Sui Kow (water dog) dumpling

I love dumplings, period.
I think my husband and I can eat dumplings everyday.

Sui Kow or translated from Cantonese is called 'water dog'. Not sure the history to the name, but it's delicious. It is a type of meat dumpling, and this is my favorite of all dumplings, especially when boiled. I hope by sharing this, you would love it too.


Sui Kow Recipe

Ingredients (makes around 40)

• 150g pork / minced pork
• 200g prawns, shell removed, deveined and rinsed
• 5 pieces of water chestnut 
• 2 pieces of dried fungus
• 1 carrot

Seasoning

• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 teaspoon soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• a dash of pepper

Wrapping Ingredients

• mix 1 teaspoon of cornflour with some water
• flour
• 40 pieces of sui kow skin wrappers

Soup Seasoning

• 6 bowls of water (for making the soup)
• 1 tablespoon of salt to taste
• 1 tablespoon of powdered chicken stock
• 1 tablespoon of soy sauce
• 3 stalks of spring onion (for garnishing)
• A bunch of vegetable
• 8 shitake mushrooms (optional)

Preparation, (prep time : 30 minutes, cooking time : 15 minutes)

1. Cut the pork to cubes and mince them in a food chopper (If u have minced meat, you may skip this step). Set aside.
2. Mince the prawns in a food chopper
3. In a bowl, season and mix the pork from step 1 and prawns from step 2 with the above seasoning ingredients. *Tip, according to my mom n hubby, you need to taste your mixture to know whether it is well marinated, then spit it out of course....I didn't follow this tip.
4. Meanwhile, take 2 dried fungus and soak it in water until soft
5. Chop the water chestnuts in the food chopper, then mix them together with the meat and prawn from Step 3.
6. Chop the carrots and mix them together with the meat, prawns, water chestnuts from Step 5.
7. Once dried fungus are soft, ideally, slice the fungus thinly....but I just chopped it and add it to the meat, prawns, water chestnuts, carrots from Step 6. That's all to the filling

Now, for the fun part, let's wrap!

1. Prepare the wrapping ingredients as it's gonna get a little messy; cornflour mixed with water, fillings, sui kow skin and some flour.
2. Take a sui kow skin and place on a non dominant hand
3. Place a teaspoon of filling in the middle of the sui kow skin
4. It's hard to see the next step, but what I did was moisten the edges of sui kow skin with my finger dipped with cornstarch mixed with water
5. Next I tucked in my filling and did a simple fold of the wrapper into a half circle. Then press to seal. If you like prettier dumpling, you can do pleats around the edges of the wrapper.
6. Tada! I made 40 sui kows! and I dust some flour to the dumplings to prevent them from sticking.

That's a wrap! Now for the fast and easy part, cooking the dumplings and making the soup.

1. Boil some water and cook the dumpling by gently dropping them into the pot. Cooked dumplings will float to the top and skin color change to translucent after 3 minutes.
2. In a separate pot, boil the 6 bowls of water, then prepare the soup by adding the soup seasoning, followed by the mushroom, vegetable and spring onion. Ideally, we should use a green vegetable to our dish, but we ran out and therefore ended up using iceberg lettuce!
3. My husband and I ate 32 dumplings for dinner!

So out of the 40 dumpling I made, I was hoping to keep at least half for out other days.
I ended up only having 8 dumplings remaining....It was too good...
Anyway, we froze it and cooked it with Miso soup base on another day =) nice and easy!