A first recipe (part 3) - Steamed fish dumplings

"Morsels that will vanish in a single mouthful are still presented with incredibly detailed decoration."

Charmaine Solomon

I confess that this kind of dumpling - the kind of thing you get at yum chas - are not my thing. So probably not a perfect recipe to suck me into a book. But really it was the curry pastes I think that sucked me in - and they could also be described as first recipes. That and the fact that I really wanted to try making Thai food - it was a big thing at the time, and I had probably just come back from one of those brief stop-offs in Thailand. The book emphasised the easy, and flicking through it I could see that there were lots of potential dishes to try. But it was really the curry pastes.

However, in the interests of tackling the first recipe thing here are steamed dumplings. And interestingly on the next page are curry puffs - sort of the same thing but fried - and so much more tempting looking to me. Which shows that I am a sucker for unhealthy things.

Steaming is a favourite cooking method for the health gurus. And it's not that I don't have the equipment. I have an actual steam oven which I confess I have never used as a full steam oven - well once - for cooking rice and I have to say the rice was perfect. I also have one of those bamboo steamers - well the basket part - I don't have the lid, but then I can balance it on a rack in my wok and put a lid on, so I can steam that way too. My rice cooker has a steaming basket too. So plenty of options for steaming.

The appearance of steamed things is one thing that puts me off. They tend to look somewhat anaemic. The dumplings in the picture above don't even really look cooked, but also, particularly with the yum cha things the texture is not attractive to me - they always seem a bit chewy, rubbery and even slimy.

I looked briefly at a few online recipes for the pastry and they all included non normal kinds of flour - Charmaine Solomon's are made with gluten-free flour (wheat starch) and maize cornflour. I wonder if you could short cut and use those wonton wrappers? I have never used these, so I don't know, but I have seen lots of recipes for yum cha kind of things that do use wonton wrappers. Not that it seemed all that difficult to make the pastry. The pastry for the curry puffs by the way is different and more 'normal'.

But then comes the truly fiddly part. (The filling is easy - you basically just put all the ingredients in a food processor). The fiddly bit is rolling out the pastry and filling each dumpling. For they are small.

"Encased in semi-transparent dough and steamed, the fish filling in these small dumplings is tasty but not hot. One of the intriguing characteristics of Thai food is that so many things seem to be in in miniature." Charmaine Solomon

and in her introduction to the curry puffs she tells of how the Bangkok street stalls sell:

"curry puffs so tiny that I wondered at the fact that each still had a perfect rope edge decoration. One small mouthful, nothing more. We tried making them this size. It is possible, but there's no denying that it's easier when they are just a little larger, like those pictured."

But she still sticks to that rope edge, which is complicated and time-consuming, even though the pictures she provides make it look simple.

I tried this with much larger Cornish pasties once and completely failed to get that neat look, so I can't imagine how difficult it is to do small scale. It looks quite easy in the pictures but I bet it isn't. And so time-consuming, unless you've been doing it all your life. Then there's all those carved vegetables as well. The ones shown in her two photos are relatively simple. I've seen much more complicated ones in Thailand and Thai restaurants. When I looked for other examples of this dish I found that most of them did not, in fact, have the crescent shape, most of them were more like this: