He loves to teach. Go ahead. Ask him a question. He’ll show you how. A hand drawn illustration almost always is included.

Trust me. I know.

Over dinner at Mizu, I asked about potstickers… “how they’re made”, “what’s his technique”, yada yada…

The following night he had me elbow deep in potsticker dough. The time: midnight.

Like I said he never just tells. He loves to teach. Luckily I love to learn.

So about those potstickers…

1. They are a bit time-consuming to prep but super freaking easy to make. You could use pre-made potsticker wrappers but we made a simple dough from scratch using the ratio below.

• 4 cups of all-purpose flour
• 2 cups of boiling water

hand stir until the mixture forms into a round ball that will be smooth

creates roughly 30 potsticker rounds

2. When rolling out your dough, be sure to make your dumpling rounds large enough to fill and properly close without tearing. It might be worth testing out a few sample sizes to see what works best for you. We went with about a 4-inch diameter.

3. The filling options are endless. We’re trying to back off of meat a bit (after our holiday meatapolloza here and here) so we went veggie. We had cabbage and carrots in our fridge so we used that as our base and lightly braised with ginger, shitakes, spinach, onions and some of Nathan”s ‘light you up’ dried peppers from Shore Farms.

3. Did you know that the name potsticker stems from their cooking technique? They literally stick to the pot. To cook you first fry them lightly in a liberally oiled pan until the bottoms brown. Next water is added to the pan (Be careful! Expect some sizzling commotion!). You’ll need to cover to steam the tops while you also release the sticky bottoms from the pan.

5. Feel free to freeze. You can quick freeze them separately on parchment paper on a sheet pan if you do not need (or immediately devour) the entire batch. Be sure that they do not touch in the freezer, and once frozen solid, place in a freezer bag for safe keeping. They’re perfect for entertaining at the last minute or for sneaking out for a late-night snack… like I do.

Until we stick and steam again,

a+h