The video in question:
We obviously didn't follow that recipe since it called for pork, but it was helpful for getting the general idea of how to fill and seal the little guys.
There aren't any hard and fast rules about what should go in the filling, but for our first time we wanted to use a recipe to give us some general guidelines. Having only two Japanese cookbooks on hand made it fairly easy to settle on a recipe by Miyoko Nishimoto Schinner (from Japanese Cooking: Contemporary and Traditional), which called for textured vegetable protein and vital wheat gluten as replacements for the meat. We reconstituted the TVP in water and a little soy sauce:
Then Michael sautéed some Chinese broccoli (wrong culture, I know, but it's what we had)...
...while I chopped a few scallions.
All of that was tossed into the bowl with the TVP, along with some reconstituted dried shiitake mushrooms and a little of their flavorful soaking liquid.
We seasoned it with finely chopped garlic, grated ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil. The vital wheat gluten was added last, and it soaked up the remaining liquid and added a little chewiness and texture to the filling.
Filling and sealing the gyoza turned out to be a good deal easier than I thought: Just mound some filling inside a wonton skin, fold it over, and fork it closed. Those of you who are frequent readers (ha! anyone? anyone???) will recognize this technique from Thanksgiving, where we stuffed and folded puff-pastry squares. Same idea, only here we had to spread a little water along the edges of the wonton skins to make sure they sealed together.
Emboldened by some early successes, I tried out a slightly more complicated folding technique, which involved tucking one edge of the wonton skin back on itself to yield a little package:
Not perfect, but not bad for my first try, I think.
Michael with a tray of finished gyoza:
We cooked them by first pan-frying them in a little oil until they browned on one side.
Then we flipped them over, added some water, and put lids on the pans so that they could steam. That's all there is to it. Please enjoy your gyoza with soy sauce and rice vinegar for dipping. :)
Much as I've grown fond of Trader Joe's frozen Thai potstickers, I think I probably won't buy them anymore since this was so easy. Plus, the recipe made enough filling for, like, 100 potstickers, so I froze the leftovers and now we have lots of ready-to-eat homemade snackies.
To round out our meal, we recreated a favorite dish from our California days: Japanese eggplants with sweet miso sauce. The eggplants are supposed to be deep-fried, and they taste better when they are, but then doesn't everything? Lacking a deep-frier (and/or the desire to heat and then store several liters of oil), we just sliced them in half gave them a generous squirt of oil before they went under the broiler. We let them cook until they went soft on the inside and started to char a little on top.
The sauce is made of white miso, mirin, and sugar, which is mixed together and then slathered onto the hot eggplants.
The recipe doesn't call for this, but we like to put them back under the broiler at this point to caramelize the sugar and make them nice and gooey and melty. They get topped with sesame seeds when they come out, and should be eaten immediately. Which they were.
Again inspired by our dinner at Kajitsu, we scoured the local Pennsylvania state liquor store for some saké and turned up a decent organic one --- made in California, but still quite good. Kanpai! (Cheers!)
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