Good evening! Yesterday, we had our second try on making "siomai" or dumplings. This was our first try making siomai if you haven't seen it: COOKING DAY: OUR FIRST TRY MAKING SIOMAI (Dumpling)
Siomai is how we call it here in the Philippines. It is ground meat mixed with vegetables and spices and wrapped with a soft dough wrapper usually in square or circle size. Siomai can be eaten steamed or fried. Then it can be mixed on several dishes, like soup, rice, noodles, or you can eat it alone with a soy sauce dipping sauce with lime and some chili garlic oil. This is best paired with a "Sago at Gulaman" drink.
Now let's proceed to our second siomai-making experiment! :D
So during this quarantine, we are on a mission to perfect making siomai. That meaty chunky meat and soft silky wrapper. Mmmm!!!
For our second try, my mother decided that we make salmon siomai. Our kitchen was vacant the other day so we had the chance to cook longer. Guess who's excite to do the wrapping again. Lol.
My mother did the meat since I am doing something in my room which I can't remember now. >.< However, I went to the kitchen for awhile and asked about some of the ingredients. She said she's adding mushroom aside from the salmon. The salmon we have are the local salmon. It's cheaper than the usual salmon people know. She already cooked the fish before making it into a siomai meat so it is easier to mash or grind it. And instead of turnips, which she had watched on Youtube before, she replaced it with breadcrumbs. I think the purpose of this is for food extender, though I am not very sure. The grinded meat mixture was chilled for an hour and we are now ready to wrap them! Now on my favorite part!
We used a 1 tablespoon measuring spoon to scoop the meat. We used small molo wrappers to make siomai this time and as you can see on the photo below, the edges of the wrappers are only short. The molo wrapper is also more stiff than the siomai wrapper that I tear it sometimes when I fold it tightly. It took me a few tries to get used to the molo wrapper but my mother was surprisingly good at using it compared to the siomai wrapper last time. Haha. The photo below are our combined wrapped siomai. My mother already mixed our works together but I think that tiny siomai at the second column on the left is probably my work. 😂
We had a few siomai wrappers unused from our first trial so we used them too!
The steaming time for siomai is around 20 minutes, according to my mother who have watched tutorials on how to cook siomai. Lol. And so took care of steaming some of the siomai while I continued wrapping the rest.
After more than 20 minutes, she returned with one siomai on a plate for a taste test.
The problems we had on our first trial before were thick and seemingly not fully-cooked wrappers and flaky meat.
We're we able to fix the problem this time?
Well, quite a little! The meat was less flaky and sticks to the wrapper better compared on our first try where the meat will just fall out from the wrapper after eating half of it. However, the wrapper still feels not fully-cooked and starchy. It doesn't feel nice chewing it. >.< The siomai in smaller wrapper were less starchy though.
We're not sure if it's about the wrapper or we're just dumb making siomai. If anyone knows how to get that soft, silky, and translucent-like texture of the wrapper, please enlighten us. ❤️
