lot of work but it is so good here i just  want to show you you want the dough just thin enough to hold it together but not thicker than  necessary and then you can sort of see around the outside that you can see the filling kind  of through that translucent dough a little bit that is what you are going for i want to have my  second what bite with lettuce because the lettuce really rounds it out nicelyso satisfying the filling is it's got a really nice sort of texture because you cook that pork  so much it almost hardens a little bit so it's not like a smooth thing so that's a great thing  to counteract the smooth dough and it's salty and it's sweet and the filling itself is a little  too much but once you chew everything with the dough with the garlic it just  balances out and that texture of dough i'm telling you it's it's soft but it's also got a  a bit of a bounciness and elasticity to it so the mix of different flowers is really important  for this so usually i would say so i hope you give this a try but for this i would totally  understand if you don't ever give this a try but i hope you found that interesting anyway and  maybe you can just make balls just don't even do the flowers just make dumplings balls just  so you see what they taste like right so the written recipe will be on hatthaikitchen.com  and if you haven't subscribed to the show make sure you do so you don't  miss an episode and click the bell icon as well so you get a notification when i post a new video  thank you as always for watching and i will see you next time for your next delicious time\n"