China's Legendary Dumplings Served in an Auntie's Living Room

[cleaver smacking ginger]

Welcome to Chengdu.

Here we are in the capital of Sichuan.

We're in a little knit district,

a little neighborhood called Niushikou

that is known, oddly,

for its hidden pockets of deliciousness.

One of these places is called Auntie's Private Dumplings.

And we're in the middle of a truly residential district,

but you'll see right there,

that's the clue we're looking for.

It says mysterious unit.

That's the clue.

[speaking Chinese]

Welcome to Auntie's Private Dumpling.

This is Auntie's living room.

If you come to the back,

this is actually the fridge that she works out of

and the kitchen itself.

A home kitchen, two stoves, one wok,

one for boiling noodles and dumplings.

Those little bowls, so iconic.

She has two staff,

but most of the day-to-day is mom and dad

because they actually live here.

That's their bathroom and that's their bedroom.

It almost feels a little bit intrusive

that we're shooting here in somebody's home.

After she left her dumpling job

at a very, very prominent dumpling spot,

she thought to herself,

why not just make dumplings at home

and sell them to people?

The pork here is lean pork

with a little bit of spiced water.

So one of the Sichuan techniques

is to soak things like ginger inside of water,

which helps get rid of a little bit of the gaminess

of the pork itself.

You can see how smooth that final filling is.

You see that little bit of an opening?

You learn how to make dumplings from anywhere else,

and they'll say you must keep all of the sides crimped,

you must keep that whole thing intact.

That's not the case here.

The deliciousness of this dumpling

is the interaction of the dumpling with the sauce,

and you want that sauce to go inside of the dumpling.

You want that sauce to soak inside

of this relatively soft skin.

It's almost less of a crimped dumpling

and more of a cooked sandwich maybe, something like this?

So these two aunties are making a huge amount of dumplings

throughout the day.

Auntie Ye, the owner of this shop,

has been here for 21 years.

Here comes the making of the filling.

First step first, smash ginger with the side of the cleaver

to get that flavor out.

But that's a ginger that's going to get rid of the gaminess

inside of that pork.

She's rubbing salt directly into the ginger

so that the salt draws out that ginger juice,

draws out that moisture.

That's the juice that's going to lend moisture to the pork.

The lean pork goes into the bowl,

the combination of cuts

in between the loin and the shoulder.

A generous amount of table salt into the pork.

The key to the deliciousness of the filling here

is the manipulation of texture.

She's really squeezing that pork.

As she's agitating this pork,

the meat will slowly, slowly get tackier.

It'll get, in some ways, a little bit rubbery,

but it will become the clean, porky glue that is needed

for that filling to keep the wrapper together.

With hand as filter, the ginger water goes in.

That pork, like a sponge,

is going to soak up that ginger water.

As she's moving,

you can see those protein strands extending.

You can see little spiky strands coming apart.

Auntie says the filling must be mixed in one direction,

and this is actually a little bit

of intergenerational knowledge

that is shared in many, many different parts of China.

The idea here, obviously,

is that she wants to extend those protein strands

as long as possible.

If you're mixing in two directions,

you end up risking breaking those strands of protein.

Something that's smooth might not be so appealing

in many other contexts, but in the dumpling context,

where it's sandwiched between dough,

it makes all the sense in the world.

There's no sesame oil,

there's no garlic, there's no cabbage.

It is just an expression of pork

and its flavor and its texture.

Auntie's making me my bowl of dumplings.

10 of them go into the pot.

It's at a rolling boil.

She's agitating it,

constantly keeping it moving for the first couple of seconds

to make sure that it doesn't stick to the bottom.

That's when the starch granules begin to absorb that water.

You have to make sure that it's moving at a rolling boil

so that it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pot.

Because they're cooking in the same pot of water

and the dumpling is not totally filled,

some of that pork liquid that leeches out

is going to flavor the water,

so they're making a very gentle pork broth almost

in which they're going to cook the subsequent dumplings.

I know we're just talking about boiling dumplings here,

but there is a little bit of technique

and there is attention to detail.

What she's doing right now,

to keep the timing of the cooking of the dumplings correct,

she adds a little bit of water at a time.

My grandma taught me how to make dumplings

in the exact same way.

After you add the dumplings, water comes to a boil,

add a little bit of cold water,

and that brings the temperature down again,

and theoretically, you're supposed to do this three times

in order to get the dumplings to fully cook.

Of course, now having been a chef for a little while,

the cooking time of that dumpling is totally dependent

on how much hot water there actually is,

how much cold water there actually is,

but the fact of the matter

is that this is a reliable folk way of keeping time

of cooking dumplings.

She's looking for the skin to be shiny

and she wants the edges of that skin

to be a little bit translucent.

That is the sign of starch fully gelatinizing.

She's getting rid of the water,

draining it really well back and forth,

and here comes the seasoning.

First, the thickened sweetened soy sauce.

Second, the minced garlic.

Third, chili crisp.

Chili oil.

[both speaking Chinese]

Okay, here's the thing with zhong shui jiao.

At the minimum, three layers of flavor

in terms of the sauce.

Number one is the chili oil.

This chili crisp, she says it's cooked at about 300 degrees.

There is, at the minimum, chili flakes, sesame seeds.

Really important to not forget for zhong shui jiao

is actually the garlic and the minced raw garlic.

Some places like to have minced garlic

with a little bit of grape seed oil.

Here, it's water.

On the bottom is a fu zhi jiang you, the modified soy sauce.

Everyone that makes this dumpling

has their own secret recipe,

but usually it's something to the effect of slab sugar,

brown sugar, the soy sauce,

usually some sort of red soy sauce

or slightly sweetened soy sauce darker in color,

and then it's fortified with a huge amount

of warming Sichuan spices,

Sichuan peppercorn, cardamom, long pepper, fennel,

so on and so forth.

It really depends on the store,

but this is one of the things that she really insisted

we don't get the recipe or we don't film.

I am a huge fan of this interactive element

of bringing the flavors all together.

[chuckling]

Stupid delicious.

[slurping]

So good.

The filling is just like a meatball.

It holds the whole thing together.

A little bit of gentle sweetness.

That chili, it's spicy, but it's it's not deadening,

it's not scorching.

It's a small pop of brightness.

Oil on the outside of the skin

makes the whole dumping so slippery.

It goes down so easy.

You see, the skin is still a little bit open after it boils,

and so that sauce goes inside of the dumpling.

It's infectious.

This thing is really just,

[slurping]

just so good.

And again, just like everything else

in Chengdu snack culture,

small bowl, [foreign language].

You can pop these all day long.

She opens in the morning, some people come for breakfast,

but she's open all day, so people come for lunch,

people come for the snack in the afternoon.

The smoothness of the dumpling skin is mimicked

by the smoothness of the meat in the middle itself.

When you pop this in, it's just one slippery bite,

just one cohesive pop of spice, sweet, savory, salty.

This might be one of the first times we've shot

and I've finished the entire portion of something

the first time hits the table.

It also is like eating at your auntie's house,

watching a little bit of television, talk a little smack.

Bueno, that lingering sweetness,

that lingering garlic, lingering spice.

Everything that we ate stays with you till the end.

Good stuff.

That was delicious [foreign language],

also called zhong shui jiao.

This dish was invented maybe 150 years ago

by a guy by the last name of Zhong

and Chef here is the legacy.

She came from that restaurant, that's where she trained,

and now she's really made it her own

by bringing this delicious dish into her own home.

I'm just gonna say bye to Chef real quick.

[both speaking foreign language]

[laughs]

[both speaking foreign language]

Onto the next.

[muffled foreign conversations]