Dumpling Update: Manti
May. 4th, 2012 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
multipurposegoddessSo, I planned on making pork buns next because they are old favorites of mine and they're a May recipe. But when I went to buy the ground pork, I also found ground lamb, and since last time I went looking for ground lamb I couldn't find it anywhere (this was a couple of years ago, but it made an impression!) I picked up a pound. And browsing through the cookbook brought me a recipe for lamb dumplings that I hadn't made yet that was filed under April and, perhaps most importantly, that I had all the ingredients for: Oven-simmered Lamb-filled Dumplings with Minted Yogurt, a Turkish recipe.
It took me a week to actually make it, but I finally got to it today. The filling is pretty simple: lamb, onion, mint and oregano. The dough id also pretty simple, but needs to be rolled out thin, which is a big part of why I kept putting it off. As it turned out, getting it rolled out what wasn't too hard, but cutting and shaping 64 dumplings was pretty tiring, so I took a break halfway through. And while I was on that break my dad called and we ended up having a big emotional talk about fixing my car, which was good in that we got some stuff resolved but made the dough sit longer than I had intended. That doesn't seem to have hurt it any.
I'm not great at the "bottleneck fold" that is used on these - you are supposed to end up with a little cup of dough surrounding the filling with an open neck at the top. Which I guess I got, but mine do not look elegant. A teaspoon of filling in a two-inch square of dough seems like too much to me, although some of that may be measuring error on my part (some of my squares? Not so square). But the batch I cooked up tasted great! They are baked for, like, 15 minutes and then chicken broth is added to the pan to simmer in the oven until it is absorbed by the dough or evaporates, which is one of my favorite ways to make rice (uh, without the initial baking, but the principle is the same). I should probably have used a smaller pan - I cooked up a quarter of the recipe and put the rest in the freezer and it was unclear from the recipe if the size pan they recommended was for a full recipe or any portion thereof. They were extremely tasty, but much more baked than simmered, like tiny little lamb pies covered in garlicky minty yogurt. The sauce, btw, super simple and delicious. All in all, yum.
I have quite a bit of filling left over, maybe it should go into a pie...
It took me a week to actually make it, but I finally got to it today. The filling is pretty simple: lamb, onion, mint and oregano. The dough id also pretty simple, but needs to be rolled out thin, which is a big part of why I kept putting it off. As it turned out, getting it rolled out what wasn't too hard, but cutting and shaping 64 dumplings was pretty tiring, so I took a break halfway through. And while I was on that break my dad called and we ended up having a big emotional talk about fixing my car, which was good in that we got some stuff resolved but made the dough sit longer than I had intended. That doesn't seem to have hurt it any.
I'm not great at the "bottleneck fold" that is used on these - you are supposed to end up with a little cup of dough surrounding the filling with an open neck at the top. Which I guess I got, but mine do not look elegant. A teaspoon of filling in a two-inch square of dough seems like too much to me, although some of that may be measuring error on my part (some of my squares? Not so square). But the batch I cooked up tasted great! They are baked for, like, 15 minutes and then chicken broth is added to the pan to simmer in the oven until it is absorbed by the dough or evaporates, which is one of my favorite ways to make rice (uh, without the initial baking, but the principle is the same). I should probably have used a smaller pan - I cooked up a quarter of the recipe and put the rest in the freezer and it was unclear from the recipe if the size pan they recommended was for a full recipe or any portion thereof. They were extremely tasty, but much more baked than simmered, like tiny little lamb pies covered in garlicky minty yogurt. The sauce, btw, super simple and delicious. All in all, yum.
I have quite a bit of filling left over, maybe it should go into a pie...