AT YOUR LEISURE
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The dinner party, as cool and grown-up as it is, has some issues. 

Namely, the inherent tension between those preparing the meal and those who have been invited to enjoy it. Sure, the rise of open-plan homes has eased this to a degree, as guests and hosts can now comfortably mingle while the cooking happens. But still, polite society demands that guests must say some form of "Do you need some help?" at least a handful of times before everyone can relax and enjoy themselves.

A gathering of people also demands that small talk must be made. Most times it's an easy hurdle to clear! Other times a mixture of hunger and conversation running dry is enough to make one feel like they will probably die a million deaths before the night is over.

The solution to these two annoyances is the humble dumpling. Throwing a dumpling party — a dinner party where everyone makes dumplings and then enjoys dumplings —  gives guests something to do, something to eat and something to talk about.

Jon Ho, an architect here in New York, has thrown many dumpling parties. Every single one has been a success, and he thinks you should throw one too. It's simple. You provide the raw materials for dumplings, the filling and the wrappers, and your friends provide the help in folding them. Everyone works, everyone eats and everyone has a good time.

"When you're folding dumplings all you can really do is just talk to each other," says Jon. "But you don't have to force conversation. If there's a pause it's because you're focusing on making dumplings."

Better still, the pot-sticker dumpling, the dumpling we're going to focus on here, is simple to make and tastes great. It has meat, it has carbs and it has vegetables. "A meal in a bite," Jon says. If you're planning on throwing your first dinner party, a dumpling party is a great first venture into the basic human ritual of socializing over a meal.

"What's nice about everyone having to help is that everyone can eat faster," he says. "Everyone has to participate, so we can all eat together at the end."

Get The Ingredients And Make The Filling

Almost every culture has some form of dumpling, a nugget of protein wrapped in a carbohydrate and consumed en masse. Pierogi, ravioli, empanada, hot pocket. Dumplings are everywhere.

For our purposes, we're going to focus on the pot-sticker dumpling, which is both pan-fried and steamed. Jon's go-to is a traditional pork and cabbage pot-sticker. It's truly the best of all of the dumpling worlds.

The first step to throwing a successful dumpling party starts the day before with buying the ingredients and making the filling. If you have a decent pantry, you should already have most of what's required but still, here is everything you will need to throw a medium-sized dumpling party.

  • 1 pound ground pork
  • 1/2 pound nappa cabbage, chopped 
  • 1/2 pound scallion or Chinese leek, chopped
  • 1/4 cup soy sauce
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 tablespoon corn starch
  • 1 tablespoon sesame oil
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine
  • 1 package of dumpling wrappers
  • 1 medium to large pan with a cover

If you haven't done much Chinese cooking before, you'll need to stock up on some pantry essentials (rice wine, sesame oil, soy sauce), and if you have trouble finding anything, it's probably in the Asian section of your grocery store. As for dumpling wrappers, you're looking for "northern style" wrappers, which are a little thicker, and hold up better to the pan-frying and steaming. They should be pale white in color, and not to be confused with the yellow "Hong Kong style" wrappers, which are more for steaming than pan-frying.

Once you have all your ingredients, get cracking on the filling. It needs time to marinate, so it's best to make this the night before.

In a medium-sized bowl, combine the pork, cabbage and scallion/leek until you have a homogenous meat/vegetable mixture. Once combined, add the soy sauce, sugar, corn starch, sesame oil, Worcestershire sauce and rice wine and mix until all the liquid has been absorbed by the meat and vegetables. Cover the bowl and stick it in the fridge to chill and marinate overnight. 

We've listed exact measurements here for a baseline, but Jon stresses that you should just kinda feel everything out. He doesn't really use strict measurements so much as he just measures by ratios. In other words, he eyeballs it. There should be an equal amount between meat and vegetables, that he knows. But otherwise, decades of making dumplings has left him adding a splash of that, or a dash of this. Which is fine! 

"Part of the beauty of Chinese cooking is that you just cook by feel," he says. "My paternal grandmother, who was a great cook, she would never measure anything. She would just measure by, well, 'Yeah take a little bit of this, a little bit of that.'"

Invite Some Folks Over And Start Wrapping

We've taken care of the filling, but the real meat of the dumpling experience is having people over and folding scores of dumplings together.

There are many ways to fold dumplings, but the one we'll be trying to recreate here is the one Jon learned as a young hungry man in college. It requires that you produce an according-style fold along the top of the dumpling, providing the dumpling with a firm handle at the top and a rounded base to be fried at the bottom. Here's our man Jon demonstrating how the fold works:

 

Got it? Let's fold our first dumpling. On a big table set out the bowl of filling, the wrappers, a few spoons and bowls of water. 

Take a wrapper, place a small nugget of filling in the middle (less if you're less experienced, more if you're, erm, more experienced) then wet the edges and pinch the wrapper together at the top. 

Now here's the slightly tricky part. Wet along the edge, and then, starting from the top and moving towards one edge of the dumpling, fold the top layer of the wrapper onto itself. Repeat this going towards the other edge. The end product should look like a ribbon going across the top edge of the dumpling. 

It doesn't have to be perfect! There's always another dumpling to be made, so if you don't get it on your first try just grab another wrapper and start fresh. The truth is, an ugly dumpling still tastes just as good as a pretty dumpling.

"How you fold dumplings can kind of say a lot about the personality of someone," says Jon. People who are meticulous or good with their hands can put a lot of folds in while others just kinda give up and fold them flat. Jon recalls stories of being in college and witnessing the aunties at his church just cranking out scores of dumplings while enjoying casual conversation. Still, Jon assures that it's something everyone can do. "Most people who've come over, they've figured it out eventually."

Now Cook Those Dumplings

Apart from the folding, the trickiest part of making dumplings is the logistics of cooking them. The biggest frustration Jon still runs into is not having a big enough pan to churn out dumplings faster than people can eat them. Cooking them is fairly simple and Jon says is "pretty hard to screw up unless you leave them in the pan too long or put too much water in."

The way Jon has figured it out is to build up a large amount of folded dumplings early, then start cooking them in batches as folks trickle into the party. That way there's always hot dumplings to be enjoyed, and more to replace the ones eaten.

Once you have a batch, put a skillet on medium-high heat, add a tablespoon of oil, let it warm up and then place dumplings in flat-side down. Let them brown up, nice and good. You can even grab the tops of the dumplings to lift them up and see how the browning is going. It's fine!

Once browned the next step is to steam them. Pour a cup of water into the pan, put on a lid, turn down the heat and let them steam for around two and a half minutes. You can set a timer if you'd like, but again, it's fine to just play it by ear. They don't need to steam forever — just long enough to cook the wrapper and whatever bits of filling haven't been fully-cooked by the frying.

Once steamed, take off the lid, and turn up the heat again to cook off the remaining liquid and crisp the dumplings back up. Shake the pan a few times to make sure none of the dumplings are sticking (even though they're called pot-stickers, we don't want them to literally stick to the pan) and transfer over to a plate. Enjoy immediately, or maybe wait a beat since the insides will probably still be screaming hot.

Enjoy The Dumplings, Together

The beauty of the dumpling party is that there doesn't have to be distinct phases. You can just keep eating them while also making more. Have a cocktail hour, or don't! Make side dishes and enjoy a sit-down dinner, or don't! It's as formal or casual as you'd like it to be.

Soon enough everyone will be suddenly full and there will still be plates of dumplings left over — which is pretty much an ideal situation, surrounded by your own excess of dumpling labors. That everyone can take credit for contributing to this luxurious Dumpling Surplus is kind of the cool and unique element to all of this. Through collective action, everyone can equally enjoy the spoils of labor: a hot and tasty dumpling. 

"The act of preparing the meal together, there's a sense of unity and it bonds people," says Jon. "Everyone feels accomplished at the end because we all contributed to the meal and it's not just one person slaving away in the kitchen."

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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