 Oh man, that is, oh, you don't even know. This reminds me of mom making this and we're like fighting for the first bowl. Dumplings are everything in one bite, that explosion in your mouth. You want sweet, you want salty, you want sour, you want spicy, you want a little crunchy, you want some soft. All the flavor you can pack into one little bite. It's elementary. I'm Chef King and today we'll be making dumplings. Not one dumpling, not two, three dumplings today. First one, we're gonna be making a traditional Chinese style dumpling. Don't kill me on the pronunciation, jiaozi. Very traditional dumpling filling wrapper. The second dumpling we're gonna make is one of my favorites, pancit mollo. Very traditional in the Philippines when we were kids. You know, I have a little cold, little sniffles. Mom would make some of that and it's, I don't know, it's heaven. And then the third one kind of incorporates the first and second one. Jalongbao, XLB, soupy dumplings, whatever you wanna call them. There's soup in the dumplings. Once you learn all these three recipes, you are really gonna know what makes dumplings dumplings. Our first dumpling, classic Chinese dumpling. You can pick up store-bought wrappers, which is totally cool, I'm with it. If you have a little time, a little extra time, make it yourself. The ingredients are all-purpose flour, a little bit of salt, and water. That's it, can you believe that? You could do this with your hands, at least start it off with your hands, right? We're just mixing this water with the flour and you'll just see in a few minutes it'll all come together. So when it's not sticking on my hands like this, we're gonna be good. We're looking for a ball, like a nice, soft, pillowy ball that we play around with. What we could do is put this right here on our cutting board. You want that just nice consistency, like right now, that's what we have here. The part that takes time in this process is the resting part. And now this is coming together. I like how this is looking, look at that. We're gonna cover our dough with a blanket. This is a wet blanket. It's gonna take a 30 minute nap, but during that time it's resting. While that's resting, you're working, you're making the filling. This is a very classic filling. Cork, ginger, scallions. Those are kind of like the trinity for this dumpling. This is white pepper, some soy sauce, Chinese cooking wine, and a little more salt. And now I'm gonna mix it. So once we have that in there, we can move on to garlic, scallions, ginger. What else do we have? Sesame oil. Sesame oil's very strong, right? Very strong flavor. But again, remember it's oil, so it kind of gives our dumpling more fat. So it's gonna be juicy, which we want. We don't want a dry dumpling. That's probably like one of the worst things you could ever have in your life is a dry dumpling. Let's not forget two more friends. Don't leave them out of the party. Cabbage and bamboo shoots. So the bamboo shoots add some flavor to it, but also crunch. Now we're just gonna mix that in all together, right? Use your hands. If you don't want to cook with your hands, I mean, I think you should, but if you don't want to, you could use this guy as well. Totally cool. But just imagine like my hand here looks kind of like a big kind of dough mixer. And I'm just going around. I'm gonna go on high speed now, right? Now we're on high speed. In a matter of minutes, you see when I'm mixing here, this is nice and sticky already, you know? This is cool. So we just worked that in a couple of minutes and off, and I think we're good. We have our filling. So right now, before we put this in our wrapper and go all the way, we're gonna make a little test batch of our filling. You know, at this point, you could get a bowl of rice, make a few of these patties, fry an egg, and that's breakfast. A little hot sauce. I happen to make small-axe peppers. That's my hot sauce. We donate pepper seeds to community gardens. Peppers grow, we buy them back and we make hot sauce. Now this is done. We're good. Oh, we're good. Our dough is rested. The alarm clock went off. So now you can see how it's developed, it's nice. Definitely like pillowy. Springs back a little bit, which is good. I'm not gonna roll all 60 pieces here. I'm just gonna take half of the dough that we need for right now. That other half could rest for a little bit more and we'll play with this half. What I have in front of us, we'll make about 30 dumplings. You know, now what we wanna do is kind of form these into like a log, almost. It looks like a doughnut, but no, it's not. It's just to help you kind of portion this out and get like these even portions. I'm just gonna cut that up. I'm also putting a little pressure down as I'm rolling. You can see it's getting a little bit longer, a little bit thinner, which is what we're looking for. I forget exactly what the recipe says. Can somebody help me? What does it say? Quarter inch. Oh, half ounce, okay. So let me get my digital scale. We could use coins, we could use scales, we could use the magic of TV and a scale appears in front of me. Pow, pow! I'm probably not even at that point yet. I'm jumping ahead of myself, but we're almost there. So I think this is the right diameter I'm looking for, something like this. And it's a good thing, we left the first one there so you can kind of see the difference how we started off like that. Half ounce, let's see. So first, what I like to do is cut this in half. So now we're talking about equal pieces, right? And we could cut that in half. So we said 30 pieces, right? 30 pieces. So I have these two halves. That means I should get 15. I'm doing this in fours, so I'm probably gonna get like 16 out of it. Dun, dun, dun, dun! Can we get a drum track, drum roll? Oh! Point five, one. You wanna roll this into, it's a little balls now. The main thing is we do wanna keep them uniform in size. You know, so you get the pitcher. This is very zen, very calming. And now we have 16 half ounce balls. So now once our balls are done, pull a ball, put it in front of you, push down. Right, now we're gonna make pancakes kind of. If you want, when you're at home, you could put a little wet towel over them to prevent the skin, that crust from forming on top, you know. And then now we're gonna roll, right? And then quarter turn, roll. So with half an ounce of weight, three inches is what we're looking for. And that's pretty much like a uniform size. It's nice and flat, you know, it's even. So this is looking about where we want it. Fits in my palm, that's what we're looking for. Let's fill it, we already tasted our filling. We know it's the bomb, right? We know it's good, one tablespoon, keep them even. The main thing to focus on is just to make sure that filling fits in here and you don't go overboard where you can't seal it or when it cooks, it's gonna blow up and then you gotta, you know, you gotta mess. Right now I'm just putting water around the perimeter. If it's easier for you, you can put it on the board and just fold the bottom and go right over to the top and then just pinch and seal it all the way through, right? You could call it a day and leave it right there. There's your dumpling. Or this was just crimped with a fold on each end. Like I said, the main thing is just make sure it's sealed. Time to cook our dumplings. I love frying, you get that crispy texture on the outside of the wrapper, right? It's nice and crunchy. But the top of the wrapper is still kind of soft too. We're not deep frying these. We are gonna pan fry them and then also to kind of continue the cooking, we're gonna wind up steaming them as well. Neutral cooking oil, not olive. It is smoking now, which is good. I'm gonna go with my dumplings inside. We're looking for like medium heat. And right now I put it on the flat side, kind of the bottom of the dumpling. So we're gonna form that nice crust on the bottom. So I'm just checking on the bottom. It's starting, but it's not there yet. Almost there. That's hot. So this is what we're looking for. You know, that nice color, that nice crust. And I'm gonna hit it with a little water. I don't know what it says in the recipe, like a tablespoon maybe. So what we're doing now, we're steaming it. It's finishing the cooking process on the dumplings. The pan frying kind of just seared those dumplings on the outside, but the middle, we still have raw pork in there. So by adding the water, what it's doing, it's cooking the dumplings evenly. I just go by time, I would say a few minutes. Man, I love that sound. Look at that. They're gonna be good. That I could tell you for sure. These are gonna be good. I know they're done, but let's check it out. Ooh, when I cut with a spoon, I saw the juice come out. So there you go. There's no pink, there's no red. This I can tell you is gonna be a nice juicy dumpling. Money. Let's plate. These are our naked dumplings. I'm gonna dress them up in a minute. Now this is all up to you. You like spicy? Let's go a little spicy. I like spicy. Just just like a little sambal. So we got that heat. So I have soy here. So the soy adds fermented soybeans, some saltiness. Vinegar, I love vinegars to get that acid, right? Cuts through that fattiness, the richness of the pork. And then my favorite, maybe yours, sesame oil. I like to just drizzle it kind of around. And then some green onions. We have green onions inside. Let's do some green onions outside. Show a little love everywhere. Jausi, or jouts, or dumplings. However you want to say it. Don't bust me on the language, remember? I'm not a linguist. Oh, I'm not gonna get to eat these with all the seasoning. Oh, okay, okay. Oh man, man, this is my favorite part. Flavorful, juicy. These are dumplings. All right, now we're making dumpling number two, pancit molo. One of my childhood favorites. My mom would make this for us all the time. It's a very traditional Filipino dish with roots coming from Chinese dumplings from number one. We're not gonna make wrappers for this. We're gonna use store-bought wonton wrappers. But the whole cool thing about this is now these are dumplings in soup. So I'm gonna begin the recipe by making the soup. I'm putting my chicken parts into our stock pot or soup pot, whatever you want to call it. It's just a vessel that will hold the bones. Now we're gonna kind of add a little more flavor to it and go with some pork bones as well. This is pork shoulder. We just buy them already cut. And onions. Onions will add some sweetness to our broth. And also we're gonna add, this is really my favorite ingredient here, fish sauce. If you know me, you know I love fish sauce. Very strong, funky flavor. Don't let that scare you. I'm gonna add the fish sauce. We're gonna bring this up to a boil. I'm gonna lower it down to a simmer and let it go for about six hours. All right, you can see how much it's reduced. Right now what I'm gonna do is strain it, pour it away from you. And when I'm straining, I'm using fine mesh condor and some cheesecloth. Got our onions in there. I see our onions there. Some pork, some chicken. Now remember, this has been going for about six to eight hours, so I mean, this is beautiful, tender chicken. We don't wanna waste this. So this is gonna be part of our soup, right? We have chicken. Oh, here's a piece of pork. So I got a piece of pork. And then I'm just gonna pick through the rest of this and get more chicken. And that's gonna be part of our pancit molo. So one of the most important parts of a dumpling, the filling, pancit molo. Similar to the first one, we're using pork, putting in some onions, some garlic, sesame oil, fish sauce, my favorite. Oyster sauce, made from oysters. Now we didn't have oyster sauce in the other one. Similar to fish sauce, that umami flavor. Fresh ground black pepper, egg. This kinda just helps it bring that dumpling all together. Just wanna combine all those ingredients together. Make sure it's uniform. Similar ingredients in this wonton. Lots, lots more umami. There's fish sauce in here, there's oyster sauce. And since it's a soup, we're not gonna really be able to kind of add that finishing sauces to our dumpling like we did before. You know, we're not gonna have a dipping sauce. This is, everything is gonna be in that soup. So you really, really, really want that flavor all here, which we have. We're gonna form our wontons for our pancit molo. I'm using store-bought wrappers here. Little different texture. If you're gonna work quickly with them, you don't need to cover them, but if you're gonna be there for a while, probably just wanna cover this with something wet. Now to make the wontons, you're gonna hold it with the point, one point towards you, one point away from you, fill it with our filling. We're gonna wet it just like our other wrappers. Just gonna fold this over and make a triangle. And I'm gonna seal the edges to make sure there's nothing open. The next is we're gonna fold this back, kind of push in the center. That gets twisted there. You put a little water on this corner, fold it. And there's baby wonton. I made this with my kids last weekend and they love it, you know, they make their own shapes. You know what I tell them is this, this is the most important part right here, is just make sure you seal them. So you begin with this, this little triangle thing, sealed all around, and then from here you could do whatever you want. You could leave it like that if you like. But you know, I show them the next step, you kind of push that middle in there, tuck the left side in, hit a little water on the right side, close that up. And there's our dumpling. Our wontons are filled, they're shaped. Now we're gonna boil them in our soup and get to eat them. Right now I'm cooking just one portion, just for me. But you can make as much as you want. You know, usually mom would make a big pot. So now remember, I'm putting the dumplings in there. What we're looking for now, it's just a couple of minutes for the dumplings to cook, the wontons. They'll all kind of float to the top when they're cooked. And you could already see how they're all kind of floating to the top right now. Remember that beautiful chicken we had that we made our broth with? I don't wanna waste any of that. So I'm just gently shredding this chicken. We're gonna put that in there as well. Number one rule for any type of soup, any type of dish. Let's taste, let's see where we are right now. Oh, that is good. I'm just gonna add a little, little, little, little, touch of fish sauce. This is, remember like our salt? I'm just gonna put a little bit there. Oh man, this, this like, this really brings me back to like when I was a kid. I love this. Mom would make this. Look at that chicken, the chicken is just like shredded, falling apart. Simple garnish, scallions. Add nice flavor, a little sweetness, a little green. And oh, one of my favorite toppings, fried garlic chips, ooh. I think I could just sit down in front of the TV and eat like a bowl of fried garlic. I can tell it's delicious. Here's our pancit molo. I'm gonna dig into this. Oh man, that is, oh, you don't even know. This reminds me of mom making this. I get up with my brother and we're like fighting for the first bowl. This is it right here. You can eat this every single day. It is so good. So this is dumplings in soup. The next one we're gonna do is make a dumpling with soup in the dumpling. Jalongbal, XLB, soupy dumplings, whatever you wanna call them. Dumpling number three. I know at home you might be like, oh, how did they get the soup into the dumpling? But I'm gonna show you the trick on how it gets into there. And to do that, gelatin. The gelatin is what holds that stock together. And once you have this gelatinized stock, you just cut that into little cubes, mix it into your filling, and that goes into your dumpling. Right, but so now what we're gonna do is we are gonna bloom our gelatin. It's called blooming. So stick that in there. So blooming activates the gelatin. Okay, let's get a sliver of ginger. And then what I like to do is take the back of my knife and kind of hit that ginger. I can already smell. It releases some of that fragrance already. There's ginger in there. Same thing with our scallion. We're just kind of bruising it. That also releases the juices in that scallion. And we have one shiitake mushroom. Believe it or not, this packs a lot of flavor in there. So they took a fresh shiitake, they dried it. When this shiitake rehydrates, a lot of that flavor will be in our stock. One cup of chicken stock. Store-bought, homemade. I'm gonna crank this up. We're going power boil here. Power boil. Power boil. So we are power boiling right now. I'm gonna lower that down. We're gonna remove our aromatics from our broth. I'm gonna take my bloom gelatin. I just wanna make sure that our blooming gelatin is now dissolved, which it is. We want it to come back up to a power boil. Power boil. And then we're good to go. So I'm gonna pour it in the sheet pan. We're gonna put the sheet pan in our fridge, let it chill, let the gelatin go to work and make that aspic, make that gelatinized stock. We're gonna let that sit for about 45 minutes in our fridge and come back and we're gonna slice it up. So right now we're making our dough for our jamon bao, our soupy dumpling. Couple of differences. We're gonna add hot water first to our flour. Let's go with our salt, room temp water. And now we're gonna add also our oil, which will give the elasticity and also give a nice sheen to the dough after it's cooked. It's definitely coming together now. I'm just gonna cover this. Time to take a nap, 30 minutes and we'll set the alarm and come back. Our filling for our XLB, our soupy dumplings. The ingredients you see here are the things we've been working on in the last couple of dumplings and also our gelatinized stock that we made. It's been in the fridge for 45 minutes. We have pork, pork, pork, pork, pork. It's all about the pork. Ginger, garlic, scallions. We have dark soy, sesame oil, Chinese cooking wine. I'm gonna mix these ingredients together first and I will add the rest of it in there. Let me add my sugar, salt, brown white pepper. Very classic dumpling filling. And we're gonna mix that in a second. I'm gonna cut up our gelatin here, our gelatinized chicken stock and that's gonna mix very well with this. We're gonna go back to our hand mixer. Nice and sticky. So we have that. Let me get to our gelatin. We're gonna cut this into, you know, like little cubes. You just wanna go down. These little cubes of gelatinized chicken stock is gonna go into our filling and that's what brings the soupy part to our filling because once we steam these, we're gonna cook them by steaming them. The pork gets cooked. The gelatinized stock melts basically into that cooked filling and you have soup inside your dumpling. So I'm just making a crosshatch. All right, our stock is now portioned out. Take my rubber spatula and then pour it into our filling. Mix it with the pork and here we are. And then we're just gonna mix that together. The ground pork, seasoning and our gelatinized stock. We rolled out round wrappers, which we have here in front of us, round wrappers. The only difference here when we roll this out, it's slightly thicker at the bottom. The main thing is to get your filling in there. It's about a tablespoon of filling. We're gonna fold up the wall and at the same time, while we're folding up the wall, I'm pushing and turning at the same time. When I say pushing, I'm pushing the filling down. I'm folding and pushing down and twisting and pushing down and twisting. Yeah, like a little pouch, right? Like a little pouch. So everything is packed in there compared to like our other dumplings. Yes, they still need to be tight on the bottom, but when we're talking about sealing them, these are gonna be cooked vertically, I guess. So if there is a little opening, totally fine. So we have our steamer basket. We're lining this because when we cook these, if we don't have these lined, the dough will stick to this basket. And when you lift it up, all your soup and your filling is gonna be left in the basket. You're gonna be picking up wrapper and it's like, ah, you don't want that to happen. So the best thing is you line it with these cabbage leaves. You just wanna make sure that, you know, it's not fully covered. Like I could still see you. I could see you, you know, you don't wanna totally enclose the steamer basket. So now that we have the sides open, my leaves are there. I'm just gonna lay these gently on these leaves. So this is set. We just need to get our wok ready. Crank up the heat, go to power boil. If you have power boil, power boil. Make sure there is water in there because once that burns, if you forget about this, your steam baskets, your bamboo baskets will burn as well. Let's go with our first layer of dumplings. That's layer number one, or tray number one, or basket number one. Here's basket number two. And to make the steam actually cook our dumplings, we're gonna cover that. We have our sauce ready. This is a little black vinegar and finely julienne ginger. When you're working with steam, steam is extremely hot. When you open this, you kinda wanna step back and open the lid towards you so the steam kinda goes that way. And here we go. They look good to me, so we're gonna pick up two baskets that we cooked on and we're gonna go right there on our plate, all right? I'll wait a couple of minutes. I'm gonna put a little bit of this on my spoon, my sauce and a little piece of ginger. I take one of the dumplings, been sitting there for a minute, shouldn't be as hot. It's still hot, I mean it's smokin', but just to be safe, I'll cut a little hole in there. So the soup is on the spoon, it's with my sauce now. Delicious, the soup is in there. The filling tastes juicy. I wish you guys could try this. Today we made three dumplings. Our number one, the jiaozi. Pork filling, nice and juicy, very classic dumpling. Then we went on to number two, pancit molo. One of my favorites, really close to my heart. Reminds me of being a kid. Number three, now we have soup inside the dumpling, the jalombao, the XLB, the soupy dumpling. You can make this at home and you can do whatever you want. Change the fillings, you don't like pork. Go with vegetables, you wanna buy wrappers, buy wrappers, it's all up to you. Please let us know how your dumplings turn out and make sure to subscribe to The Spruce Eats.