gyoza skins

I've been making, or helping my mother make, gyoza for years. She has an amazing filling recipe, and I've made it with great success a number of times.

The problem is, here in France, gyoza wrappers are a little more difficult to come by than the SF Bay Area. I've made them with wonton skins from the big Asian store, but it's a little bit of a hassle to get to the store.  A while back, I went to a gyoza party hosted by someone I met at my French language school, and he made the gyoza wrappers himself - opening my eyes to the idea this was possible.

Yesterday, I finally got around to trying it.  I went with this recipe (it was the first hit off a Google search, wasn't a video, and looked pretty straightforward) for the dough.  I made a double recipe; I had a LOT of filling.  The filling recipe calls for cabbage and roughly equal weight of ground meat, so what I generally do is find a pretty cabbage at the store, then buy enough meat to use it all up.  Since I got my food processor, this is a lot easier, and while it takes a bit more time to make that much filling, and wrap that many gyoza, it's not actually any more difficult, and this way I can cook and freeze the leftovers and have gyoza meals on demand for several weeks.

With homemade wrappers, I had to figure out the best way to make the dough into wrappers.

Last night, I tried doing it kind of like I'd do cookies - grab a medium-sized ball of dough, roll it out as thin as I could and cut out circles (using a kid's sized rice bowl), collected the scraps, worked into the next ball of dough to roll out into the next sheet.  It worked OK, but the wrappers were uneven thicknesses and a little larger diameter than I decided I wanted.  They were tasty for dinner though.

Today, I had a few wrappers left that I hadn't used last night.  I weighed them, figured out how much each wrapper weighed, and then went to my leftover dough.  Using my kitchen scale, I made balls of dough that weighed 30g.  I then rolled them out into an oblong, and cut them into 3.  These pieces then got dusted with flour, rolled out as thin and round as I could manage, redusted with flour, and put on a plate in the fridge.  A bit time-consuming, but I did it in batches throughout the day.  Preotty much a variation on what the recipe's website recommends. Who, me, do things the way the recipe says? :P


I'll be experimenting with baking the gyoza for storage (rather than steaming-frying them as usual) so they don't stick together as they thaw.  I'll report back :)