Thursday, December 8, 2022

Black bean pumpkin gyoza 黒豆かぼちゃ餃子

My wife wanted a seasonal quesadilla which is composed of pumpkin puree, black beans, cheese, and roasted pork. After enjoying the quesadilla as a lunch, a good amount of the filling remained.  My wife suggested we use it to make gyoza. It sounded a bit like an odd combination for gyoza but I have seen a recipe for gyoza stuffed with potato salad so I complied. I added more finely chopped BBQed pork . Since we ended up with quite a good number of gyoza, we realized we couldn’t possibly eat them all before they went bad so we decided to freeze some. Then the next question was how? In the past I made up some gyoza and without any additional preparation froze them. The shells became brittle and shattered apart. So we decided some degree of preparation was required to keep that from happening again. So I boiled them first and froze a number of them that way. Then we realized that we would have to fry them before serving. So we got the (brilliant) idea that if we boiled, fried and then froze them, all we would have to do is toaster-oven them (the verb form of noun toaster oven) without thawing and then serve. In any case, the pre-boiled gyoza were fried in a small amount of peanut and sesame oil to produce nice brown crispy shells, frozen than toasted in the toaster-oven as shown below. (Easy-peasy). 


You can see, on the cut surface, small cubes of pork, black beans and pumpkin puree. It is not typical gyoza flavors but it worked. 


We have two frozen batches; one boiled but not fried and the other boiled and fried. Any bets on which batch gets eaten first?


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