I’m sure by the title of my post, you can guess what direction I plan on going today. But first: CANDY!
Oh, how my heart sings.
I recently ventured forth back to Hmart and I restocked on my beloved nurungji candy (the bag with the brown top). On top of that, I also grabbed a bunch of other bags to try. At a $1.50 per bag, I couldn’t resist. The verdict: Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuum. I personally love the plum flavor the best because it reminds me of peach rings, but my sister is in favor of the grape. I’m still on the fence about how I feel about the green tea candy, but it isn’t terrible, so there’s that.
Now onto the reason for my post!! As mentioned before, I’ve taken a interest into Korean cuisine and I’ve made it a personal mission of mine to try and master the art of the Korean kitchen. To aid me in my quest, I bought a cookbook off of Amazon that looked promising. I have other books I want to buy, too, but I settled for this one to break the ice. The title is, The Food and Cooking of Japan and Korea, and the authors are Emi Kazuko and Young Jin Song. It’s a smidge-bit pricey at $25-ish, but it is pack full of recipes and has some interesting history tidbits at the beginning of the book, so I think it’s worth it. Obviously, my choice first recipe to try out was mandu and you lucky folks get to see me flounder in my attempts to make sometihng semi-edible. *DISCLAIMER: I won’t be posting the recipe exactly because I don’t know copyright laws well and I don’t want to get in trouble with the Internet police. If you’re interested in a more exact recipe, I can recommend a few good websites. Just leave a comment and I’ll direct you to a few good links*
I started off with my meat mixture. The recipe wanted beef but I got wild and crazy and chose turkey instead. You know me, I live life on the edge. I used about half of the turkey, but feel free to use all of it for your recipe. To that, I added 3 green onions, 3 cloves of garlic, some grated ginger and rice vinegar. I must add that I was supposed to use rice wine for this, but we didn’t have any and I’m only 18 and can’t buy alcohol on my own, so I adapted. A fun tip for peeling your ginger is to use a spoon to scrape off the skin. By doing that, you don’t peel off excess ginger and more of your root stays in tact. I also want to mention that ginger is absolutely heavenly to grate. If it weren’t such a bitch to get out of the grater, the smell of the ginger alone would make me want to grate some daily. Yay for good smelling ingredients! Anyways, I mixed everything together by hand and set it aside for 15 minutes.
Whilst my meat was marinating (if you can call it that), I tackled part two of the filling. This included tofu, Chinese (supposed to be Korean) chives, an onion, soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, salt and pepper. I have never in my life before cooked with tofu and boy is it an adventure. You’re supposed to squeeze the excess water out of tofu using a cheese cloth or paper towels and this sounds easier than it actually is. My paper towel kept tearing and tofu kept escaping and it was all a mess. But you know what, I made it work. If some tofu tried to make a great escape I would just use my hand to squeeze the liquid out and crumble it over my mixing bowl. I am the master of all I survey. After I chopped up my chives, I coated them lightly with sesame oil because the Internet told me I should. I’m not exactly sure what that’s supposed to do, but I trust the Internet and I do as it tells me. Once everything was in the mixing bowl, I lightly mixed everything together and waited for my meat to be ready. I put the tofu mixture in with the meat and mixed everything together with my hands like you would for meat loaf. 
Now the real fun was about to start. Mandu filling!
I picked up the skins from Hmart and compared to the other skins available, I think I got some on the smaller side. In case anybody reading this is interested in making mandu but doesn’t have an Asian market nearby, Goya’s empanada skins would work, too. (Am I wrong thinking that Goya is an easier brand to find nationally?) Anyways, I found it really hard not to over stuff my poor dumplings but eventually I got the hang of it. I also didn’t fold them in the traditional half-moon/crimped way because 1) Ain’t nobody got time for that and 2) I planned on making a soup with them, so you’re supposed to fold them differently, anyways. I folded them a lot like how you would see tortellini folded and that was still a challenge. To do that, I brought the edges together so that the skin was a half moon and then I took the two ends and brought them together. Make sure you use warm water as a kind of sealant. In my picture to the left, you can see how the whole edge of the skin is covered in water. You’ll be using water as a kind of glue to keep everything together, so don’t skimp on it. I would water the edges, bring them together, use more water to pinch the edges more firmly together and then use water on the ends to keep them stuck together. 
A handy tip I learned was to pinch the filling into a long, cylinder shape before trying to fold the skin. That made the filling less likely to try and squeeze to the top when pinching the edges together. Beware, filling the dumplings is a tedious process and you will use a whole package of skins. As a matter of fact, I still had filling left over after I ran out of mandu skins. The whole thing took me about a hour and a half to finish, but I was going slow and took breaks often because I would get bored :D This was my final product.
I stuck my tray of mandu in the freezer for a hour and then took them out to put in a Zip-lock bag. From what I’ve read, you can keep mandu in the freezer for a couple of months, so that’s a definite plus. 
I know what I’ll be eating for lunch for the next few weeks! I left my mandu in the freezer overnight and made myself some mandu soup today for lunch! For the soup I need beef broth, soy sauce, salt, pepper, a green onion, a clove of garlic and of course, my frozen mandu. I brought 2 cups of broth and 1 cup of water to boil and stuck in about 8 of my mandu. I covered the pot and left it to boil until the mandu floated to the top (about 6-ish minutes). From there, I added my crushed garlic and chopped green onion with the soy sauce and left the mixture to boil for another few minutes. I added salt and pepper to taste, and viola!
I put my soup in a bowl and it was ready to enjoy!
Ta-da!
My final verdict? It was good but I can see ways to tweak the recipe to give it some more flavor. The filling definitely needed a kick, so next time I make mandu, I’ll be playing around with spices. The broth was solid and a good compliment to the mandu but I also want to play around with that. Overall, this the perfect recipe to put your own mark on. You don’t need to follow an exact recipe and you can fit mandu to your personal taste preferences easily.
I look forward to exploring Korean food more in the future and I’ll definitely be posting my culinary adventure here. But first, that movie review I’ve promised twice already ;)
안녕,
Meghann, the wannabe Korean
P.S. Sorry for the bad quality pictures. All of them were taken either on my iPad or iPhone in fading light, so they’re a bit lacking. Next time I promise to use my good camera.
