If you’ve scoured the internet and various cooking books, you’ll notice that recipes for homemade dumpling skins all have the basic two ingredients, flour and water, but the proportions and technique vary greatly. They all work – dumpling skin dough is very forgiving. Using the right proportion and method, however, can make the process a lot easier and faster.

The ratio of flour to water for dumpling skin dough vary greatly ranging anywhere from 2:1 to 4:1 (or 66% to 80% flour by volume). Many recipes also call for hot or boiling water and letting the dough rest for at least 30 minutes. A soft, warm, well-rested, dough is easier to work with and roll out if you’re doing it all by hand. But who has the time? If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that my go-to appliance for almost anything dough related is my trusty KitchenAid stand mixer. Making dumpling skin is no exception. Here, I also use the pasta roller attachment. Let the appliance do all the hard work for you and make a cold, stiff dough instead with no resting time required.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup cool/cold water
• 1 tsp salt (optional)
• extra flour for dusting the dough
• cornstarch for dusting the finished dumpling skin.

Directions:

• In the mixer bowl, combine flour with salt, if using.
• Add cool/cold water.
• Using the dough hook, knead until the dough comes together and forms a nice ball, about 2 minutes.



• Remove the bowl and hook and attach the pasta roller.
• Cut off a small piece, shape into an oval, flatten and dust with flour on both sides.
• Feed the dough through the pasta roller, making at least 2 passes – the first pass on the thicker setting and the second pass on the thinner, final setting. The thickness is really a matter of preference. I usually do the first pass on setting ‘2’ and the second pass on setting ‘4’.



• On a flour dusted surface, cut circles using a 3 inch (again, a matter of preference) cutter. Reuse all leftover dough.



• Dust the dumpling skin in a bowl filled with cornstarch.
• Set aside or refrigerate (up to a couple of days) until ready to use.

When you are ready to make the jiao-zi, you can simply seal the filling with warm water – the cornstarch will hold it together. If you roll out your dough to a final thickness setting of ‘4’ and use a 3 inch cutter, then this recipe yields about 100 dumpling skins.

How often do they fall on the same day??? As with every holiday, our family celebrates both occasions with food and lots of cooking on the days before and the day of. For Chinese New Year, I like to make homemade jiao-zi, Chinese dumplings (more on this on another post) and fortune cookies. This year, though, I put sweet Valentine notes as the fortunes. Here are the recipes and directions for making homemade fortune cookies.