Home-made Dumplings

Yawns...been ignoring my blog for a while now because of all the sitcoms i have to watch. Been watching The Office like crazy every night and every weekend. Would you believe i only started to watch The Office less than a month ago and i have already finished Season 1 up till Season 5 and now watching Season 6 now? lol. Anyhoo, i made dumplings aka pot-stickers aka woh-tieh aka gua tieh last Sunday :D

I read somewhere it's just very simple to make the dumpling skin. I just mixed plain flour with cold water until the texture is just right (not too sticky and not too dry) and i made it into 2 long shapes (as shown above) and leave it for around 30 minutes for it to expand.

The filling i used is just normal minced pork with some seasoning of soy sauce and salt. By right, i should add in some vege like cabbage or onion but mehhh i wasn't feeling so "healthy" that day :D (in actual fact, i should have added some veggies to give it some extra crunch but oh well...)

This is how my dumplings look like before cooking

Not very bad for first try eh?? wahaha...i "researched" online for hours on how to make the little pleats on the dumplings. And this is how it looks like after fry-steaming

Brown and crispy bottom and with soft top (the pleated side). 

The reason i didn't really want to elaborate more on how i cook it is because the top which was supposed to be soft was pretty hard :( I don't know what i did wrong. Every recipe i read from the internet uses the same ingredients as me and i did try to cook it as how they mentioned too. My only explanation now is because i did not cover the pan when the water is boiling when cooking the dumplings because i do not have a cover at home..yeah! go figure.