Some things I like and don’t like about making gyoza —
Chopping Chinese cabbage is my least favourite part, mainly because my chopping board is a bit too small, as is my knife, so I end up with bits of cabbage all over the kitchen. It seems like I chop for an hour or two without making much progress then suddenly it’s over and I have a large heap of finely chopped cabbage. Nice.
Salting and squeezing the cabbage is probably my favourite part. Basically you take the chopped cabbage, put it in a bowl, stir through a couple of spoonfuls of salt, put that into sieve over a bowl and wait for twenty minuets. The salt will draw water out of the cabbage so there’ll be quite a bit in the bowl. Most of the water will need a bit more encouragement, so you put the cabbage in the middle of a tea towel and wrap it up and squeeze it as much as you can to extract as much water as possible. I don’t know why I find this so satisfying. Maybe its because there’s nothing like this in any other recipe I make. Anyway, it’s fun.
Bonus second favourite part — getting a nice deep dark crust on the underside of the gyoza. Without it, I’d consider my gyoza a failure.
If you haven’t made gyoza and want to give it a try, go for J. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe.