Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes, where we waddle our way through wet meats and washoku to bring you the catch of the day. Today, the catch is Pelmeni, a little Russian dumpling that I don’t know a ton about, but am slowly convincing more and more of my family members to eat after I first tried them during a tragic time. DOES THAT SOUND ENTICINGLY VAGUE? THEN READ ON DEAR…READERS. Fuck, I hate using the same verb twice, even when it’s part of a noun. Ugh. If you don’t want to know what I’m vaguebooking about, just click this link to get the recipe. You’re going to miss a bit about RoboBuddhists, though!

A Big Feelings Dump(ling)

Actually, we aren’t going to spend a lot of time on my emotions, because I’m still conditioned to suppress those and rely on female associates for free emotional labor as pressure valves for my dangerously compressed emotional states! It’s fine, as long as I’m aware I’m maintaining harmful patterns! But it is somewhat important to me that I point out that Pelmeni, when I first discovered them, were a small ray of sunshine during a somewhat turbulent time for me. Because I first discovered Pelmeni on one of several walks through Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which would actually tell you exactly what this is going to be about, if you’ve paid a disturbing amount of attention to my posts over the years, because there was only one period in my life where I was taking “several” walks through Capitol Hill, and that was (dun dun DUN) while my father was at Swedish Medical Center, when his cancer was first diagnosed.

I thought that was going to be happier too, meme guy.
Don’t know why I did, it was literally set up as “these dumplings were a ray of sunshine in a dark time”, probably should have expected the explanation to be dark.

As I mentioned somewhat briefly in our “Time to Chip In” post, while my father was in the hospital, my mother and I often spent 4-6 or more hours a day there. And with his many naps due to the medications, and small tests or meetings that he and my mother were part of but I was not, it meant that I spent a lot of time with nothing to do, and that ended up with me wandering a 1.28 mile ‘loop’ made of Madison, Pine, and Broadway. (Those names mean something to people in Seattle, I assure you. Or, you know, you could hop on Google Maps and find it if you needed to kill like, 4-5 minutes.)

That loop had several inspiring restaurants that I ate at over those weeks. I grabbed one of my first Spam Musubis at the Marination Station up there. My mother and I quite enjoyed Lark, a fact that we weirdly have not in any way helped other people learn about beyond me posting about it almost two years ago. We went to Little Uncle to try their Khao Soi and discovered their Chicken Skin Steamed Buns, and there’s a bunch of other weird little connections in that tiny triangle of businesses. (One friend had a birthday party there, some other friends and I hit up a bar in the neighborhood, the restaurant of my favorite chef on Iron Chef Gauntlet is there, just a BUNCH of little weird things.)

Let me tell you, if you want to get some carnival-themed food in a pastel colored bar in midtown Seattle, I have a recommendation for your INCREDIBLY specific needs.
Perhaps ironically, it’s MUCH more colorful than the also-horse-named gay bar a few blocks over. On the outside. I haven’t yet had a reason to visit Pony.

So what ended up happening is that, on my loop of the neighborhood, I found an outpost of Rachel’s Ginger Beer. And as I have mentioned in passing before, I love Ginger Beer. In case you don’t know/remember, Ginger Beer is a variety of Ginger Ale that tends to have a more ginger-forward flavor. (“X-Forward” being a cocktail/wine term meaning “tastes like X”, asking for a “fruit-forward wine” is the way to ask for a fruity wine without feeling like a child.) It’s not typically alcoholic (in America at least, some other regions have different standards), and it’s used in Moscow Mules, Dark and Stormy’s, and other cocktails. Rachel’s Ginger Beer is a Seattle-based business that has been nationally recognized for its Ginger beers, making around 12 different flavor profiles including rotating seasonal options.

This particular station of the company ended up being nestled in what may be, in theory, my favorite building of all time: the 12th Ave Arts building, a complex containing 2 theaters, office space for several non-profit organizations, affordable housing apartments, and three food-based businesses: Rachel’s Ginger Beer, U:Don (an almost cafeteria-style Japanese noodle restaurant), and Dumpling Tzar, a restaurant that specialized in Pelmeni and interesting takes and iterations on the food.

Like this!
Is this an interesting iteration? You don’t know! I haven’t yet established a baseline!
(It is not. This is like, 100% classic edition.)

But what exactly IS Pelmeni? Let’s unpack that quickly. And, pro-tip, we’re going to be doing a lot of quick talking about things, because this recipe is actually pretty straightforward, until it completely fucking fell apart on me.  

Do you ‘Ear what I ‘Ear? The Cavalry’s ‘ere!

Making references before your audience can understand them, Title Jon? That’s why you’re the best in the biz!

Anyway, Pelmeni are relatively small, typically meat-filled dumplings from Russia. And some of you may be asking, “Jon, haven’t you told us about an Eastern European dumpling before?” To which my answer would be “NO! SILENCE, YOU FOOLS! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE-“ before being interrupted by the deafening nether-shrieks of blazing rifts forming in the very air around us as we’re bodily pulled into the etymological Hell that is this Thursday’s post.  

Oh good, we landed near a pack of Verb-wolves. I always love these trips.

Using the Time Stone, however, we’re arriving back literally the instant after we left so I don’t have to handle that topic right now, meaning that Future You now gets Title Jon’s pun, while outside observers will have to experience the circular nature of time for themselves to know.

Moving on from our confusing time shenanigans, let’s talk about Robo-Buddhism. Today’s recipe comes from a rather weird source, the Overwatch Cookbook, which my mother bought for the household while I was in Leavenworth.

She was apparently convinced by the Ramen on the cover, because, as I KEEP iterating, my mother is a weeb.
Also, this cover is a lie. There is NO Chashu (the pork belly strips on the left side of the soup pillar) in the recipe in this book.
And don’t @ me with “Maybe it’s the strips of chicken breast that are in the recipe, Jon!” This picture is a little too low-rez, but there is CLEAR pork-fat striping in the middle strip.

It’s a pretty fun cookbook, and I’m definitely going to talk more about it another time soon, but the basics are: Overwatch is a video game with an aggressively diverse cast of nationalities in its characters, as the majority of its characters are members of basically one of three groups: Members of future Interpol, members of a future international Terrorist group,  or omnics: free-will possessing, self-aware robots who recently were part of a Skynet style war for humanity until their factories were destroyed and they developed Robo-Buddhism.

The cookbooks is fun because it consists of characters of the franchise giving 3-4 recipes from their home country, allowing them to cover a wide range of international cuisines in a quick way that gives fans of the series something to connect the recipes to. The Pelmeni come from Zarya’s section of the book, with Zarya being ‘The Strongest Woman in Russia’.

A claim I have FAR too small of biceps to attempt to weigh in on.

So, enough talk on backstories, let’s get to MAKING this thing! 

The Pain Begins

HEY, no fair spoiling the twists, Title Jon. But yes, I had no small amount of difficulty with this recipe. Which is impressive, because it basically consists of two components, both of which are pretty easy. This is a from-scratch recipe, so you hand-make the dough, and the filling. And making the dough was pretty fun and simple: in a large bowl, you rub together flour, salt, and butter. “Rubbing” here means basically exactly what it sounds like. You’re  using your hands to work the butter through the flour by literally rubbing flour into balls of butter. It’s a little like working play-dough, and after about 5 minutes of work, your mixture should look kind of like sand.

It’s an oddly soothing, fairly enjoyable process. Like petting a cat.

To this, you add an egg, and some of a cup of cold water. I say “some” of a cup because you’re not just supposed to add all of it: baking is very dependent on getting the right texture of dough, which can be affected by the local temp and humidity, so sometimes you may need the whole cup, other times, you may only need 3/4s of it. This is one of the reasons I personally dislike baking, it’s SO precise a science that it sometimes feels a little like witchcraft. Like, there are breads you don’t make when it’s raining. Not because it’s bad luck, but because the dough will literally NEVER COME OUT RIGHT if there’s too much humidity, which, you know, raining is almost as high as humidity gets. Anyway, you’re looking to get a fairly dry dough that isn’t sticky.

Something like this pale amorphous blob.
Damn it, now I wish I was in the background of this shot so I could dunk on myself.

Once it comes together, you knead it on a floured surface until smooth, and then let it sit for 30 minutes. All of these steps are important, because kneading dough causes more gluten to form, which will let the dough hold up in hot water. But gluten when It first forms is tough, so by letting it sit, you’re letting it relax, and get easier to work.

Then you make the filling, which is very easy to make as well: one diced onion, some garlic cloves, as well as some dill and parsley go into a blender, and then get mixed with a pound of ground beef and a pound of ground pork, as well as some salt and pepper. The result looks kind of like meatloaf.

Well, “like a giant meatball”, but that’s also what meatloaf looks like until you shape it into a loaf.

And all of that went fine. It was the next part where things went wrong. You take your dough, cut it into 4 chunks, and roll one chunk out VERY thin, under 1/8 of an inch (3 mm). And, since our counter was crammed with a bowl of meat, the rest of the dough chunks, and a spree of bottles we’ve started storing on the counter for lack of cabinet and shelving space, I had to do it on our cutting board, which, as I’ve complained before, is like, 4 inches too short for me to work at comfortably. It’s also fairly old, and not well supported: literally the ONLY thing that keeps it steady is how much of it you leave unextended from the counter, meaning that on any larger project, it WILL be tilting and wobbling as you work on it.

This quickly frustrated me, ESPECIALLY since the rolling, cutting, filling, and folding of the dumplings was taking me much longer than it was suggest it would in the base recipe. As such, I called in my mother to aid me, who wasted no time in pointing out that I had clearly failed to make the dough 1/8th of an inch thick, with the dough being closer to 1/6th or 1/5th of an inch. She in turn called in Nate, and eventually decided I could not be trusted with rolling out the dough, though, in traditional O’Guin fashion, this meant that it merely became HER rolling skills we criticized.

The process isn’t HARD, assuming you roll the dough at least vaguely to the correct thickness, but what DOES become a problem is the amount. If you’re making rounds 5 mm thick instead of 3, obviously you’re going to run out of dough faster, only getting about 60% of the quantity you’re supposed to. So we ran out of dough about halfway through our prepped meat.

Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of this ongoing failure, because, as noted, I was forming balls of raw pork and beef into dough. My hands were full, and dirty.

All of this was even MORE frustrating because I had started the recipe, which was written to take 1 hour and twenty minutes, and started it an hour and a half before I had to leave for a rehearsal. And if that sounds like a tight window, I actually hadn’t planned to COOK the dumplings before I left, cutting a further 20 minutes out of the recipe. So I started with a 30 minute window buffer, and, with the help of TWO other people, I was able to leave ONLY 10 minutes late, getting to my rehearsal 15 minutes after it started, instead of 5-10 before. 

Luckily, the dumplings chill and freeze well, so we just dumped them in the fridge while I was at rehearsal, and cooked them up when I came back. And the results were…food.

Most food looks pretty gross when you’re too close.
Hey, that rhymed!

The interesting thing is that this was ALMOST a success in an unexpected direction: See, the thicker dough ended up trapping the rendering meat fat and juices in the cavity with the meat, creating, in essence, a low-moisture kind of soup dumpling. Now, the flavor of the meat was fine, though some of the batches were a little close to under-done, with it being difficult to check every dumpling for proper heating while boiling. But with the thicker dough, and the excess fluid inside, I felt I could do better. This was FINE, but progress could be made.

Which is why it was amazing things went WORSE the next day. See, one thing I hadn’t mentioned about these dumplings: I was making them in part as a send-off gift for my cast. The show I directed closed on Sunday, and was set in late Imperial Russia. So I figured “hey, bring a bunch of Russian dumplings as a snack for the cast on the last day, easy peasy little thematic gift/thoughtful project.” But, I decided to avoid making the dough that morning, since the dough process is about 45 minutes all told, and the matinee showing of my play and a late wake-up from me meant I was slightly crunched for time. So I figured “Hey, I’ll just run over to the grocery store, grab some wonton or gyoza wrappers, and use THOSE. They’re basically the same thing, premade!”

For some reason, it turns out that both of the closest two grocery stores were OUT of won-ton wrappers. I ended up giving up and grabbing Egg Roll Wrappers at the THIRD store I checked, so I could get home having sent an HOUR driving around looking for wrappers to avoid making a 45 minute recipe. The irony is…JUST AMAZING.

Spoilers: I guess I gotta make Egg Rolls soon.

These wrappers, since they were being used for a process they were not designed for, didn’t do so great. About one out of 4 or so that I made tore in ways that forced me to just toss the dumpling, since I didn’t have time to try and fix these. I ended up cooking about 10 of them, to…mixed results.

These ones had a much more accurate visual to what they were meant to be, but the thinner dough meant they had also cooked MUCH FASTER than their counterparts. While the other batch had a couple dumplings that weren’t quite 165 after 6 minutes, THESE dumplings were consistently hitting 185-195. Meaning that, while the dumpling dough was more on-point texturally, he meat inside was hard and overcooked. Which made the dough stand out for its blandness and texture.

This just LOOKS weird, right? Like, this looks like some kind of mouse organ.

Defeated and out of time, I stormed off in a huff, already running late AGAIN, and told no one of my shame. Until now. The literal next day. (Editor’s Note: Due to a slight morning illness and a vet appointment, Jon was actually delayed from finishing this upload until late Monday night. So it’s “the day after the literal next day”, technically)

My thoughts on the dish as a whole.

You’re supposed to serve with dill, sour cream, and a sprinkle of paprika. But our paprika was far enough away that I used Aleppo pepper. And Nate decided “Dill and Sour Cream” was code for ‘Dill IN Sour Cream”. Not a bad choice, but not technically traditional. You can also toss the pelmeni in vinegar, or serve with horseradish.

As I’ve noted, I’ve had professional pelmeni before. And they’re good. Some varieties I’d call great. And honestly, the first batch I made, despite the dough being too thick, aren’t all that bad. I’d give them a solid C. Like, if I were served them at a friend’s house, and told they were made from scratch, I’d be impressed. Not blown away, but impressed.  The newer batch I will straight-up call bad. So…Like, I don’t know. This is a confusing catastrophe.  If you think you can learn from my failures, I say give it a shot. And I’m sure this is one of those foods where, as you make more batches, you just get better and better. But right now, I’m standing in the middle of “mixed results”, and  I don’t know that I want to push you forward into that realm to try unless you’re confident in yourself. I guess, in short, I’m telling you that I can only show you this door. Only you can decide if you want to go through it.

THURSDAY: WE ENTER ETYMOLOGICAL HELL, WITH THE SLAVIC DUMPLING WARS.

MONDAY: JON HAS LESS THAN A WEEK TO PUT TOGETHER SOMETHING FOR THE BIG GAME, SINCE THEY JUST DECIDED THE TEAMS. AND THE ONE HE WAS ACTUALLY STUDYING FOR GOT ELIMINATED YESTERDAY, SO HE’S HAVING JUST A GREAT FUCKING TIME.  

Recipe

Pelmeni

Makes a lot of dumplings.  

Ingredients

Dough

3 cups flour

¼ cup unsalted butter

1 tsp kosher salt

1 large egg

1 cup cold water (may not all be used) 

Filling

1 medium yellow onion, or ½ of a large one, diced

4 cloves of garlic

1 small bundle dill

1 small bundle parsley

1 pound ground beef (I used 85% lean, the cookbook does not specify)

1 pound ground pork

Salt and pepper

Garnish/Water
2 bay leaves for water
Dill, Parsley, Sour Cream/Horseradish/vinegar for serving

Preparation

1. First, make the dough: rub the flour, salt, and butter together in a large mixing bowl until no large pieces of butter remain, and flour is roughly the consistency of sand. Then, add the egg, and the cold water a little at a time, stirring between additions of water, until dough just comes together and is no longer sticky. Knead the dough for a couple minutes on a lightly floured surface until smooth. Form into a ball, cover, and let sit for 30 minutes before prepping the filling.

2. For the filling: Place the ingredients before the beef in a food processor, and blend until minced fine. Scoop out into a large bowl, and mix with the beef and pork, as well as salt and pepper to taste, until thoroughly incorporated.

3. To make the dumplings, take the ball of prepared dough, and cut it into 4 equal portions. Covering the remaining portions as you work to prevent them drying out, take one portion at a time, and roll it out very thinly on a lightly floured surface, to roughly 1/8th inch thickness. Cut into rounds about 2 inches across.

4. Taking a round, place about 2 tsp of meat on one half of the round, folding it into a half-moon shape over the meat. Pinch the edges close firmly to seal, using water if you have to. Then, take the opposide corners of the half-moon, and fold them away from the curved edge until touching. Pinch them together to finish the dumpling shape. Repeat with remaining dough and filling.

5. Place the bay leaves in a large pot of water, and bring to a boil. Drop in the dumplings in batches, boiling for 5-10 minutes, stirring to ensure they don’t stick to the bottom of the pot.  They will rise to the top when nearing done. Remove from the water, and serve warm, with garnish of herbs and sauce of your choice.