Duck Duck Gyoza

I got an incredible Japanese knife from my brother as an early birthday/Christmas present recently. By his request, I agreed to make some Japanese food (specifically Gyoza) to honor this. Gyoza is a dumpling that's steamed then fried. It can be filled with just about anything, but I decided to splurge and use some delicious duck. They're delicious plain or with an accompanying dipping sauce I also made. The shape of the gyoza I made is a bit irregular from what you may see elsewhere, but I think they look better and I enjoy the resulting texture irregularity. Enough talk, let's get cooking.

Gyoza:
1 cup all purpose flour
About 3/4 to 1 cup of water

1 duck breast (about 3-4 oz.)
1.5 cm. ginger root
1 medium-large clove of garlic
1/2 white onion
2 tbsp. hoisin sauce

Dipping sauce:
4 tbsp. rice wine vinegar
2 tbsp. tsuyu
1 tsp. sesame seed oil
1/4 tsp. fresh ground pepper

About the ingredients:
Hoisin sauce is actually a Chinese sauce traditionally made with toasted soy beans, sweet potato, rice and seasonings.
Tsuyu is a sauce made from soy sauce, fish stock (called dashi) and sake.

I know I said enough talk, but I really want to show off the new knife before getting started. It's a Mac knife, shipped from Japan. My anticipation was so high for the 2-1/2 weeks that it took to go through customs. It's ridiculously sharp and so far (after a week and a half of regular use) has not dulled at all. After a couple more months I'll update the status of its edge. I'm hoping that the edge will last for about 3-4 months before I want to sharpen it again. It's a gorgeous piece of steel, even when I had just cut some vegetables and for some reason decided not to wipe it off for the photo.

First, mix your dough in a medium size bowl. Put the flour in and mix in water gradually with a dowel. Once the dough it cohesive enough to form a loose ball, start to work with it by hand. Gradually add more water until it is just barely leaving dough stuck to your hands. This should be a sticky dough. Cover the bowl and let it rest while you make your filling.

For the filling, finely mince your duck (or whatever other meat you decide to use) with a knife, or if you don't have a very sharp knife, you might be able to get away with using a food processor. If you have frozen duck, let it thaw only mostly so that it is still firm and you can slice it without it mushing around. Even though my duck was not frozen, I had no problem mincing it. If you desire, you can remove the fat from the duck breast, but that's a goldmine of flavor you'd be leaving out. I minced fat and flesh alike.
Grate your onion coarsely, and finely grate the garlic and ginger. The reason you don't want to simply chop the onion, garlic and ginger finely is because you actually want more of a paste so that everything can incorporate very will into the filling mixture of the gyoza. The meat can be chunky for texture and since it is the feature, but the onion, garlic and ginger are seasonings.
Mix everything up in a small bowl and refrigerate for about 10 minutes while you build your dipping sauce and roll your dough.

 To make the dipping sauce, just combine all ingredients in a small sauce pan and simmer to reduce to 3/4 of the original volume, just barely thickened. It will still be a fairly thin and pale sauce. Don't be disillusioned though, it's huge on flavor.

 Take your dough, divide it in half and coat it in flour and place one half on a well-floured work surface. Keep in mind, this is a sticky dough. When you roll it out, you're increasing the surface area. This means you need more flour as you go. So, roll your dough out into a 5-inch circle or so, re-coat in flour and re-flour your board, roll out further, and continue repeating this process until you've rolled the dough out to be only a few millimeters thick. Then cut into about 3 inch... circles... if you have a circle cutter. And also if you feel like rolling the dough out again. I personally didn't, so I just made weird shapes and made it work when I wrapped up the dumplings.

Also, my apologies for going between the imperial and metric measuring systems. I'm working on the switch.

Take your filling mixture out of the fridge and put a small (maybe teaspoonful) amount of filling on each dough shape. Don't overdo it or you won't be able to seal them.

 Wet your hands and trace around the borders of the dough shapes to make them sticky. Then gather all the edges to the top, squeeze gently and twist to seal the dumplings. They're so cute.

Now that you have some dumplings ready, fire up your steamer. I don't actually have a steamer, so I used a lidded pot with a small dish in it and a sieve with an inverted bottom. The small dish in the pot kept the sieve from reverting to its regular form and touching the water in the pot. Luckily for me, the sieve I have fit the pot almost exactly and worked perfectly.

Steam the dumplings for 4 minutes, meanwhile heating a medium sauté pan to medium heat.

Remove the dumplings from the steamer and put them right into the sauté pan. They should sizzle as soon as they hit the pan. Sauté for about 3 minutes, until golden brown on the bottoms. If they are sticking, your heat is too high. Once they're done, they'll look something like this.

They'll be wonderfully crisp on the bottom with mincemeat texture in the middle, with a chewy top where the dough comes together. Three distinct textures blended into one incredibly exciting bite. You'll know the ones you cooked perfectly because they will have a bit of juice from the filling trapped inside. When you bite into them, you'll get a burst of duck and plum sauce flavor, which is just heavenly. Dip them into the sauce you made to add a brilliant hint of acidity to counter the heartiness of the meat and to compliment the ginger. They're truly delicious. I do believe this recipe should be enough for 2-4 servings... but I ate them all.

Major thanks to my brother Alexander for the amazing new knife and for the idea to make these dumplings. Both have been extremely satisfying.

Thanks for reading!