The Most Memorable Home-Cooked Delights, Fennel Pork Dumplings, and a Lingering Nostalgia for Hometown
Hello everyone, I'm Xiao Liu from Baiwei Kitchen, and I share different recipes with you every day.
As the saying goes, nostalgia for one's hometown often begins with eating.Hometown cuisine is a perennial theme for overseas Chinese. It lingers in the depths of memory, carrying familiar flavors and aromas of everyday life, and expressing reflections on life's vicissitudes. This taste of homesickness is unforgettable and becomes more deeply ingrained with the passage of time.
Xingtai is my hometown, an ancient northern city, beautiful, simple, and steeped in history.Since I was born, I've never left her until I graduated and started working. Although I'm in a foreign land, my memories of my hometown are always particularly profound. Northern festivals differ from those in the south. During Chinese New Year, Lantern Festival, and Mid-Autumn Festival, every family's table is missing one unique flavor of cuisine.——Dumplings.
When I was a child, my most memorable impression of festivals started with a bowl of dumplings. Speaking of dumplings, I love pork and fennel meat filling. Fennel, also known as fragrant vegetable, is commonly used in northern rural areas to make dumplings. It can be used as a staple food and as a spice. Because of fennel's special aroma, some people like it and some people dislike it.If you, like me, also have the aroma of hometown dumplings in your memory, then come and watch together, let's reminisce about the fading childhood flavors!
Fennel shoots, pork belly, edible oil, salt, MSG, light soy sauce, aged soy sauce.
1,My family usually buys the meat back directly and cuts it by hand. Handmade meat filling is tastier and more fragrant than bought ones.
2,Wash fresh fennel shoots with water, put them in a frame to dry, and make sure to drain the water, then cut them into minced pieces on a cutting board. If the moisture is too large, the dumplings will easily break and will not be easy to operate when wrapping, affecting the taste.
3,Now let's start with the stuffing. Add appropriate amount of salt, a little MSG, 2 spoons of light soy sauce, half spoon of aged soy sauce, and one egg into the chopped meat, and stir until the meat filling becomes sticky.
4,Then put the chopped fennel shoots into the meat filling, add two spoons of edible oil, and stir until the dumpling filling is ready. Making pork and fennel meat filling dumplings doesn't need to add fragrant oil and other seasonings. The fennel itself has a special aroma, and adding too many seasonings will affect its own flavor.
5,The dumpling filling is ready, now let's start making the dough to wrap dumplings! When making dough for dumplings, add two eggs to the flour, and slowly pour warm water (40 degrees Celsius) while stirring with a chopstick to make a dough mass. Knead into a dough, cover with plastic wrap, and let it rest for 30 minutes before using. This dough is easier to knead and the dumplings made with it are smoother and more elastic.
Although I work and travel for life, no matter where we go and how far we go, the taste of our hometown is always familiar and friendly, as if our childhood happened yesterday!
I am Xiao Liu from Baiwei Kitchen, today's hometown flavor 'Pork and Fennel Meat Filling Dumplings' is shared here. If you like my food, please follow and share with your friends, see you next time!
