Dimsum: A touch of heart

Passport & Plate - Pumpkin mochi with red bean filling

Canada | Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 4 photos

Filling Ingredients:
1 cup red beans (azuki beans)
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon lard or butter

Ingredients for Pumpkin Mochi (makes about 15 dumplings):
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1 cup glutinous rice flour
3 tablespoons of condensed milk
2 tablespoons of coconut milk
2 pinches of green tea powder
red bean paste (recipe above)

How to prepare this recipe

Directions for filling:
Soak the beans overnight.
Drain and put into a pot.
Add water until there is at least one inch of water above the beans.
Cook on low heat until tender. This step will take around one and a half hours.
Drain.
Mash beans in a colander so that the pulp comes out from the bottom leaving the skin behind.
Heat a pan on medium-low heat and melt lard.
Add bean pulp to pan.
Add sugar in three additions.
Once sugar has dissolved, turn off heat.
Let sweetened bean paste cool before using.

Directions for dumplings:
Mix the pumpkin puree and glutinous rice flour until it resembles crumble.
Add the condensed milk and coconut milk and mix well.
The mixture should form a dough ball that can easily be manipulated (think play dough). If it is too wet, add more glutinous rice flour. The dough should be tacky, but not come off on your fingers.
Pinch off a small ball of dough and mix it with the green tea powder. This will be used for making your stems.
Pinch off a ball, that should be slightly smaller than a ping pong ball, of the orange dough. Flatten it by turning it in your fingers.
Add about a teaspoon of red bean filling in the center.
Close off the dough by pinching all the edges together.
Roll the ball of dough lightly in your hands to make it rounder and smooth out the edges.
Using a butter knife, apply pressure to make a crease from one side of the bottom of the dough ball to the other. Do this again to make an "X" at the top. Add two more creases that also meet at the intersection of the "X" (see picture). This should now look like the orange part of a pumpkin.
Pinch off a very small piece of green dough and make a nub that has a flat bottom.
Attach the bottom of the nub to the center of the "X" of the orange dough.
You now have a mini pumpkin dumpling. Continue doing the same with the rest of the dough.
Place the dumplings in a steamer basket.
Steam for ten minutes.

The story behind this recipe:

I love the art of dimsum making because dimsum literally means a touch of heart in Chinese. As such, in order to be dimsum, detail and intricacies are required. That's where all the heart is.

I've been slowly teaching myself old dimsum techniques for the past five years. I started with learning how to make basic dough and fillings and perfecting those skills. During a trip to Hong Kong in 2013, I discovered Michelin starred dimsum was way fancier looking than the dimsum I grew up with. I became obsessed with figuring out how it was done.

Dimsum was a puzzle to me and I was determined to figure it out. Everything from how dough was tinted (without affecting texture and flavor) to the actual maneuvers required to turn a dumpling into something beautiful. I was very lucky I spent most of my childhood dedicated to origami folding. As such, having trained in making paper look like things, it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to make food look like things.

;At some point in my dimsum-making journey, I started to get inspired by other things. I saw a piece of jade that looked like bok choi and decided to make a vegetarian dumpling that looked the same. Similarly, I thought it would be fun to have Chinese New Year pudding that was shaped like ancient Chinese currency. So I made that as well.

During Halloween, I saw all the pumpkins be transformed into other things. That inspired me to do the inverse: make something that looked like a pumpkin. As luck would have it, I was volunteering at a charity food event around that time and I met a Chinese dimsum chef manning one of the booths. He knew a method of preparing mochi (Japanese rice dough) that would make it easy to mold and shape. Having impressed him throughout the evening with my dedication to old techniques, he agreed to give me his recipe.

I believe recipes are meant to be shared in order to prevent "lost recipes". I'm also very proud of the taste and aesthetics of this recipe. As such, I decided to share it.