How to pick a bag of dumplings
You’re at the grocery store thinking about what to have for dinner and you suddenly get the craving for dumplings. Depending on where you are, you might find that your local grocery store stocks a number of brands or types of dumplings. With so many choices, you’re looking at each bag trying to figure out which one to buy and when you look at the actual dumpling pieces in the pack, you find that because they’re wrapped, they all look the same! So how are you supposed to pick which one to buy?
This is truly the hardest part of knowing the quality dumpling since the filling, which is where most of the taste comes from, is usually wrapped inside a layer of dough. It’s like receiving a present and we can examine it around all we want, but it’s wrapped so we don’t know what’s in the inside. The ultimate test for determining a quality dumpling, as it is with gifts, is by getting to the inside. In this case, it is the cooking and taste testing, but we’ll get into that next time.
But just like receiving a wrapped gift, there are many clues that we can spot from the outside that might give us an idea on what’s really on the inside. With that, we’d like to share our tips with you so that you know what to look for the next time you go to the grocery store.
Tip #1: The Wrap to Filling Ratio
The ratio is perhaps the easiest thing to spot on the outside. Since most dumplings are bite-sized, a well-balanced dumpling is one that has a good wrapper to filling ratio. By looking at the dumpling through the window of the bag or the container, if the filling of the dumpling looks small, there’s a good chance that there’s too much wrapper with each bite. Remember that the taste comes from the filling, so if there’s too much wrapper and not enough filling, then the taste becomes very doughy and sometimes bland.
Since the filling is the expensive part of the dumpling, a lot of food manufacturers will try to keep their fillings at the minimum to save on costs. While that helps them a lot, it doesn’t help you fill your stomach!
Tip #2: Check the Ingredients List
You might already do this with your regular purchases, but it’s worth turning the bag around to look at the ingredients list. The things that make up a dumpling are very basic: flour, salt and water make up the wrapper and vegetables and meat (depending on whether it’s a vegetarian dumpling or not) make up the fillings. It’s really that simple.
Anything more, especially with ingredients that sound like they belong in a laboratory should tell you that there are preservatives and perhaps not the quality you’re looking for.
Tip #3: Hand-Made vs. Machine-Made
This last tip might not be a true indicator of quality, but it will inform you on whether the dumplings were hand-made or machine-made. The honest truth here is that wrapping dumplings is tedious work. If you’ve ever made any, you know that it takes time and to do it efficiently is an acquired skill. Imagine having to make hundreds, if not thousands a day.
Since dumpling wrapping is becoming a lost art and food manufacturers don’t have the time or space to train up the people to wrap their dumplings, many have now turned to machines to make their dumplings, which give you the perfect uniform size and shape every time.
The way to tell if a dumpling was hand wrapped or pressed by a machine is based on the consistency of the look. A machine-made dumpling is perfect every time - the size of the filling and the pleats that make up the dumpling are always the same. A handmade-dumpling is less perfect. The pleats will be inconsistent and the sizes can vary as well.
At the end of the day and since everything is wrapped up in a bundle, the true test of quality for a dumpling comes from looking into its insides - through cooking and doing a taste test. That said, we hope this short guide will help you pick a good quality bag of dumplings and we’ll check in next time to uncover how to tell a quality dumpling based on the taste.
At Typical Noodles, we continue the tradition of hand wrapping each dumpling one by one, which allows us to control the ratio of each of our dumplings. Our freezers are regularly replenished with new stock, so we do not use any preservatives in our dumplings!