Ha Gow - Test Run

We followed the recipe pretty closely for the filling, choosing bamboo shoots as the compliment to the shrimp, as well as using mirin and black bean sauce as suggested. Peeled and de-veined shrimp from Marina Market helped with process. The filling turned out straightforward and pretty tasty. The only caveat is that we found cutting the shrimp pieces smaller (instead of the 1/2" in the recipe) made filling the dumplings easier.


The dough came next. We got wheat starch from Marina Market and tapioca flour from Whole Foods.


Rolling out the dough went smoothly. The only curious part of the recipe was the hot chicken stock, more on this later. The dough was formed into rolls and cut into pieces.



We made wrappers from individual pieces by pressing them with a heavy pot between wax paper, and some slight enlarging with a rolling pin after.


Making pleats were a little difficult, especially given the hand made wrappers. We found our Ha Gow somewhat like regular dumplings in appearance, but overall not too bad looking.



The moment of truth. We steamed a few dumplings and the rejects to test the taste. It actually tasted pretty good, to our surprise. The filling was flavorful and the shrimp and bamboo shoots went together well. However, the wrapper left something to be desired. The wrappers had the translucent quality you normally see in Ha Gow, but were colored a bit yellow and were a bit overly chewy. The yellow color we believe came from the chicken stock (other recipes used water).

Ha Gow 2.0. Since we had some filling left, we decided to make another try at the dough and wrapper, this time choosing a water based recipe, to hopefully get rid of the yellow and chewy-ness. We found this recipe instead:

1 1/2 cups wheat starch
2 Tbsp tapioca starch
1 cup boiling water
1 Tbsp lard (we used veg. oil)

Supposedly this came from the book "Classic Deem Sum: Recipes from Yang Sing Restaurant, SF." by Henry Chan (http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Deem-Sum-Henry-Chan/dp/0030715466). We felt this was auspicious since we like Yank Sing.


We also watched some youtube videos on making wrappers, and found that some chefs used their cleavers to flatten the dough. So we decided to try this route, putting vegetable oil on both the table and the cleaver. We found this actually worked very well, and was faster than the rolling pin and produced thinner wrappers.


After making up dumplings with the rest of the filling, we decided to steam a few rejects again to taste the new recipe. The result was a success! The wrappers were translucent as before, and did not have the yellow coloring. They also weren't as chewy and tasted fairly close in texture to restaurant ha gow. For future dumplings we will definitely use the new dough recipe and the cleaver flattening method.