Love gyoza but can’t find it vegan? Make it at home!
Gyoza is a Japanese dish adapted from Chinese dumplings, and is everyone’s favorite in Japan. Without exception, I love gyoza but it’s extremely hard to find vegetarian/vegan gyoza at a Chinese restaurant in Japan, so… why not make it at home?
There are myriad of ways to make gyoza, but today, I wanted my gyoza to have a nice crunchy texture when biting into it. So I used spinach, glass noodles and ground tempeh. If tempeh is difficult to find, you can always use extra firm tofu and just crumble it up, but make sure you squeeze as much water out as possible because otherwise, the mixture will get too soggy.
You can easily grind tempeh in a blender or food processor.
Spinach and glass noodles should be lightly boiled and cut into bite-size pieces.
For other ingredients, I used finely chopped Japanese long onions (naga negi – or you can use the white part of leek), ginger and garlic as well as shio-koji (or regular salt), sake, soy sauce and sesame oil. I would say these are standard ingredients for making gyoza.
There are different ways to wrap the mixture with gyoza skin (I just used store-bought skin), but the way I learned to do it is: put water on the edge of one side (this will be the glue), fold the edge of the other side like pleats and seal the edges together. This takes some practice, so if you don’t care about the pleats, you can just seal the edges together without them, no problem!
To cook the gyoza, pan-fry it until the bottom is brown, add HOT water (gyoza will stick together if you use cold water) and cover to steam for few minutes until the skin becomes transparent. Unlike the regular meat counterpart, vegan gyoza doesn’t contain anything that is not edible uncooked so you don’t need to be too particular about cooking time here.
I like to dip my gyoza into soy sauce & vinegar sauce, but you can have it with just soy sauce or add some hot sauce/chili oil… YUM!!!
