The One Shortcut You Should Avoid For Homemade Soup Dumplings

If you've ever wondered how soup actually makes it into soup dumplings, the answer is gelatinization. Restaurants usually create a gelatinous broth from scratch using collagen-rich pig parts. Once the broth solidifies, it's chopped and mixed with ground meat and vegetable filling for a solid stuffing that liquifies as the dumpling steams. A shortcut many recipes recommend for homemade soup dumplings is mixing powdered or artificial gelatin into a doctored broth. While this may save you the time it takes to make broth from scratch, it's a shortcut with a cost on flavor and nutrition.

A packet of gelatin is a highly processed product that is both tasteless and less nutritious than a scratch-made broth. Since most soup dumpling recipes that utilize the gelatin shortcut require you to doctor a store-bought broth before adding it, it's not that much more effort to make your own broth. Also, many store-bought stocks and broths contain all kinds of additives. Plus, you'll be utilizing cheap pork scraps like skin and bones. Making your own broth requires patience, but the upgrade to your soup dumplings is well worth the wait. You can use pork parts or a chicken carcass, neck, and feet for your collagen broth, throwing them into a boiling pot of water with aromatics to simmer for a few hours.

After straining the liquid into a fridge-safe bowl, place the broth in the fridge overnight to set. Then you can break up the solidified broth that's rich in natural gelatin and collagen and mix it with your filling ingredients.

Vegetarian or plant-based soup dumplings aren't traditional, but you can make them from scratch just as easily as their animal-based bone-broth-filled counterparts. The process to make jelly-like vegan broth swaps pig parts for aromatics and umami-rich ingredients like dried mushrooms. However, as collagen and gelatin are animal products, so the binding and thickening agent you'll need to solidify the veggie broth is agar agar powder, which you can buy online (this Kate Naturals agar agar powder is less than $10). You can stir the agar agar into a boiling pot of broth before straining and transferring the liquid to the fridge to set overnight. Derived from an Asian species of seaweed, this plant-based gelatin substitute is useful in gummy candy and fruit jello recipes, too. You can also use it instead of egg whites to make a vegan mousse.

Whether you're making veggie or bone broth, the protocol for incorporating the jellified product into the dumpling is the same: Chop the solidified broth and stir it into the filling before adding small dollops of the mixture onto the dumpling dough. Try to roll the dumpling dough as thin as possible for the best consistency, and enjoy them fresh out of the steamer. A homemade chile oil is a classic choice to drizzle over your dumplings, as the umami-rich filling and broth will balance the heat and complement the spice.