Wontons

Making the vegetable broth

1. Start by preparing the soup or broth. We settled on a rich broth made from ordinary vegetables: carrot, onion, celery and spices. At first, though, I thought of serving the wontons with fish in a homemade fish soup.

2. Make the vegetable broth. Pour 2 l of water into a pot and put it on the heat. Peel the carrot, onion and celery stalks. It is better to take more vegetables so the broth turns out rich. Tie 1-2 tbsp of dried soup roots (5–9 g) with aromatic herbs in a piece of clean cloth or a sachet bag, and add a few unpeeled garlic cloves to it. Cut the carrot into large pieces and drop in the onion whole, scored crosswise. Bring the broth to a boil over high heat and cook over low heat, covered, for more than 1 hour. While the broth simmers, you can get on with the filling and the dough. Before serving, take the vegetables and the bag out of the broth.

   

Preparing the fish filling

1. Make the minced fish. Scale the fresh carp and remove all the flesh, carefully picking out all visible bones by hand. The leftover fish can be thrown away or used to make a fish soup. Grind the carp fillet in a meat grinder. Usually not all the small bones pass through the plate, and they collect in front of it. Throw them away and grind the filling once more.

   

2. Mix the fish with the herbs and seasonings. Put the minced fish in a deep bowl. Finely chop only the cilantro leaves with a knife. Cut the green onions, whole or just the green tops, as for a salad. Add the herbs to the bowl. The wonton filling should be moist. Add 1 tsp each of mirin, fish sauce, rice vinegar and sesame oil, 0.5 tsp of white or brown sugar, a pinch of salt and plenty of ground black pepper. Mix the filling thoroughly until smooth.

   

Making the dough

1. The dough is very simple and hardly differs from dumpling or ravioli dough.

2. Knead a stiff dough. Sift 1.5 cups of premium wheat flour (195 g) into a bowl, add a pinch of salt and mix. Separate one egg white from the yolk into a glass. Add slightly warm water so that the total volume is about 130-140 ml. Whisk the mixture with a fork and pour it into the flour. Knead a stiff dough, slightly stiffer than for dumplings. If the dough sticks to your hands, add a little more flour.

   

3. Roll out the dough to about 1 mm and cut it into squares. You can roll it with a rolling pin on a floured table or board. We roll the dough out with a pasta machine, which we also use for lasagna and fettuccine and for jiaozi dough. Using a pizza wheel, cut it into squares with sides of 7-8 cm. The trimmings can be rolled out again.

   

How to shape and cook them

1. Shaping comes with experience, and it comes quickly. As it turned out, there is nothing difficult about it.

2. Place the filling. Lay the squares of dough out on the table so they are convenient to work with. Prepare a cup of water (200 ml) in advance for dipping your fingers while shaping the wontons. Put 1 tsp of fish filling on each square of dough. Depending on the situation you can use less; what matters is that the amount of filling lets you seal the dumpling tightly and leaves dough around the edge to form the “shirt”.

   

3. Fold the dough into a triangle and seal the edges. Wet a finger with water from the cup and run it along the edges of the dough, just a little, only to moisten. Fold the dough in half diagonally so the filling is completely covered. Pinch the edges of the dough with your fingers, pressing the air out from the filling. The edges of the dough around the filling should be sealed.

   

4. Shape the “shirt”. In one motion, fold together the opposite corners of the dough that adjoin the long side, the diagonal of the square, pressing them lightly with your fingers to the dough around the filling. The top corner of the dough will stick out to the side. You get something like a ball of dough with filling wrapped in a swaddle in the form of a puffy “envelope”. That’s really all: the wonton is ready for boiling or frying.

   

   You can cook the wontons directly in the vegetable broth, but the dough will make the broth cloudy. So, to keep the soup clear, they are first cooked separately.

5. Steam the wontons or boil them in water. The Chinese dumplings can be boiled in plain boiling water for 3-4 minutes, until they float. Or, as we did, steamed in a wooden Chinese steamer that sits on top of a pot of boiling water. It is very convenient. The cooking time is about 5 minutes.

   

6. Finish the wontons in the broth. We additionally cooked the steamed dumplings in the broth for 2-3 minutes over low heat. This way the broth doesn’t become cloudy from the dough and stays clear. Salt the broth to taste, or add a little soy sauce, which will darken the broth slightly.

   

Serving

1. For serving, it is better to use not soup plates but large bowls with a rounded bottom.

2. Divide the wontons among the bowls and pour over the broth. Put the cooked wontons into each bowl, dividing their total number into portions. Pour the broth over the dumplings so that the liquid level is below the level of the dumplings. Sprinkle with a pinch of finely chopped cilantro and sliced green onions. In appearance the dish resembles an ordinary dumpling soup.

   

   Use Chinese chopsticks for serving, to pick up the dumplings and eat them, and a curved wooden spoon for the broth. If you like, season the broth with hot pepper. I liked it that way very much; the dish was noticeably spicy and tasty. When you bite in, remember that there is hot broth inside, as in Georgian khinkali, so be careful.