Dumpling Sauces

During busy periods, I often turn to frozen dumplings for a quick meal or snack. My freezer stocks a mix of Chinese dumplings I pick up at Marketplace on Oakton or from Trader Joe's (I like their Shao Mai).

What I don't like are the little sauce packages that come with them. They go straight to the trash. I usually give myself two sauce options:

1) A healthy dollop of "Red Rooster" Chili sauce.

2) A mixture of 1 part dark sesame oil, 2 parts Chinese black vinegar, 3 parts tamari. (Occasionally I will substitute chili sesame oil for the dark sesame oil).

Does anyone else have any tips or ideas for throwing together a quick dumpling sauce out of on-hand ingredients? (I have tried the bottled "Dumpling Sauces" and they just don't do it for me).

I agre with you that the packaged dumpling sauces are pretty terrible-my own dumpling sauce is similar to your second. I don't care for tamari, I use instead Pearl River bridge light soy, and I add a good dose of fresh shreds of young ginger, and a few drops of chili oil

I do something like your #2, but prefer Chinese red rice vinegar. I also like to shred some ginger and or scallion into it.

Sometimes I like a Thai-style dipping sauce, Nam Pla Prig, with the frozen potstickers from Costco:

1/4 cup fish sauce
5T lemon or lime juice
2 cloves garlic, minced
5 fresh chiles, chopped (jalapenos or seranos or whatever gives you the heat you like)

Hoisin sauce mixed with sesame oil. Sometimes with scallions mixed in.

My typical mix is:

2 parts good soy/tamari
1 part rice vinegar
1 part dark sesame oil
scallions or chives
grated ginger (critical!)
1/2 part sugar
sometimes a little crushed garlic, or sambal oelek, or hot chili oil to taste

Mhy older son is the gyoza king: I've seen him down 20 easily in a sitting.

my typical mix, all approximate, adjust to taste:

3 parts good quality soy
2 parts chinese black vinegar
1 part sesame oil
1 part lan chi chili paste with garlic or your favorite chinese chili oil

add in scallions if you want, slices of ginger if you want. goes great with potstickers.

I like very hot stuff, so I use one part garlic chile paste to two parts sweet hot chile sauce, with a dash of light soy sauce for balance. Mighty good on the pork and leek or veg, pork, and black mushroom dumplings from Marketplace.

Seems to be a lot of similar ingredients in use! I usually mix up:

- hot sesame oil
- cooking sake
- balsamic vinegar
- a little garlic
- soy sauce

I then simmer/steam the dumplings with the lid on in this mix, so it's no so much a dipping sauce, but a sauce nonetheless.

Thanks for all the great ideas. I'm definitely going to try the Thai idea, and I always have a hunk of ginger on hand and I never think to use it.

I use

1 part soy sauce
2 part balsamic vinegar
2 clove garlic crushed
1 Tablespoon of frozen ginger root shaved with chef knife
2 chopped green onion
1 teaspoon seseme seed oil
optional diced hot pepper

let stand for 1 hour min best at 24 hour in fridge then can be strained and served if wished or used unstrained

We had good luck with a sweet and sour-like sauce based on a recipe from Moosewood:

Chopped fruit - apple, pear, plum, appricot, orange, lemon
5-8 cloves of garlic (or more)
Healthy portion of red peppers

Simmer with a little water for most of an afternoon. Strain or puree. I suppose you could add a little pectin if the citrus peel doesn't do it. Can be frozen or possibly canned.

Alriemer

i wish this post had appeared earlier in the week. my wife ususally buys frozen dumplings from argyle, but a few days back, i decided to make potstickers for the first time as the frozen dumplings never thrill me. the potstickers turned out really well. but after making them, i wondered what i'd use for a dipping sauce (hadn't thought about that in advance). i ended up mixing soy sauce, dark sweet soy sauce, fish sauce, sugar, and sesame oil. turned out not so good -- intense but salty. probably could have used rice wine i'm thinking.

btw, i used a modified version of alton brown's potsticker recipe (since he gave me the inspiration to make them, i figured the least i could do was to try his recipe), which calls for mustard and worcestershire sauce. don't think i'd recommend the recipe as the mustard and worcestershire were more dominant than i'd have liked them.

not to usurp the theme of this post, but does anyone have a potsticker recipe that they'd recommend. we keep kosher, so, verrrry unfortunately, no pork or shellfish, please.

foo d wrote:btw, i used a modified version of alton brown's potsticker recipe (since he gave me the inspiration to make them, i figured the least i could do was to try his recipe), which calls for mustard and worcestershire sauce. don't think i'd recommend the recipe as the mustard and worcestershire were more dominant than i'd have liked them.

not to usurp the theme of this post, but does anyone have a potsticker recipe that they'd recommend. we keep kosher, so, verrrry unfortunately, no pork or shellfish, please.

I started a thread a while back about my experience modifying AB's recipe. You can easily substitute any ground meat for the pork.

Here's the link:
http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=1494

Best,
EC

foo d wrote:not to usurp the theme of this post, but does anyone have a potsticker recipe that they'd recommend. we keep kosher, so, verrrry unfortunately, no pork or shellfish, please.

My mom sometimes makes vegetarian dumplings, and I've had good versions elsewhere. I also had excellent shrimp/seafood dumplings at a restaurant in LA...I imagine you can just substitute the pork w/ chopped shrimp and maybe add chinese chives and shitake mushrooms, if you like.

For the veggie version, you can use Napa cabbage, shitake mushroom, tofu, and sometimes I also use scrambled eggs (sounds weird, but it works). Sorry I can't remember exact measurements, but at least you can get some ideas to play around with.

When I commented to my sister how much I liked the dipping sauce we got with the pot stickers at Mee Jun's in Highwood, she replied that she and her husband have no trouble finding this "dim sum sauce" in grocery stores. (Now, she doesn't do much of the shopping or cooking, so if anyone's finding it, I suspect it's her husband.)

I have kept an eye out at all the local chain grocery stores, and also went to an Asian food store, which had a wider selection of Asian sauces and dips and marinades than any of the grocery stores, and I never found something labelled "dim sum sauce." (I did however find and buy a bottle of hot chile oil, which I'm looking forward to mixing with dim sum sauce, whenever I find/buy/make it.)

So, naturally, my questions are, is this something that is in either the grocery stores or Asian food stores, but goes by another name? Or does it exist in bottled form, but not where I've been looking? Or is it something I'll have to mix up from other ingredients? It's neither just soy sauce nor just terikayi sauce. If anyone knows how to mix it up, I'd appreciate instructions, but if I could buy it by the bottle, oh, I'd eat so many more pot stickers ...

[edit]Geez -- I looked for this thread and couldn't find it to link to the poster above me. Praise be to the moderators[/edit]

You may be able to find "pot sticker sauce" or "dumpling sauce" or "gyoza sauce" depending on what variety... but I never buy this pre-mixed.

Here's my basic recipe, easily doubled or more
1 tbs soy
1 tbs rice wine vinegar
1 tsp sesame oil (the dark stuff)
1 tsp sugar

to this, you can doctor it up with one or more of
1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger (no powder!) -- I consider this essential but I've done without it
1 clove garlic grated on a microplane
1 scallion or several chives or garlic chives, slivered
a generous squirt of sriracha, chile oil or chile paste or some red pepper flakes

It's really quite flexible. I've used chinese black vinegar instead of rice(decrease the sugar), thick soy a.k.a. kecap manis instead of soy (skip the sugar completely). The point is to balance the sharp (vinegar, salt, ginger, chile) with the smooth (sesame oil, garlic, sugar). It should taste good on its own, but keep it simple if you want the flavors of the dumplings, etc. to shine through.

Thank you, Cathy2, for steering me to this thread and all these ideas! I did do a search before my previous post, but didn't find this, probably because I restricted it to "dim sum sauce."

Well, I'm proud of myself; I had potstickers with homemade sauce for the first time today, although I can't say I'm very proud of the sauce. What I ended up making was a hodgepodge of the recommendations in this thread (1 part this, 2 parts that, etc.). I used soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame chile oil, balsamic vinegar, scallions, and ginger. The result, although it had a core of good taste, was too oily and too bland. So to what's left over, I think I need to add more soy sauce, more vinegar, some chile paste, and someone mentioned sugar also, to get where I want to be with this sauce.

Katie wrote:Well, I'm proud of myself; I had potstickers with homemade sauce for the first time today, although I can't say I'm very proud of the sauce. What I ended up making was a hodgepodge of the recommendations in this thread (1 part this, 2 parts that, etc.). I used soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame chile oil, balsamic vinegar, scallions, and ginger. The result, although it had a core of good taste, was too oily and too bland. So to what's left over, I think I need to add more soy sauce, more vinegar, some chile paste, and someone mentioned sugar also, to get where I want to be with this sauce.

Oil should be used pretty sparingly. As I've developed my homemade dumpling sauce preferences over time, I find that oil accounts for maybe 1/8th or 1/16th of the total.

I don't really subscribe to the balsamic vinegar idea. I think you'd be doing yourself a huge favor if you picked up some Chinese black vinegar.

Best,
Michael