Shrimp Dumpling or Har Gow is an interesting dish. According to my roommate from Hong Kong, dim sum restaurants in Hong Kong actually lose money for serving Har Gow since the cost is higher than the selling price. Restaurant include this dish because there is high demand and also fierce competition between restaurants. They make money by selling everything else to cover the cost of Har Gow. Of course, dim sum places in US definitely still make money out of Har Gow. However, we now know if you are thrifty like me, this is the dish you definitely need to order at a dim sum place!
I love Har Gow, it’s pretty and tasty. The translucent skin makes them look so different from all other kind of dumplings. My brother and I always have dim sum at weekends. We will have 2 orders of Har Gow, one for me, one for him. Now, why spend so much to have it once in awhile, when you can actually make this at home?! 🙂 Here is our recipe of Har Gow, let’s start!
Har Gow filling ingredients
- 13 oz of shrimp
- ½ tsp of salt
- ½ tsp of white pepper
- 1 tbsp of cornstarch
Har Gow skin ingredients
- ½ cup of wheat starch
- ½ cup of sweet potato starch or potato starch
- ½ cup of boiling water
- ½ tsp of salt
Personally, I love the type of Har Gow that you can actually taste the shrimp. Therefore we are going to do one extra step for our Har Gow filling. First, defrost 13 oz of shrimp. I can’t emphasize how much I love Costco shrimp. Keep several bags at your freezer so you can make all shrimp dishes whenever you want! Take out 13 oz and defrost in your refrigerator overnight. If you are in a hurry, pour them into a water bath for 30 min to thaw quickly. Just keep in mind Costco shrimp is somehow salted and you can simply skip the salt in this recipe if you use shrimp from Costco.
Take half of the 13 oz of shrimp, about 16 shrimps, remove any head or shells and chop repeatedly. You will soon find the best way. For me, I do it this way: Chop it down completely, scoop it up with my knife and turn a different direction, chop it down again and repeat the steps several times. Before we invented meat grinder, this is the way we make ground pork or any other ground meat. This method is elegant in a way because you get to control how fine you want to grind your protein. For this particular dish, I like it coarse to preserve more texture.
Season the shrimp paste with ½ tsp of salt, ½ tsp of white pepper and 1 tbsp of cornstarch. Mix until it’s mixed well and sticky. Now you can transfer the seasoned shrimp paste to your refrigerator for later use
Take the other half of the shrimp, cut each of them in half crosswise. We are going to wrap each Har Gow with shrimp paste and one half of shrimp to get the optimal texture.
Now it’s time to make the Har Gow wrapper!
The reason why Har Gow is especially beautiful is because it’s translucent like gems. You can see the shrimp inside. On top of the cool look, the wrap is chewy and bouncy. It’s very very different from what regular dumplings taste and feel like. The secret to this magical wrapper lies in the ingredients, we will need to use ½ cup of sweet potato starch or potato starch to mix with ½ cup of wheat starch. You might not be familiar with wheat starch (澄粉). However, you can find it easily at any Chinese supermarket. Boil ½ cup of hot water to mix with the starch powders to make the dough. Make sure your water is boiling hot right before you add to the starch powders. Be careful!! Even after you mix the boiling water into the dough, it’s still hot, do not attend to knead it until it’s cooled. Take a second to measure the temperature before you knead it with your hands. I personally tested all four kind of starch: Wheat starch, cornstarch, potato starch, and sweet potato starch. Cornstarch performs the worst, it’s not very translucent and the texture is not chewy. Wheat starch perform a bit better than cornstarch. the end result is a bit more translucent and a bit chewier. Sweet potato starch and potato starch have excellent look, close to 60% translucent but they are way too chewy. Therefore, the perfect mix is 1:1 wheat starch vs. sweet potato starch (or potato starch). Cut your dough into 16 pieces, let’s move to the next step!
Now here comes the fun part. We will make the Har Gow wrapper. It’s definitely ok to roll out wrappers with a rolling pin. I’m going to do it the traditional way and tell you the alternative. Traditionally, you need to use a special kind of knife called “拍皮刀” (wrapper knife), it looks like a Chinese cutting knife with a blunt edge and also narrower and lighter than a Chinese cutting knife. To make one wrapper, you pinch off one little dough and round it up, grease your wrapper knife with oil and smear across that round dough. Then you scrape it up from the cutting board. You can simply use a regular Chinese cutting knife and it should work just fine. However, people usually don’t have this skill so here is our alternative: Roll out one big flat dough and use a wrapper cutter – anything that got a round shape will work. Cut out as many as you want, and then knead the rest together. You can repeat this step until all the dough is Har Gow wrappers now.
Put ½ tbsp of shrimp paste and put 1 chunk of shrimp on top of it. Wrap your Har Gow by folding it while wrapping it. It’s very similar to how we make pot stickers but with only one direction. After you finish them, now we are going to steam them!
On high heat, steam it for 5 min and 30 seconds, do not go too long or your shrimp filling is going to taste like rubber. 5:30, now it’s done. Time to enjoy your own Har Gow!
- 13 oz of shrimp
- ½ tsp of salt
- ½ tsp of white pepper
- 1 tbsp of cornstarch
- ½ cup of wheat starch
- ½ cup of sweet potato starch or potato starch
- ½ cup of boiling water
- ½ tsp of salt
- Defrost 13 oz of shrimps
- Grind 6.5 oz of shrimp into shrimp paste with cutting knife by chopping repeatedly.
- Add ½ tsp of salt, ½ tsp of white pepper and 1 tbsp of cornstarch into shrimp paste, mix until it’s sticky.
- Put in refrigerator for later use
- Chop each of the 6.5 oz of shrimps into half crosswise
- Put in refrigerator as well
- Take 1 cup of sweet potato powder, 1 cup of wheat starch and mix well
- Boil 1 cup of water and add into the mixture, mix well to form the dough
- cut the dough into 16 pieces
- Make Har Gow wrapping with the side of knife
- Wrap the Har Gow, put about 1 tbsp of shrimp paste and 1 shrimp chunk
- on steam cooker, steam on high heat for 6 min
- Ready to serve
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