Recipe Review: Gyoza

In my continuing quest to learn to make Asian Food, Gyoza was recently elevated in priority as a dish I needed to learn.

I was spending the day with my sister before she went on her official Honeymoon and we went to the butcher shop she and my new brother-in-law shop at and I found ground pork in the freezer section in 1 lb packages.  I knew, just knew, this was the ground pork that has always evaded me when I attempted to make Asian food in the past... so I picked up 2 packages with the intent to make Gyoza or Spring Rolls (or maybe both) with it.  But Gyoza was definitely wining the top spot in my mind so....

I decided to search YouTube for a video on how to make Gyoza and I found This Channel, EmmyMadeInJapan.  There's something about Emmy that I just love.  I have watched so many of her videos and I am thoroughly entertained by them.  I love her willingness to try anything and I'm finding I especially enjoy learning about what people in other parts of the world snack on.  Check out her Channel, seriously.

So Emmy has a super easy and delicious recipe for Gyoza, which I took for a test run.  Boy oh boy, did everyone in my gaming group love, love, love these little gems!

Here's how they go together.

I started with shredding the cabbage - I used Napa - and finely chopping the green onions and placing them in a bowl...





...and adding the ground pork and seasonings...



...and mixing it well until it's thoroughly combined...



...then the fun part comes - filling the Won Ton Skins or Gyoza wrappers.  I could only find the square Won Ton wrappers at my local grocery store...



...so it took me a bit to get the hang of how to pleat them.  Here's my first attempts:



...make sure not to overfill your Gyoza.  They are much easier to seal if there isn't filling trying to squish out at the seams.  I used only about 1/2 tsp per wrapper.  Eventually they started to look a lot better...



I was able to use up all of the wrappers in the package - I think there were 24 of them - so I took Emmy's advice and froze what I didn't need for our lunch.  Here's what they looked like when they were done - I served them with Emmy's sauce, it was super delicious and so, so simple...



I didn't change a thing about this recipe and there is no reason to - I will absolutely be making these again (and again, and again - in fact I dream of a freezer full of these so I can have them any time I want to).  They were fabulous and not as time-consuming as I expected.  Thanks for a great recipe, Emmy!