Har Gow

Ingredients

• 120g wheat starch
• 40g tapioca starch
• 170ml boiling water
• 1 tbsp lard or groundnut oil
• 1/4 tsp fine salt
• 300g raw peeled prawns
• 60g tinned bamboo shoots, drained
• 40g pork back fat or fatty pork belly
• 1 tsp caster sugar
• 1/2 tsp fine salt, for the filling
• 1/4 tsp ground white pepper
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp cornflour
• 1 tsp Shaoxing wine

Before you cook

• Rinse the prawns, pat them very dry, then toss them with a pinch of salt and rinse again to firm up the texture.
• Chop half the prawns into 1cm pieces and mash the other half against the board with the flat of a cleaver until pasty.
• Blanch the bamboo shoots in boiling water for 2 minutes, drain, and chop them into tiny dice.
• Simmer the pork fat for 5 minutes, cool it, then dice it as small as the bamboo.
• Combine the prawns, bamboo, pork fat, sugar, salt, white pepper, sesame oil, cornflour and Shaoxing wine, and stir vigorously in one direction for a minute until the mix holds together.
• Chill the filling for at least 30 minutes.
• Sift the wheat starch and tapioca starch into a heatproof bowl with the quarter teaspoon of salt.

Steps

1. Bring a kettle to a full rolling boil, because anything cooler will not gelatinise the starch.
2. Pour the boiling water into the starches all at once and stir hard with a chopstick until no dry powder remains.
3. Cover the bowl and leave it for 3 minutes to steam through.
4. Add the lard and knead the warm dough on an unfloured surface for 3 minutes, until it is smooth, elastic and no longer sticky.
5. Roll the dough into a log, cut it into 24 equal pieces, and keep them under a damp cloth.
6. Oil the flat of a cleaver and your work surface lightly.
7. Press one piece of dough flat with the cleaver, then drag the blade across it to spread it into a disc about 8cm wide and paper thin at the edges.
8. Lift the disc, put a heaped teaspoon of filling in the middle, and fold it into a half moon.
9. Pleat the front edge only, pressing each fold onto the flat back edge, until you have made at least ten small pleats that curve the dumpling into a crescent.
10. Set the dumpling on a square of oiled baking paper and repeat with the rest, keeping the finished ones covered.
11. Bring a steamer to a hard boil and arrange the dumplings in the basket with 2cm between them.
12. Steam over high heat for 6 minutes, until the wrappers turn glassy and the pink prawn shows through.
13. Take the lid off away from you so no condensation drips onto the skins, and rest the dumplings for 1 minute before serving.