What does "handmade" look like for us?

The word handmade often invokes a soft feeling of homeliness - that the product was crafted very intentionally and with a lot of care. There's an image in our minds of the product sitting in someone's hands and it's carefully shaped and prepared into something that's ready to be used. But this word is often overused and can be misused. It's not always clear to the consumer where the line is drawn for something that is handmade. Does one consider flicking a switch to be done by hand? We wouldn't, but others might just to be able to run with this idea that their products are also handmade.

Regardless of what others consider to be handmade or handcrafted, we wanted to be open and transparent about our process so you know our definition and what we mean when we say that our dumplings are handmade.

Preparing the dumpling filling

There are two main parts to a dumpling filling - the meat and the vegetables. All of these ingredients are delivered to our store in its rawest form and it requires a lot of work before the ingredients are small enough to mix together to fold into a dumpling. For the meat, we get an entire slab of meat which we then wash, slice into strips and feed through the meat grinder to get it into a form that's ready to be mixed in with vegetables.

The vegetables take a lot of preparation as well. As you're well aware, raw vegetables often come with a lot of dirt. We take the time to hand wash every single vegetable down to the stalk. For vegetables that require peeling like carrots and ginger, we pare down each one until the dirt of the skin has been stripped off. The vegetables are then chopped and diced again into smaller chunks and then mixed in with seasoning and the ground meat. Are we crying because it's such a beautiful process? No. That's the just crazy amount of onions we needed to cut up.

Preparing the wrapper

The wrapper requires some machinery, but it is still a very manual process. We combine all the necessary ingredients like flour, water and salt into the machine and we create the dough out of it. The machine helps us toss everything together to create dough. When that's done, we need to flatten the dough by feeding it through another machine until it's thin enough for our needs. Think of it like a larger scale pasta maker, where we run the dough through multiple times until we get the desired thickness.

These sheets of dough are then laid out on a table on top of each other to create a stack. At this stage, we're finally ready to cut the dough into the shape of the dumpling wrapper that we need. Dumpling wrappers come in multiple shapes and thicknesses, so the type of dumpling we're wrapping determines whether we're cutting the dough with a knife or using a cutter to create circular wrappers. The end product is a stack of wrappers that's ready to be used.

Wrapping it up

The last step is that the wrapper and the filling need to come together to create a dumpling. For this, we have dedicated people wrapping each one of these dumplings individually. With a stick, they place the filling in the middle of the wrapper and wrap it according to its style. Now keeping in mind that the average bag of dumplings includes 50 pieces, that's 50 times that someone did this process to create one bag. After that, the dumplings are frozen, bagged and then ready to make it to your home.

So that's our process from ingredients that arrive to our store as raw materials to getting it down into each individual dumpling. Our days are filled with this type of work - washing, cutting, wrapping, mixing, etc. - all of which requires us to use our hands to create dumplings ready for you. This is the process that we've known and over 30 years of our business, we never strayed away from it because the end product of all this manual labour is a high quality dumpling that people have come to associate with Typical Noodles.

Stop by our store in Richmond today and check out all products that we have made for you, each one by hand.