Viet World Kitchen

How to Make Asian Dumplings without Eggs or Pork

I haven’t had the chance to make a new dumpling to share with you, but I have been fielding email queries from cooks interested in making Asian dumplings. Over the weekend, I received a question that you may either ponder about or have solutions to. This came from Meghan in Indiana:

I was wondering if it is possible to make dumplings, or pot stickers, without egg yolks? I am allergic to egg yolks...and pork actually. That's not a big deal though because I could always add beef or chicken, etc.. but I do need to know about the egg. I'm not allergic to egg whites and it does actually work in most recipes that I've tried. I would really appreciate it if you could let me know. Thanks!

Eggs and pork play marvelous roles in Asian cooking but can you do without them in dumplings? Yes, indeed!

After I wrote back to Meghan, I figured that I’d organize and expand my tips to her in a post. If you have the same allergy or want to avoid eggs for some reasons, these suggestions may help your adventures in dumpling making: (page number references are for the Asian Dumplings cookbook)

The general lowdown & DIY dumpling wrappers
Most Asian dumpling wrappers don’t contain egg. I’ve seen recipes online and elsewhere that incorporate egg into the dough and that’s not necessary for all dumplings, especially popular pot stickers. Just check packaged wrappers sold at a market and read the ingredient label.

Rice Paper Gadget Wars: Mr. Spring Roll vs. New Star International

Vietnamese business people can be hyper-entrepreneurial and competitive. When an idea succeeds, copycats and rivals inevitably appear – springing up practically overnight like mushrooms.

That, my friends, is happening with the plastic Vietnamese rice paper dipping bowl that I recently wrote about. Vinh, Mr. Spring Roll’s maker, commented in the post and thanked everyone for supporting his product. He also apologized for the hiccups in distribution. He was working out of his apartment!

Not long after that post, a Viet chef friend, Terrence Khuu, pointed me to a rival product, New Star International, which had a fledgling Facebook page but no website. (The first 100 people to like their page get a chance to win a dipping bowl.)

New Star’s to nhung banh trang (bowl for dipping rice paper) comes in three colors and is fashioned from “high-quality PVC” (PVC is a type of plastic that I typically associate with plumbing pipes but it has many industrial uses). Terrence’s friend is distributing New Star International and sent a lime green one for me to test drive. The other options include blue and clear.

My first thought was, “Mr. Spring Roll works fine. Who needs another one of these?” New Star thinks that its rice paper water bowl beats out Mr. Spring Roll. This week, I compared the two on these points:

Mama Says: For Neat Spring Rolls, Use Chopsticks (video)

Ten years ago I launched Viet World Kitchen. I wanted to create a hub for information on Vietnamese food, cooking and culture. There wasn’t much out there so I spent weeks working in Dreamweaver to build the site. Each page was constructed with very little automation, as is the case nowadays with platforms like Typepad and Wordpress.

I toiled without knowing about search engine optimization. I just focused on publishing information that may be of use to people. If someone liked it, they would email me and I would post their comment.

One of the Viet World Kitchen pages I made was called “Mama Says,” a repository for kitchen tips that were taught to us by someone older. Mine were primarily from my mother so I created a cute icon dedicated to her.

I posted Mom’s culinary tidbits and she liked it. When I moved VWK over to a blog platform, I moved “Mama Says” onto a post called “Tips for Cooking Vietnamese Food.”

New Rice Paper Gadget: Mr. Spring Roll

When I serve a “roll your own” rice paper meal, one of the biggest pains in the butt is the water bowl used for softening the papers. This type of semi-DIY meal involves a lot of stuff on the table -- platters of  lettuce, fresh herb sprigs, bun rice noodles, grilled meats, seafood, or tofu. Little bowls of dipping sauce too. The requisite large vessels of warm or hot water used for softening the banh trang rice paper take up a lot of prime real estate. They have to be wide enough to make dipping easy. Plus, if the water cools too much, you have to replenish it in the middle of the meal.

Enter Mr. Spring Roll, a new gadget from Vietnam. I have Tuyet Nguyen to thank for the tip. She wrote me about it, asking if I’d seen or used it. No I had not but I wasn’t looking for Mr. Spring Roll either. Then I spied it at one of my favorite Viet markets in San Jose, Thien Thanh. It sold for about $7 and the cashier said that it was a new and popular item.

I was skeptical at first because it seemed flimsy. The packaging and plastic didn’t instill confidence. The fact that the Vietnamese “To Nhung Banh Trang” (bowl for dipping rice paper) looms largest means that it’s geared for the solid Vietnamese market, not for outsiders.  The distributor’s name is Evershing Trading Incorporated (maybe that’s suppose to be Everything Trading Inc.?) However, Mr. Spring Roll does have a website  and Facebook page – he’s marketing savvy.

Is Tofu Healthy or Harmful?

April is national soyfoods month in America. Seriously. Every month of the year has been snapped up by at least one food group or industry. Why not soy in April?(!) Given that, I wanted to address a couple of common misperceptions about tofu.

First off, I'm an omnivore. My new book, Asian Tofu, isn’t a vegetarian cookbook or one that aims to preach and convert. It’s about showcasing tofu as a delicious food with borderless Asian roots. 

Nevertheless, a handful of people have asked me about tofu’s impact on personal health. I'm not a health expert and often end up engaging people in conversations about what tofu is and what it's not. Below are a couple of recurring topics and a recap of my responses. Feel free to weigh in.

Is tofu a processed food?

The answer depends on how you define a processed food. Most of us think of processed foods as something that’s been altered from its natural/original state, mostly for convenience or safety reasons. It’s been stripped of its essence. It’s a non-food or food-like substance. It’s packaged in cans, frozen, dehydrated, refrigerated and has gone through some kind of aseptic processing so that it can have a longer than freshly made shelf-life.