Recipe: Chinese Vegetable Dumpling aka Chai Kuey/ Chai Pau

 

Remember the tortoise cake (ang ku kuih) recipe I posted some time ago? Those purple chewy textured skin is suitable in making Chinese steamed vegetable dumplings as well. These dumplings are also known as chai pau as well. That previous post has no recipe in it, so I decided to include the recipe in this post.
The love for this purple colour in food is inevitable especially when the colour is usually really deep and pretty.

 

 

To begin with, prepare the fillings first. The fillings can use to be improvised into snacks like fried spring roll, when wrapped with poh piah skin.

 

Ingredients :
500 g Jicama (Chinese turnip)
50 g French beans
1 piece bean curd
Half carrot (optional)
Water
1 ½ teaspoon salt
Pinch of pepper
1 teaspoon sugar
Some oil
2 cloves garlic + 2 onions (minced with pestle)

 

Methods:
1. Julienne turnip, French beans, carrot and bean curd. (Use a shredder for turnip and carrot)

 

 

2. First, fry bean curd in oil till lightly brown and drain the oil.

 

 

3. Fry the blended garlic and onion in oil for the fragrant, then stir in the julienned French beans.

 

 

5. Next, stir fried the turnip and cover wok lid to soften the turnip for about 5 minutes. Add water after turnip is cooked with the heat at low fire to further soften the texture (If you like crunchy texture of turnip, add water earlier and use water to boil to cook instead of cooking with slow heat in the wok. This way, the texture would be crunchy on the outside). Put in carrots and let it cook to desired texture. Put salt, sugar, and pepper to taste and mix in the earlier bean curd and French beans and set this aside.

 

 

Moving to the skin, we can use the same skin for sweet or savoury bites depending on what’s in for the filling (I recommend coconut, or read bean paste for sweet bites). Read about tortoise cake here

 

Ingredients :
250 g Glutinous rice flour
50 g purple sweet potato (steamed and mashed)
2 tablespoons cooking oil
2 tablespoons hot water

 

Methods:
1. Mix hot water to flour and cooking oil and add mashed sweet potato

 

 

2. Knead till it becomes dough (at this point adjust texture with flour or water –if too hard, add water and if too soft, sprinkle in some flour)

 

 

3. Pinch and divide the dough in smaller portions and start wrapping it with the vegetables prepared earlier (dip fingers with some oil to prevent dough from sticking to fingers when shaping the dumplings).

 

 

4. Placed the dumpling on clean banana leaf and steam these glutinous pau for 5 minutes.

 

 

When cooked, the colour is superbly beautiful. Eat this with chili sauce and a cup of teh-c. Wrap in any shape desirable and the remaining fillings (if any, can be served as a dish to go with white rice or using it as normal pau filling)

 

 

This dumpling is great if you have guests coming over. Happy cooking!

 

Follow me on twitter @sycookies for all micro updates and see more photo pin ups of everything else on Sycookies Pinterest boards. Also, click here for more photos and updates on Foodeverywhere’s facebook page.

 

Love