Making dumpling with kids is pretty much the same as making edible play doh! We did homemade play doh earlier this month for a school assignment and little did I realize how both doughs use the same ingredients, salt, flour and water–except dumpling wrappers uses warm or hot water and play doh uses room temperature water.
I got the dumpling wrapper recipe from Red House Spice. It is not often that I stick to any recipe complete, the recipe from there was super clear and easy to understand and all of her recipes are drool worthy. She has a great video tutorial on how the wrappers are made as well. Her recipe called for 2 cups of flour and 1/2 cup of hot water. I ended up adding an extra 1/4 cup of hot water to mine. She makes a good point in sharing that often times, flour brands are different so the water may vary.
Here is my usually picture walk, but instead of sharing a recipe below, it will be a list of materials I purchased for the kids to make dumplings with me. I made the investment finally since the kids will be home for another few months at least due to the pandemic and they are always playing with either play doh or model magic anyway. You can read more about Art Things I Always Have in Bulk here.
I will probably work on a post for fillings only another time, but for this batch, I used pork, cabbage and chives seasoned with oyster sauce, dark soy sauce and cooking wine (with a little for starch)– which I precooked since I did not want the kids to be touching raw meat (I usually never cook the filling first) since these days, we don’t want to risk going to the ER or the doctors’ office if we could help it.
Picture Walk
Dumpling Making Things for Kids (scroll down for my pics below)
The bamboo cutting boards are sustainable and the price is just right at under $10 a board. This one we have is just beautiful and looks very “grown up” and fancy. The size is on the smaller size- about the size of an iPad mini, but it works for us because it’s. Just enough space to roll out dough for a wrapper or cut up a sandwich shape (will be posting materials for that another time). We have even used these boards for them as a placemat too spell out their homework sight words or have Esme play around with forming her name, numbers and letters and other creations.
The rolling pins seem well made and came in a set of 6– perfect for our family of 5 if we all wanted to make them or for parties or sleepovers hopefully in the future.
The curious chef’s knives were nylon and not too sharp. To be honest, I thought from the photos I was purchasing kid friendly stainless steel knives, but it worked well for the kids to cut their dough and they even used it before to cut off the crust off their sandwiches they made earlier that week to test it out. It cut cabbage pretty well, but the tiny think chives were a little trickier.
I used my own Walnut End Grain Butcher Block Cutting Board for the kids to place their unrolled dough and to place the cooked and cooked down filling.
I found some very cute aprons (affiliate links below) that I plan to buy for them and for myself on another occasion.
The mini cutting boards and rolling pins can work for so many other things and I plan Rn do them all with the kids–pizza, pupusas, empanadas, pierogies, samosas, tortillas and more!
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