Marty Wolf's Gyoza Recipe

Marty Wolf (Marty_Wolf@radian.com) posted the following on  the Kobe Alumni mailing list on April 12, 1999.

Everything is very approximate:

• 3/4-1 lb ground pork (do not use ground beef/turkey/chicken or pork sausage -- ground shrimp is surprisingly good, but I have only found it at a Chinese market in Mountain View, CA)
• 1/3-1/2 head cabbage - (boil and then chop, but the cabbage needs to remain firm -- Chinese cabbage [hakusai] gets too watery)
• lots of green onions (4 or 5 or more)
• lots of garlic (we usually go with 6-8 cloves, but we have gone with a full head before)
• a little ginger
• 2-3 tablespoons shoyu
• 1 teaspoon of sesame oil (optional)
• 1 package of gyoza skins (50 or so; wonton skins won't work -- too thin)

Mix together everything (except the skins) with your hands. I'm not sure if people remember the filling technique, so here goes. Put a heaping teaspoon of filling in the middle of the skin. Apply water to the edge of the top half of the gyoza skin. Fold the gyoza skin over the filling. Press the edges of the skin together while making 4-6 folds/tucks in the bottom half of the skin that was folded over. Cookie sheets make a good "holding pen" for the gyoza while you are making all of them. Don't let them touch unless you are starting to cook right away -- the skins can get very gooey.

Non-stick pans do not work very well. We use cast iron frying pans. Coat the pans with oil and let them sit on 'warm' for 10-15 minutes. When ready to cook, turn the temperature up to medium-high to high. Put the gyoza in the frying pan. After frying for 1 minute or so, throw some water in (not too much or you end up doing the wonton thing) and put a lid on to steam them. Cook for 4-5 minutes. We use pyrex casserole lids because you can see what's going on. My wife is always worried about eating raw pork, so we usually add another shot of water to make sure. We usually don't bother with lining the gyoza up like Osho's does, but that doesn't affect the taste. Serve with rice and thinly sliced cabbage and QP (kewpie) mayonnaise.

Now the Osho's gyoza sauce is a bit of a mystery. I'm pretty sure it was just shoyu and chili oil (ra-yu), but I'm not sure about the "floaties". We also joked that they were gyoza scrapings, but they probably were the small dried chili peppers (taka no tsume). We usually do shoyu and ponzu (a citrus vinegar made out of hassaku, daidai, natsumikan and other Japanese citrus fruit -- made by either Mitsukan or Nakano -- can't miss it in the store, it's a fluorescent yellow/green) with a touch of ra-yu. I add more ra-yu later on to my plate. We also mix up some Japanese mustard to go with it.