Date Night Dinners - Potstickers To Enjoy Inside And Out

6/05/2015 tringel 0 Comments

I love potstickers. Love, love, love. Actually I love the potsticker wrapper. To me, the middle is usually bland, strangely textured and leaves little to be desired. When I order potstickers at a restaurant, I usually leave my plate looking like a half eaten mess - no potsticker wrappers to be found but picked at middles scattered about.

Brenden and I just solved that problem. This week, we made pad thai potstickers and they were amaze-stickers! Get it, get it? The inside was just as good as the outside. Potstickers are no longer a shell for me to pick around.






This week date night was a two part extravaganza. When we couldn't find potsticker wrappers at first glance in the store we thought we shouldn't be looking for them anyhow, we should be making them. After some quick research, we found that the process to make the wrappers were very similar to that of the homemade pasta dough we have become obsessed with. Instead of eggs, the potsticker dough uses hot water. This switch created a different texture and taste from the fettuccine, but still a wonderfully easy dough recipe that turned out superbly.



We decided to make the dough the night before our usual date night, just in case something went wrong. When we ran to the Asain market for the last few ingredients, we almost picked up a batch of pre made wrappers for back up. At the last minute we decided not to, and it was a fine choice on our part. Happily everything went just as planned. We mixed, we kneaded, we rolled, and we got the perfect consistency for potstickers. The back ups were not at all necessary, our dough looked just as I imagine potsticker dough, pre-cooking. And Brenden's love of dough confirmed it when he "taste tested" the raw dough scraps. We wrapped up our wrappers and placed them in the fridge, anxious to finish the prep of our potstickers the following night.



The next night, date night, we tackled the filling. But it wasn't much of a tackle because it was so, so easy to prepare. The filling was inspired by pad thai. I love pad thai and we recently made a more then successful pad thai, so we were extremely confident in the use of these flavors. We knew the filling would be just as much the star of our potstickers as the wrappers.

The hardest part of this whole process was forming the potstickers. We had taken the dough out of the fridge to warm up to room temperature in plenty of time. The issue was the actual stuffing. I tended to overstuff mine while Brenden was more light handed with his stuffing. In the end though, they all turned out great and we couldn't even tell who stuffed which.

Each potsticker had amazing texture: perfectly golden brown and crunchy on the bottom, sticky and chewy around to the top, and a burst of flavor jumped out with each bite of the soft center. They were fabulous and it was hard to not eat all 35 in one sitting. They made a great dish for dinner, but they are also perfect as an appetizer, which is what we will use the leftovers as. And now that we know how to make the potsticker wrappers, sky is the limit with all the flavorful fillings we can come up with. Maybe we will even make a dessert potsticker, then we can serve a three-course potsticker-centric meal.

PAD THAI POTSTICKERS
recipe adapted from hostthetoast.com, Pad Thai Potstickers and justonecookbook.com, Gyoza Wrappers

INGREDIENTS

Wrappers

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup just boiled water, plus 1-3 tsp more if nessecary
• Corn starch for dusting

Filling

• 1 Tbsp tamrind paste
• 2 Tbsp fish sauce
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 1 large egg
• 8 oz extra firm tofu, drained, patted dry and cubed
• 8 oz shrimp, thawed cooked, devianed and peeled
• 2 Tbsp sriracha sauce
• 1/3 cup unsalted peanuts
• 1/3 cup bean sprouts
• 1/4 cup scallions, chopped
• 1/4 cup fresh cilantro leaves
• 2 garlic cloves
• Canola oil for cooking

DIRECTIONS
Make the potsticker wrapper dough. Sift the flour into a large bowl and create a well in the flour. In a small bowl, add salt to just boiled water and mix until it is completely dissolved. Add the salted, just boiled to the flour, a little at a time, stirring with a rubber spatula. Add an additional 1/2 teaspoon of water at a time until the all of the flour sticks together, but is not sticky feeling. When the water and flour have combined, switch to using your hands and form a ball. Remove the dough ball from the bowl and begin to kneed on a work surface. Kneed for about ten minutes or until the dough is nice and smooth. Cut the dough in half, wrap each piece in plastic wrap and let the dough rest for one hour.
Form the potsticker wrappersAfter the dough has rested, unwrap one half and roll out until it will go threw the pasta press machine. Roll the dough through the pasta machine to get it nice and thin. (If you do not have a pasta roller, roll the dough by hand until it is as thin as you can get it.) With your thin dough, use a 3 inch cookie cutter or the rim of a glass to cut circles from the dough. Sprinkle each circle with cornstarch and set aside, covered by a damp towel. Combine the scraps from the circle cut outs, re-roll out and repeat the process. Then complete this process with the second dough ball. You should get between 30-40 circles, depending how thin your dough gets rolled out. Once all of the circles have been made, stack them, wrap in pastil wrap, and place in the fridge until you are ready to use them.
Prepare the filling. In a small bowl, whack together the tamarind pasta, fish sauce, and sugar until the sugar dissolves. Add in the egg and combine, then set aside. In the bowl of a food processor, place the tofu, shrimp, sriracha, peanuts, garlic, bean sprouts, scallions, and cilantro. Pulse the mixture until evenly chopped. Then pour the tamarind mixture into the tofu mixture. Continue to pulse until both mixtures are fully combined, minced and moldable.
Fill the potstickers. Fill a small bowl with cool water and place on a table or your workstation with the potsticker wrappers and potsticker filling. Place 1.5 Tbsp of the filling in the center of one potsticker wrapper. Fold the wrapper in half, over the filling, creating a half circle shape. Pinch and fold the edges together to seal the potsticker. Sit the potsticker on a tray and cover with a damp towel until all the potstickers are prepared and ready to be transferred. Repeat this process until all of the wrappers have been filled.
Cook the potstickers. In a large skillet over medium heat, heat the oil. Place one layer of potstickers in the skillet. Do not overstuff the skillet, each potsticker should be touching the bottom of the pan so that it can get golden brown, about 3-4 minutes. Once the bottoms are golden, pour in 1/4 cup of water carefully. Cover the skillet immediately with a lid. Continue cooking the potstickers for another 5-6 minutes, until all of the water has evaporated. Carefully remove the cooked potstickers, plate and repeat this process with remaining uncooked potstickers (or refrigerate/freeze remaining potstickers until you are ready to cook them as directed above). Once all of the potstickers are cooked, serve and enjoy.