{recipes} Southeast Asian Potstickers and Duck a l’Orange Potstickers

(Note: This happened several months ago, but I couldn’t find the recipes I wrote down, so I hadn’t posted about it. I found them wadded up in the bottom of a drawer recently, so here goes.)

My Dad and I have birthdays a week apart, and often do things together to celebrate. When I turned 6 and he turned 40, I asked my parents if we could eat at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. (We lived in New York at that time.) I guess at that point my parents realized they had a strangely fancy food-obsessed kid on their hands. I don’t remember much about the food, but I do recall going to the bathroom with my sister, who was 10, and being thoroughly confused by the presence of a restroom attendant. When I turned 16 and he 50, we donned our tuxes and prom dresses and got the best seat at Julius’ Castle, a venerated old dining institution with views of San Francisco Bay. Of course neither of those places is still in business, sadly, but we still try to do food-related birthdays together.

This year I was a little surprised when he told me that for his birthday, he wanted to have a potsticker competition. (OK, not that surprised, considering our past food competitions.) Maybe at this time you’re thinking “what does an old white guy know about making potstickers?” But in fact, as a retired professor, my dear old Dad has had the pleasure of working with scores of visiting Chinese postdoctoral students–and while he edited their neuroscience papers, they shared their dumpling-making secrets. So he has been making excellent potstickers for a couple of decades, at least, and they are better than the ones you get in most restaurants. It also doesn’t hurt that he has traveled to China dozens of times to do lots of taste-testing.

Back to the fierce competition: there were 4 competitors, me, my Dad, and two of his friends. There were also several extremely partisan judges to taste-test the total of seven varieties that were on offer. I am happy to say that I totally kicked a$$ by winning with my Southeast Asian-inspired potstickers. The non-traditional filling includes mint, cilantro, chopped cashews, and lime, along with the more standard potsticker filling items like ground pork and cabbage. 

I kind of cheated though, because I had two entries. Although it came in 4th place, I actually preferred my other entrant, a duck a l’orange potsticker, which involved duck confit and orange zest. So I’ve decided to share both recipes with you.

If I’m making 2 kinds, I like to fold them differently so it’s easy to tell which is which. I’ve included directions for both square and round wrappers, so if you’re making multiple varieties, you might want to make one type with square wrappers and one type with circular wrappers.

It’s more fun (read: easier) if more people help out, like an assembly line.

A caveat: we don’t make our own dough, which some people might think is lame. (I’m happy to see that the inimitable Jaden Hair agrees it’s not really worth it. However, the unparalleled Andrea Nguyen would probably disagree.) Baby steps, people. It took us 25 years to get this good at the other aspects of potstickery. We’ve got big plans to attempt a reverse engineering of  Shanghai’s finest Yang’s crispy dumplings, dough included, in the near future. I favor Japanese gyoza skins for my potstickers, because they are a little bit thinner. You can buy Japanese gyoza wrappers or Chinese potsticker skins in the refrigerated section of an Asian market.

• 1 lb ground pork
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup finely chopped mint leaves
• 1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro leaves
• 3-4 cloves finely chopped garlic
• 2 Tblsp grated ginger
• 1/3 head chopped cabbage, lightly sauteed in a teaspoon of sesame oil and dried on paper towels
• 1/2 cup grated carrot
• 1/3 cup finely chopped cashews
• 2 Tblsp soy sauce
• 1 Tblsp sesame oil
• zest of 1 lime
• sambal oelek or sriracha to taste
• 1-2 packages gyoza or potsticker wrappers
• vegetable oil for cooking