Be warned. Once you have mastered making your own shui jiao skins or dumpling wrappers, you’ll never be able to go back to store-bought, packaged wrappers any more.
This means you’ll have to knead and roll and roll and roll and corral your family to come and help you wrap the dumplings. Making this a family affair is much easier on your nerves than making 100 or 200 dumplings on your own. Unless you are one of those who find rolling dough therapeutic.
To make the wrappers we first have to make the dough. If you have made bread, this would be a piece of cake for you.
This recipe is very forgiving. I’ve been lazy and didn’t want to dirty my hands and have used a pair of chopsticks to mix the dough with water and it works. Maybe not the perfect, smooth skin, but good enough.
The thing is to let the dough rest for at least 15 minutes, even up to an hour. My friend Tailing Krawitz who taught me how to do this years ago said the dough is ready for rolling into dumpling wrappers when it feels soft, like pressing down on the soft flesh or your thigh. This dough can also be used for making noodles. With noodles the dough should feel like pressing down on your knee. Meaning it’s not as soft.
Here are the instructions for how to make the dough, roll it out, cut it into pieces to form each wrapper. This recipe makes 50 wrappers. I usually double the recipe when making dumplings for my family of four.
Shui Jiao Wrappers
Makes about 50 wrappers
Preparation time: About 15 minutes to mix dough, 20-30 minutes for dough to rest, and another 15-20 minutes to roll our wrappers
3 cups all-purpose, unbleached flour
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water
Making the dough
Put the flour in a large bowl. Drizzle 3-4 tablespoons water over the flour. To start, swirl the flour around with the fingertips.
Keep adding water gradually, a little at a time, with your other hand. Mix the flour and water by rubbing the damp flour between your thumb and fingers, moving around the bowl as you incorporate more flour with more water.
Rubbing the flour this way blends it well with the water. It will start binding together. The more you add water and rub it between the fingers, the less lumpy and smoother the dough will get. As the dough starts to bind together, gather the bits at the bottom and sides of bowl to form a ball.
Start kneading the ball with the palm of your hand. Continue to knead the dough in the bowl for a few minutes. Cover the ball in bowl with a clean towel and set aside at room temperature for at least 15 minutes, or up to 1 hour.
Rolling out dough
Prepare your work area. You should have a large area to roll out dough. You may use a large chopping board. And you will need a knife, a French-style or tapered rolling pin and 2-3 cups of flour for dusting.
Test dough after it’s rested for 15 minutes. If it feels springy to the touch, cover and leave it to sit for another 15 minutes. Dough is ready when it feels soft. Cut the ball of dough in half. Return half to bowl and set aside covered. Work with one half of the dough at a time.
Form a ring
Cup the dough into a ball with both hands. Form a ring with the dough by poking a hole through the middle of the ball with your thumb. Squeeze around the hole with both hands to make the circle larger and larger. Don’t pull.
Just squeeze around the ring forming an even thickness of about 1 inch in diameter. Cut one part of the ring so it becomes a long rope of dough.
Cutting dough in pieces
Lay rope on the lightly-floured board. Cut the rope into 1-inch pieces, making a half turn on the rope before cutting the next.
Cut out 1 inch off the rope into 25 pieces. Sprinkle the pieces with a little flour and gently toss them to dust completely. Set the pieces off to the top side of the board. Press down on the flat part of each individual piece to form a perfect circle. Set aside, dusting with flour if necessary to prevent them from sticking.
Rolling out the skins
Take one circular piece with the left hand and with a rolling pin in your right, start rolling from the edge and to the center (not all the way to the opposite edge) and keep rolling back and forth. With the left hand, keep turning the circular piece anti-clockwise so the wrapper gets bigger, rounder and thinner.
The perfect skin is slightly thicker in the middle than at the edge of the circle. It should be about 2½-3 inches in diameter. Put the finished wrapper to one side. Repeat with rest of the pieces. Set the pieces aside, one slightly over the other. Dust lightly so they don’t stick to each other. Now you are ready to wrap the dumpling.
NOTES
My preference is to use King Arthur unbleached, all-purpose flour. You may also use bread flour. Also, in Chinese supermarkets, they have flour that is specifically for making dumplings. Basically the flour used for shui jiao should have a high gluten content (11 percent gluten).
