The last one fed me for three months - so far, that is - about a third of the last bag is still left. It was a high quality 25# bag, and it cost me $9.00.
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It all started with gyoza skins. Gyoza are pot-stickers, and I literally wrote the blog on them, where I stated my opinion that they might well be the "perfect food". Two-thirds vegetables and one-third meat, flavorful and beyond easy to cook. They can be an entire meal, and you can make a great dipping sauce with only two ingredients - soy sauce and vinegar.
All I needed was the skins.
Now when I lived in SoCal, you could pick these up at the neighborhood 7/11. I live in dear old dad's ancestral home now, on the frozen shores of Lake Erie, and gyoza skins simply aren't to be found. Just about anywhere.
Long story short, I could buy them by the frozen crate (they only last two days once defrosted), but shipping costs were outrageous for this sort of frozen shipped commissary item. So I looked around and found this blog, and I decided that the solution was to make my own. First, I'll need an Italian Pasta Maker.
It's pretty much a precision extruder with 3 rollers, and the distance between the rollers can be set using a knob with a scale from 1-9. First, flat rollers, for making long, thin pasta sheets. You can make flat lasagna noodles with this. Then a tagliatelle die roller which produces "ribbons" (think 'fettucini'), about 1cm wide, and a spaghetti die. It's simple, and I'll go into greater detail about it in Part II.
The dough is beyond simple - there's two ingredients - flour and hot water. I chose to make it in my biggest food processor because six cups of flour is a handful, but it came out perfectly.
6 cups flour
2 cups boiling water
salt to taste
Next step was to divide the dough ball into 12 equal sized more managable parts, and roll them out with my rolling pin. But I didn't have a rolling pin, so I used this empty bottle of Joel Gott Cab 2009 instead :-)
BTW, a simple 1 inch diameter wooden rod makes a great rolling pin as well. Now just roll out each ball into a strip about a half an inch thick to prep it for the pasta maker. Then just roll it through the pinch rollers like this:
I made the dough ribbon increasingly thinner by setting it first on zero (thickest), then two, then five - then I used a cookie cutter to make a circle about 3.5 inches in diameter.
The scraps were gathered up, kneaded back into a dough ball again, and put back into the hopper.
When finished, I ran the remainder through the tagliatelle die, and this is how much that was left over:
They came out perfectly. This stack represents only about a third of them - six cups of flour is a lot ! Here's a tip - use cornstarch between the skins to keep them from sticking to each other. You can make huge batches - they freeze perfectly.
It's a whole post just to talk about the filling, but I'll refer you again to this "knol", which tells you everything you'll need to know. For an overview, use 2/3 vegetables to 1/3 meat, use lots of aromatics (especially fresh grated ginger - it maybe works the best!), and keep the mixture relatively dry to prevent soggy gyoza.
This all came about because of a desire to eat better, cleaner, healthier, more natural food. I've begun making three kinds of dough - Asian pasta dough is covered here in Part I.
In successive submissions or "parts", I will discuss the other two types of dough as well - egg pasta and pizza dough. All three are simple, highly flexible, and require only a few common ingredients.
And the cost? So far for the flour, it's looking like it's going to be less than $3 per month.
12:26 PM PT: For those of you considering the purchase of one of these devices, I will speak to the various brands and levels of quality, maintenance and cleaning, as well as ways to possibly find these inexpensively in Part II. I'll talk about selecting flour as well.
I'm thrilled as can be that this effort was warmly received. A heartfelt gasho to this incomparable community!
I will publish Part II next Saturday at 07:30am EST - look for notices in the various open threads in this regard as well.