Happy New Year everyone! With New Year comes resolutions and one of mine is to start cooking again and writing about it.
I spoke to my Dad this morning and he was telling me about a rendang curry recipe he has been working on. I told him he ought to write it up for my blog,
“It’s been ages since you wrote me a post, Dad”
“It’s been ages since you wrote a recipe; when are you going to finish with South America? I’m bored.”
So am I.
“I’ve been busy, Dad. You know, finding a job, moving house and with Mum and Cha here. Plus I still had stuff I wanted to write about... I am going to start writing recipes again soon though.”
“When?”
“Today!”
So here I am.
To see in 2012 we had an impromptu New Years Eve party with canapés and cocktails. Usually there are so many house parties going on in London that my friends and I are spoilt for choice and spend the whole night hopping between them. This year there was nothing. Everyone seemed to be away, doing family things or having “a quiet one”. So 3 days before New Year, my flatmates and I decided to coerce all the "quiet ones" into a civilised dinner party. Well that is how it began anyway.
I did some Asian canapés, the best of which were these pork and prawn wantons. The few times I have made wantons in the past I have found a Chinese recipe and followed it exactly hoping to get a dim sum straight out of a yum cha restaurant. I, stupidly, never actually tested the mix before stuffing the wantons and was disappointed when the results tended toward bland and uninteresting. This can, of course, be masked with a dipping sauce, but I wanted the wanton itself to be good enough to standalone. So this time I choose my favourite wanton ingredients and made it up as I went along, frying small bits of the mix and adjusting the flavours accordingly. The result was so much better. Of course, I still provided dipping sauces but the wantons were the main event.
I wrote everything I added down as I went, eventually starting a tally for most items since I needed to add a lot more of the seasonings (soy, ginger, garlic, coriander) than I'd anticipated. Of course, your tastes may be different to mine and for this reason, if you feel confident with the flavours involved, I recommend taking my recipe more as a guide than a given. If you add the essentials and then fry off a little bit of the mix in a pan, as suggested, you can add more of whatever you think might be missing as you go along.
You should also decide how you like your water chestnuts and your prawns. I like my water chestnuts diced quite chunky so you get a nice crisp textural contrast with the meat. For the same reason, instead of blending the prawns like in some other recipes, I cut them into three and put one or two pieces in each.
I served my wantons with a soy and ginger dressing similar to the one I did with my Chinese crisp-roast pork belly except that I had no Mirin so I just put in more rice wine vinegar. I also provided a bowl of Pun Chun Singapore Chilli Sauce for dipping, which is the sauce they use in all the yum cha restaurants in Sydney. You can’t get it in London so, much to my mother’s annoyance, I make her cart over a litre of it over every year when she visits. It is similar to Sriracha sauce which is more widely available.
This mix makes a lot of wantons – I had 50 wanton skins and I still had leftover mix, but you can always freeze it and make more another time or you could halve it. Personally, I’d rather have leftovers.
Ingredients
500g pork mince (full fat – it tastes better!)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Thumb of ginger (approx 4cm x 2cm), finely chopped
1 spring onion, finely sliced
10 water chestnuts, diced
5 tbsp light soy sauce
1 large handful coriander, finely chopped
225g raw prawns, de-shelled and cut into halves or thirds
Wanton skins
Oil for frying, e.g. canola, rapeseed, peanut or sunflower oil
Method
Put the pork mince in a big mixing bowl with the garlic, ginger, spring onion, water chestnuts, soy sauce and coriander and use your hands to mix well and combine.
Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry a small amount of the mixture to test it. Add more seasonings as required.
Put a small amount of the mixture (approx 2 tsp) in the centre of the wanton skin with 1 or 2 pieces of prawn. If you are using square wanton skins, simply pull the corners of the wanton skin up and twist. If you are using circular wonton skins, e.g. gyoza skins, put a bit of water or egg wash around the inside edge of skin, fold it in half and crimp the edges. You do this by picking it up, and starting at one end, pinching the opposing edges together with you thumbs and forefinger and folding skin over on itself. See this helpful video demonstration.
You can either shallow fry or deep fry the wantons. To shallow fry, you just need to heat 2cm oil in a wok or fry pan then fry wantons for 2 or 3 minutes on each side and until golden.
To deep fry the oil temperature should be about 170-180C. If you don’t have a thermometer you can test the oil by ripping off a small amount of wanton skin and seeing how quickly it browns; you want the oil to bubble rapidly when you throw it in but not so that the wanton skin browns too quickly. The wontons should take about 2 minutes to cook and should be golden. If you are cooking a big batch to serve to guests you can cook them for less time (approx 1 minute) until they are just starting to colour and then finish them off in the oven (200C) which will take approx 2 minutes. See this helpful article on deep frying at home.