Homemade Shrimp Shitake Siu Mai
Posted on Jun 15 in cooking, Food Porn, In the Kitchen, recipeby NikaPrint
I love dim-sum.
I know thats not a terribly original thing to say because its likely that 2/3s of the world’s population loves dim sum. While the lion’s share of that 2/3 live where dim sum started, I am stuck in a dim sum wasteland. In fact, I think that dim sum is more available in Omaha, Nebraska than my little piece of podunk.
When I was doing a postdoc at Tufts Medical School, I could get any Chinese food I wanted, we were in Boston’s Chinatown after all. To matters worse, I lived a mile from there in the South End. This spoiled me terribly with respect to dim sum. Now, this doesn’t mean that I have been aggressive about getting dim sum all these 11 years since we moved from there into the hinterlands of Massachusetts. It just means that I occasionally sigh wistfully and mysteriously.
When asked by my husband, all I need to say is “dim sum” and he knows.
The closest “Chinese” restaurant here is miles a way and the food is reminiscent of what one might find at a Chinese restaurant in Amana, Iowa, so much more of the same. The only good thing about eating at that Amana, Iowa Chinese restaurant is that you can leave and go get some Amish food instead. Around here, Amish food is even more rare but I do not really crave Amish food, so thats OK.
Recently, when I was in Boston for the food styling and photography conference, I stopped by the Super 88 market to get some dried shitake mushrooms, genmaicha tea, load up on pocky, and anything else that struck my fancy. While I was there, I also bought a metal stacked steamer. I am very excited about using it to steam homegrown veggies when the season ends.
On my way out, I noticed a Dim Sum-to-go restaurant. I thought, excellent, I can kill two birds with one stone, get my Asian pantry goods fix AND get some dim sum. I ordered shrimp siu mai (as well as the fried taro thing I adore). For those of you who do not know what siu mai is, its like the iconic dim sum treat (and one that any place selling dim sum SHOULD be able to make correctly), right beside those decadent egg tarts you get off the dim sum cart.
Oh, I have to tell you, I about died when I got that siu mai to my car. The smell would have struck down a grizzly at 100 feet. And, oh, lord, I am such a fool, I went ahead and took a bite and the flavor was worse that the smell.
By the time I took that bite, I was already traveling at about 60 miles an hour with no pullover lane so I had to keep driving until I hit the first rest stop on the Mass Pike. I jumped out in the miserable pouring rain and pitched the nasty stuff in a garbage can, lamenting the vileness of it and the lingering taste in my mouth. All of this made me angry and sad, what a waste of time.
When I got home and unpacked my new steamer, I decided that I had to correct the psychological damage that siu mai did to my eternal dharma by making my own at home. I hope you make these very simple treats. Don’t be shy, experiment with the stuffing too. Pork and shrimp is traditional and quite delicious.
Homemade Shrimp Shitake Sui Mai
Ingredients:
- 20 medium shrimp, raw
- 10 medium shitake mushrooms, dried
- 1 teaspoon minced ginger
- 1/8 teaspoon minced garlic
- 1 teaspoon roasted sesame seed oil
- 1 shallot, minced
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- about 20 wonton or gyoza skins.
Directions:
Put your stacked steamer on the stove with a lot.
Rehydrate the shitake mushrooms (pour hot water over dried mushrooms, sit for about 20-30 mins) and mince.
Peel and mince raw shrimp (if you need to). Mince shallot.
Mix all ingredients except for the wonton skins in a medium bowl.
Lay wontons out about 5 at a time. Keep remainder under a moist paper towel. Pick up a skin, spoon about 2 teaspoons of mix into the middle of it (your skin size will dictate how much mix you use) and then tuck the edges of the skin up and around the mix. Allow a bit of mix to peek out the top. Press around the top edge of the purse you have made to firm it into place.
Now tamp it down on the counter top just a slight bit to shape the bottom so that the purse sits upright. Do the same over and over until your mix is gone.
Put some parchment paper in the bottom of your steamer levels and then put the siu mai on the paper so that they are not touching each other.
Steam some 15-20 minutes, until the dough looks cooked, no longer.
Serve with ginger garlic onion soy sauce!
How it tastes:
Wow! SO delicious, fresh out of the steamer, hot and delightfully shrimpy. I didn’t have to flag down a grumpy dim sum cart lady and flap embarrassingly to try to communicate my desire for siu mai. I got to cook the shrimp as long as I like (barely cooked in my case). I got to eat these siu mai in my skivvies and I got to eat as many as I wanted! (ok, as many as I could, considering that the other family members were wolfing these down as soon as they came out of the steamer).
Popularity: 3% [?]
7 Comments
Trackbacks / Pingbacks
Leave a Reply
absolutely stunning!
sooishi: Thanks – your photos are breathtaking for sure! What a lovely place to be.
where ever did you get those plates?? I do beieve I NEED them…..
great photos too.
al: I got them at this chinese restaurant supply store in Boston chinatown
Can you adopt me? Your children are super lucky!! This looks amazing! I love dim sum too!
Lily: goodness! Sure, but you gotta do some chores like helping in the garden and.. hey, can you do carpentry? We are getting ready to build a chicken house, you could barter that for some siu mai!
i have dim sum + dim sum cute plate envy
jaden