The 2-hour soup dumpling class I took with my daughter started off with the instructor telling us that she never cooks soup dumplings at home because they are too complicated and time consuming to make and it is much better to buy them from street vendors in China or from Din Tai Fung or the Dough Zone. If we made the dumplings at home within a day or two, she said, we might have "some" success, but if we waited three months, we'd surely fail. Why charge $90 per class if you don't expect the students to get good results?
The dumpling dough, the filling and the gelatin, which becomes the "soup" part of the soup dumplings, was made before we arrived. Really? If two hours isn't long enough to make the recipe, the class time should have been extended. The instructor talked us through the recipe, sort of, though she did tell us to cross out a number of steps she deemed unnecessary. She demonstrated how to mix the gelatin into the pork mixture and how to roll the dough into circles and form dumplings. Our rolling pins, she told us, were cut from dowels at the local hardware store, so they were not the "exact size," you'd typically use. The hands-on part of the class involved cutting the dough into 8-gram pieces, rolling it into circles and crimping the edges to form the dumplings, but there were no scales to use, not . one . single . scale ! Din Tai Fung uses 5 grams of dough per dumpling, the instructor said, but we should aim for 8-10 grams, because we'd never be able to roll the dough as thin as Din Tai Fung. Even though we had enough dough to make dozens of dumplings, we were only given enough filling to form about 10 dumplings each. The dumplings were, as predicted, not worth the time it took to make them. After my daughter and I each made and our 10 dumplings with tough, thick skins that weren't anywhere near as good as the frozen variety at Trader Joe's, let alone a respectable dumpling house, the class was over. There was no sit-down meal with the other students or rice to eat with the dumplings. Cost - $180 for two. Total hands-on cooking time - less than 30 minutes. Tom Douglass, you can do better than this! read more