A couple of weekends ago, I fulfilled a long-standing ambition – to learn how to make baozi.

Baozi are one of my favourite things to eat in China, and for anyone who knows me, that is high praise indeed. There’s just something about them that is hugely comforting, and biting through their soft, fluffy dough to reach the rich filling inside never fails to make me absurdly happy. They were one of the first foods I got addicted to here, and when living in our first apartment Cam and I would often buy them from nearby shop whose elderly proprietor we nicknamed ‘The Baozi Man’, because as well as selling baozi, he looked like one too.

Good baozi, though, is hard to find, especially in southern Chengdu, where rice reigns supreme. Wheat products like baozi are much more commonly eaten in the North, and so it was appropriate that it was my friend Xixi, whose father is from Northern Shandong province, who was my baozi master the other day. (As a lovely aside, Xixi’s mother is from Sichuan – so in her family, for lunch they eat Sichuan food, and for dinner they eat Northern-style).

Sadly, because it was evening when we made our baozi, I didn't get many good photos of the process (unlike when I learnt how to make jiaozi); here are the baozi wrapped and ready to be steamed…

And here are the finished products, with an excited Xixi.

We made two different fillings, one meat and one vegetarian, and ate it with spicy radish pickle, a tomato and cucumber salad and a European-style stew. The baozi were, needless to say, ridiculously tasty, and for me, miles better than any shop bought version I’ve ever tasted. They were so good in fact, that in spite of the long preparation needed, I can say with some certainty that this will not be the last time I make homemade baozi.

Last Sunday, I joined my friend Reed at his student Wang Wei’s house for a jiaozi party. Jiaozi (dumplings) are the traditional food of Spring festival (Chinese New Year), when whole families get together to make hundreds of the things. Because their shape and weight resemble ancient Chinese coins, jiaozi are eaten at the beginning of the year to bring wealth and prosperity to the household in the coming year.

Jiaozi are also strongly associated with cold Northern China (some sources even say that they were originally invented to treat frostbite!). Appropriately, our host Wang Wei lived for many years in the far north-eastern province of Heilongjiang (Black Dragon River), and a couple of other participants in the jiaozi extravaganza also hailed from the North.

On Sunday we were making shuijiao (boiled dumplings) completely from scratch, a process that took 2 to 3 hours. First, we made the fillings, or xiaor; one chicken and mushroom, and one pork and spring onion. Here are some of the raw ingredients of the fillings.

First, the meats were mashed to a smooth paste using the back of a cleaver, and the spring onions were finely chopped.

Then other ingredients such as garlic, ginger, oil and others were added and mixed into the meat and vegetable mush. Here is the finished pork filling.

Next, it was time to make the dough. Pablo from Lanzhou, a wheat King who can even make his own noodles, was in charge of this part, though I have to say it wasn’t very complicated: just plain wheat flour, a little salt, and water.

And then kneading and kneading and kneading until it got to the right consistency. Pablo’s method of kneading was quite different to the one I use for bread, when the idea is to get air into the dough – jiaozi wrappers don’t rise, and so the of kneading was merely to soften and smooth the dough (Mollie Katzen says that well-kneaded dough should have an ear-lobe like consistency – I told this to Pablo and he heartily agreed).

Next, after letting the dough rest for about 20 minutes, came the really fun part: the wrapping! First, Pablo sliced the mound of dough into about 5 pieces; these were then rolled into sausages, which were in turn chopped up into little chunks, about every 3-4 centimetres along the sausage. These little chunks were then squished slightly with the palm, and now it was time for the rolling, which turned out to be rather trickier than it looked.

Using the rolling pin with your right hand, you roll out the dough only from the centre to the edge; then, using your left hand, your twist the dough round by a few degrees, and then repeat the same rolling action. You continue doing this until you’ve rolled around the whole of the edge of the wrapper; this ensures that your dumping wrappers are perfectly round, the centre is thick and so won’t split, and means that the edges, which will be folded over one another, will be relatively thin and so not too thick when folded. It was one of those methods that I would never have thought of myself, and only someone who has been doing it all their life could teach you.

By now the whole group had gathered around the table and we began to construct our jiaozi.

Unexpectedly, to me anyway, everyone wrapped their jiaozi in a different way: some were similar to Italian tortellini, some in the Wonton-style, and still others like a cross between baozi and shao mai.

By the time we’d used up all the dough, the whole table was covered in all manner of different shaped and sized jiaozi.

Traditionally there are usually a few coins hidden in the jiaozi, and whomever finds them is thus destined for a wealthy life. Another hidden filling are Chinese dates, three of which were included in our jiaozi bounty. The reason for this stems from the similar sound of their Chinese name and the word for early, both pronounced ‘zao’ – so whomever finds a date is fated to have children early.

Now we only had to wait another 10 minutes or so while the jiaozi were boiled. It’s said in China that to avoid overcooking your dumplings or noodles you should add a cup of cold water every now and then, so as not to let the water in the pot boil too vigorously (3 times for dumplings, 4 times for noodles is one rule I’ve heard). Wang Wei subscribed to this theory, and sure enough, our jiaozi finally made it to the table perfected cooked. They were delicious – so delicious in fact, that I totally forgot to take any photos of them before we tucked in – and although there was a collective groan when we saw how many we’d made, we did, of course, finish the lot.

And if you’re wondering who got the dates, Reed got one, but the young lady in the photo above got the other two! I guess we all know how she’ll be occupied this time next year…

Stay tuned for more wheaty adventures!