From a street-food stall to one of the capital's best-loved restaurant groups, BAO has had a stratospheric rise to the top of the London food scene. Whether you're dining at BAO's Borough, Fitzrovia, and Soho premises, visiting the O.G. Netil Market stall, or living it up at its higher end offering, Xu, the BAO restaurant group deliver some of the most consistently excellent Taiwanese eating experiences in the city. This relatively simple recipe for mushroom dumplings allows you to bring a touch of that magic into your own kitchen. Always been afraid of making your own dumplings at home? This is a great place to start.
Make Xu’s boiled mushroom dumplings with red chilli oil
These mushroom dumplings from Xu are bursting at the seams with umami flavour and are also fully vegetarian friendly
Make Xu's boiled mushroom dumplings with red chilli oil
Serves 2-3
Preparation time 1 hour
Cooking time 15 minutes
Ingredients
For the dumplings:
- 250g flour
- 150ml cold water
- Pinch of salt
For the filling:
- 40g dried shiitake mushrooms
- 185g fresh shiitake mushrooms
- 125g oyster mushrooms
- 100g lotus root which can be found at a Chinese supermarket or local grocery. If you can’t find it, taro or potato also work.
- Vegetable oil, for cooking
- 10g fresh root ginger, peeled and finely diced
- 50ml Shaoxing wine
- 40ml light soy sauce
Method
For the dough:
- Mix everything together and knead for 15mins, let it rest for 30mins.
- It's then ready to be used. Cling film and keep in the fridge when not using it. These can be kept in the fridge for a day or two or in the freezer for a week.
For the dumplings:
- To make the filling, soak the dried shiitake mushrooms in 600ml of filtered water and set aside for an hour.
- Meanwhile, chop up 8mm dice the fresh shiitake and oyster mushrooms. Peel and grate the lotus root.
- Once the dried shiitake mushrooms have soaked, strain and place the mushroom liquid aside. Chop the soaked shiitake to the same size as the other mushrooms.
- Place a frying pan over a medium-high heat and add a splash of vegetable oil. Fry the ginger and all the mushrooms until all are properly sweated. This should take around 10 minutes.
- Add the Shaoxing wine and cook this down, seasoning with soy sauce.
- Add the grated lotus root to continue to fry, adding some of the mushroom soaking liquid until it binds the mixture nicely together for around 10 minutes.
- Set aside the mushroom filling.
- To make the dumplings, set a large pan of water on to boil.
- Remove the cling film from the dumpling dough and divide it into 12g balls similar to the size of a marble.
- On a floured surface, roll out a dough ball into to form a circular disc around 1-2mm thickness, 7cm diameter. Place a tablespoon of the mushroom filling in the centre.
- Fold the dumpling dough in half and pinch the edges together to enclose the filling. Roll out the dough to a round disc, put the filling in the middle. fold the rolled out dough in half and pinch the edges to close. Meet the tips of each side of the dumplings, pinch and close off to make that shape. Repeat with the rest of the dough and filling.
- Sprinkle a pinch of salt in the boiling water. Drop in the dumplings in batches and boil for about 3-5 minutes or until they all float to the top.
- Serve with the red chilli oil.
