Cooking: I can haz it

[oyceter]

I started learning how to cook around when I graduated from undergrad, for the obvious reasons, but I didn't really try it much until around 2005, when I was inspired by coffeeandink's forays into cooking to try myself. And then grad school hit, in which I would cook and wrap dumplings during the first month of each semester and gradually move toward take out, EZ Mac, and pizza as the semester wore on.

I enjoy cooking, but it may be one of those things I enjoy more when I have a lot of spare time; when I get a job again, we'll see how much I keep doing it! But so far, I feel like I've been learning how to cook all over again in the past few months. On the plus side, I think I've actually gotten to the point when I can kind of stare at the fridge and throw things together, which was my target way back when.

The really big difference, though, is that I've finally learned how to cook Chinese food.

I tried when I first started to cook, but I didn't trust most English cook books, and despite watching hours and hours of Good Eats, I had zero knowledge of the basics of Chinese cooking. As such, I could make around 3 dishes, and they all didn't taste very good. I eventually ended up mostly making vegetarian and Mediterranean inspired food when I took up cooking in 2005, largely due to the recipes my flist was posting.

For some reason, I thought I should just know how to cook Chinese food somehow, and not from recipes. I also have not the best relationship with my mother, which meant making her talk me through everything wasn't always feasible. (Sometimes I can deal, and sometimes it is just too much contact; also, as usual, please no advice or suggestions on dealing with my mom.) I got a few tidbits from conversations with my mom, but always in bits and pieces, and it was especially difficult translating ingredients from Chinese to English. Ranch 99 makes this less difficult, because the signs are often bilingual, but it's still a little frustrating. I mostly gave up after a while.

In 2008, before starting grad school, I spent the entire summer in Taiwan. My mom and her friends were going to cooking classes at that time, and I got to tag along. I never really put any of those recipes into practice, so I always thought I had forgotten most of it. My roommate in grad school was also from Taiwan, and she cooked a lot more (and a lot more Chinese food) than I did. I cooked some more Chinese food in grad school, going from 麻婆豆腐 and curry to 米粉, curry, and dumplings. A lot of dumplings.

My dumplings were terrible at first; my mother's reactions when she heard what I did was: "How much meat did you buy?" (4 lbs. ahahaha) "What do you mean, you put sesame oil in it?" and "Cornstarch what?!" I had made them before with my sister during Thanksgiving (dumplings are our school's Thanksgiving tradition), but mostly spinach and not so much meat. I then had a few dumplings parties with rilina, in which we cobbled together assorted online Chinese and Korean recipes, experimented with percentages of tofu and ground meat and totally vegetarian dumplings, and we eventually got pretty good at it. I watched my roommate make her vegetarian dumplings (so labor intensive!), then had a few more dumpling parties with Rilina and thistleingrey and troisroyaumes, in which we all found out the different ways we wrapped dumplings and the different things we put in. I don't even have a recipe now, but when I make them, I generally know what to put in and in what proportions. I can't even articulate what the proportions are, just what amount of green onions or ginger or garlic looks right with respect to the meat.

On a side note, I also discovered why my pork dumplings always used to be dry. I told my mom I had figured it out, and she asked me what I did. "I bought the fattier pork," I said.

"You can put in oil and water to..."

"Yeah, the fattier pork still tastes the best." (50/50 also works fine.)

Dumplings don't sound like much, but I think that process of trial and error, of cobbling together different recipes and spending time with friends wrapping and snarking over kdramas, all that made cooking something that was mine, not something I performed, which is always how I feel when I execute unfamiliar recipes. Non-Chinese food has the element of the unfamiliar; I know the techniques from Food Network and Cook's Illustrated, but I have very few childhood memories associated with them. (Except baking. But even then, we didn't bake much until high school, because no one had ovens until then.) But dumplings are something I've done ever since I can remember, from before moving to Taiwan. We didn't make them as often in Taiwan because it was so easy getting good, homemade dumplings there, but they were omnipresent. There was a period of time in high school when I refused to eat 水餃 because I got them in my lunch box so often. (Also, sometimes there were pieces of cartilage in the filling.) And then, after living in the US for a while, I had 水餃 again for the first time in a long time, and OMG. It was the Best Thing Ever. That said, I usually make 鍋貼 instead of the boiled ones, largely in case my dumpling wrapping doesn't hold up to the water bath.

I can't even tell you how many times I made terrible 米粉, from the time it was kind of pink and there was no soy sauce in Mariposa to the time I put in too many carrots and the entire thing was orange. Then my sister started sending me Chinese recipes, and a family friend who is much less Americanized than me moved here, and they cooked 家常 stuff, easy stuff, stuff like my mom used to make. And I started to as well in the past few months, using random recipes from my sister and friends, or from googling recipes in Chinese (I still don't much trust recipes in English, though this mistrust could be totally unfounded). When my sister stayed over for Christmas, we cooked for ourselves a fair amount of the time, and a lot of the cooking involved staring at the refrigerator and figuring out what we could do. (And we bought more meat than I have ever bought at a single point in my life, much of which is still in my freezer.) We did things like, "Mommy always says to do [blah]" or "Just cut the ginger into pieces and freeze them and take them out when you need," tips and tricks passed down through friends and relatives and personal experience instead of television or magazines.

Don't get me wrong, the tips and tricks section of Cook's Illustrated is my very favorite section. But it's nice to finally get some from people I actually know, to feel like part of a tradition.

Suddenly, in the past month, I was making Chinese food that wasn't dumplings. And it actually tasted pretty good. I have also learned more about cooking with meat, especially pork, although I still haven't tried stir frying it—my attempts at doing so out of undergrad were so disastrous I mostly stew. I was so surprised at making Chinese food that actually tasted good, that tasted right; I was so used to making it wrong and feeling less Chinese because of it. And even though I still like baking and making other kinds of food, there's something about making Chinese food that feels so homey and so right.

I don't actually eat Chinese food that much when I'm in the US, partly because it sucks eating Chinese food in a restaurant with just one person, partly because it makes me incredibly homesick, and partly because food in Taiwan is so cheap and so amazingly good that I'm usually disappointed with Chinese food here. And suddenly, in the past month or so, I've been eating more Chinese food than I ever have in the US, and although it still does make me a bit homesick, the comforting value is much higher. It's particularly satisfying being able to identify the nice smells from childhood as being cooking soy sauce, or 被爆香的蔥和薑. Is there a term for this in English? When you throw in the aromatics (ginger and scallion in this case) first to ... make it smell good/get the flavor out? Ditto with 把血水去掉... something about putting meat you're going to stew in water and boiling it first to get rid of the blood/fat/impurities in the meat.

But you see what I mean? I think mostly in English, although a week or so back in Taiwan brings back my Chinese fairly quickly. And I learned most of my Western food techniques from Food Network, again in English. But with things like this, I don't have the vocabulary or the phrases in English, because so much of it is from ahyis and my mom and Chinese friends, food names are from Chinese menus. And my spices and herbs are half in Chinese and half in English, because before 2008, I couldn't have even told you what spices are herbs are most commonly used in Chinese cooking. Scallion and ginger and garlic, of course, but I hadn't known much about 八角 or basil or cinnamon or nutmeg or 五香粉 or 陳皮 or what went into 滷味 (I do not actually know what this is in English. It is what you stew meat and eggs and ... everything in and has a bazillion spices and soy sauce?) and assorted 醬. I'm still not at the point where I can figure out what spice tastes like what and goes with what, but I was never there in other cooking as well.

Some of me is sad that it took me this long to learn, but most of me is just happy that I am cooking Chinese food that tastes and smells right, that I am cooking something where I know exactly how I want it to taste because I've eaten it so often, even though I'm not quite sure how to get there. I won't say I've never had that experience while cooking, because I love food, and I love eating, and I have very particular ideas of what everything should taste like, but there's a variety of what meatloaf can taste like for me, whereas with some things in Chinese food, it tastes like home or not like home. During cooking class, my mom and some of the ahyis would say that the teacher's 餃子 or her 滷味吃起來很舒服, and though I understood it before, I really get it now.

The other great thing is that so far, cooking is something I can talk about with my mother that isn't too fraught (although nutrition and weight and etc. still comes in). I am now making her hand write a ton of things she makes and mail it to me, since she hates typing in Chinese. And it's so good to I think I am finally at the point where I can get a list of ingredients and generalized instructions and actually know what to do with it.

When I'm in the US, I don't think about how much I miss Chinese food, because it makes me want to go back to Taiwan too much, or because I end up in restaurants here that aren't bad, but aren't home. And now, it feels like something has broken open, and the house and kitchen finally smell right. It also puts my mom's cooking habits in perspective; she cooked a lot when we lived in the US, but stopped making a lot of things at home when we moved to Taiwan. There are some things that are so time consuming to make that when she finally got somewhere she could buy something just as good (or better) than she could make, she stopped making it. And now I'm back in the US, and even though the Chinese food now is probably exponentially better than it was when she and my dad were grad students, it's still not the same.

Would people be interested in my completely off-the-cuff, untested, and very generalized recipes?

Also, switching between languages to type is SO ANNOYING. Hopefully I will soon memorize the bopomofo keyboard on Windows (pinyin on Mac is so much easier for me).

Comments

[oyceter]

I haven't made wrappers from scratch yet, although I really want to try! My sister said she and her friends tried one Thanksgiving, and it was incredibly labor intensive... but hopefully I will have enough people over for New Year Eve that I can try it because the store-bought dumpling skins are really just not as good. I might also just try making baozi from scratch first (my sister said those skins are probably a bit more forgiving).

I also used to complain about eating Chinese food! And then I went to summer camp in the US in tenth grade, and I had American cafeteria food for 4 weeks, and by the end of it, I was listing out all the Chinese food I wanted to eat. I can go without Chinese food specifically for a fair amount of time, but I can't go without eating Asian food for too long.

But I have never, ever cooked Japanese food from recipes.

I am jealous! I always wanted to be at that level of proficiency, except all my beginning attempts to cook Chinese food with no recipe ended in total disaster! Right now I kind of use recipes, but more to look up ingredients and a general methodology, and then I muck around.

I suspect I mostly cook Canto-style or Zhejiang-style, since my mom's family is from Guangdong and my dad's is from Zhejiang, so she tries to make Zhejiang dishes too.

[trinker]

I didn't know that dumplings came in different thicknesses until I had northern style thick skin guotie in my early 20s. I'm suspecting you grew up with the thinner kind (which is what the Japanese style is) with the Cgantonese cooking? I had to look up Zhejiang but I see that I know it by the subdivision names. Nom!

I should note that I cook the Japanese food that I grew up with, and my mother is a fast cook with a decent repertoire, but not into complicated cooking. So I've never done chawanmushi. And I learned to do rolled sushi from a sushi class in Venice, CA. It helps that Japanese food is traditionally okay with packaged foods - tofu, noodles, nori, fishcakes...

I'm a BIG fan of cookbooks, though. Somewhere, if they haven't been disposed of in my absence, I have 12 feet of cookbooks, including most of the Time-Life Foods of the World. (not the recipe books, though.) I learned to cook by watching and reading the Frugal Gourmet, collecting the aforementioned cookbooks, and hanging out in all sorts of home kitchens.

You might be interested in the Chinese food discussions over at egullet. It's in English, but with people who have knowledge of Chinese food terminology, often written in hanzi as well as in transliteration. It must be working a little, because I only rolled over the first few terms you used to verify, rather than being utterly mystified. So jealous of that proficiency. I want a glossary of Chinese menu descriptions to cram.

[kalmn]

ha- found it.

http://www.amazon.com/Eaters-Guide-Chinese-Characters/dp/0226555925

[trinker]

Thank you!

[umadoshi]

I am totally ordering that book. ^_^

[oyceter]

Hrm. I grew up wrapping the thinner kind, like gyoza skin, but usually labeled for shui jiao in Ranch 99, probably because there's more skin for the buck. (And I still buy that kind for home dumpling wrapping.) So we mostly ate more Canto or Zhejiang style food at home, but I think I ate basically all kinds of Chinese food out in Taiwan. So much! So cheap! So good!

I don't exactly know when I knew potsticker skin and potstickers were wrapped differently from shui jiao, but I think I've been having dumplings with thicker skin ever since living in Taiwan... there used to be this place we used to go to that had the best potstickers, long sticks of pork wrapped in thick and chewy skin that was only wrapped on the top (picture), which I know is how potstickers should be (for some regions? I am not sure!) but wrapping them like you're going to boil them at home makes them more versatile for cooking purposes! And there are actually a fair amount of places in Taiwan where you can buy homemade frozen dumplings, usually with skin that tastes like it was handmade. Or general dumpling restaurants where you can mix your own sauce and they have handmade skins omg so good. Now I am hungry!

My sister and I joke that even though all our grandparents are more from Southern China, we have tastes like Northern Chinese people, because we like our noodles and dumpling skins really fat and chewy and QQ, and we think our mom is weird for liking the thinner, more delicate noodles.

Except Din Tai Feng, which has the most amazing hand-rolled thin skins EVER and I sit there and watch them wrap xiao long bao in the windows and drool.

I love cookbooks! I, haha, don't actually use mine that often (internet!), but I love just reading them.

Oh! I have never heard of egullet! I will definitely have to go over there, especially if they have hanzi and transliteration as well! It drives me up the wall when I can't quite figure out what the Chinese is, even though my Chinese isn't so great.

Oh oh! I got a copy of Chinese Food Finder: The Bay Area and San Francisco by Carl Chu, and although it's ostensibly a Chinese restaurant guide for the Bay Area, he divides it up by regional cuisine and explains a little in the beginning of each section the hallmarks of each style and some typical dishes, including the English name and description and the hanzi title of the dish. Alas, the hanzi title isn't transliterated, so I don't know how hard that might be for you to read, but I found it so helpful! Also, it was super cool finding out where stuff I liked was actually from instead of randomly scanning restaurant menus and going, "This! I like it!"

[trinker]

Actually, hanzi as long as it's clear is fine, because then I can use a dictionary. It's the handwritten stuff that's like crypto. Does it have all the really fun stuff, like pork livers?

egullet is where a bunch of rec.food.cooking regulars ended up. It's gotten kind of...bizarre now, with the "pledge", and a bunch of pros ran away. :( But over all, it and Chowhound are some of the better big food discussion areas left.

I haven't seen the long potstickers like your image. Wow.

I think Taiwan has a mix of Northern style from the KMT influx, and native stuff (which is really different from any other Chinese style I've ever seen, with the sweet and gelatinous and...)

I want to learn to make all sorts of noodles and pasta by hand this year. I learned to make bagels and biscuits last year, and picked up pie crust again. The other thing on my plate this year ;P is sourdough bread from a starter...

Food blogs have pretty much replaced cookbook *buying* for me, but the organization and breadth of what I had is something I'm glad I still have.

[oyceter]

Ahahaha, handwritten. My mom sometimes uses random simplified characters, and I get totally confused. In a quick glance, it does tell you which places have things like intestines and whatnot! I think he describes it as "crude" at one point, but the individual restaurant descriptions also make it seem like he likes intestines; he's just not sure if the reader will. I haven't read it for a while, so this is all from a quick glance, but I hope it doesn't have the "exotic food" whatnot, since I remember reading and being so happy to find stuff on the Chinese food I knew. It even has a section on Islamic Chinese food!

Taiwan food is... yeah. I read somewhere that a lot of chefs from China ended up in Taiwan from the KMT influx and the Communist Revolution, so there's actually a vast array of different regions of Chinese food in Taiwan, and then there is Taiwanese food and Hakka and etc. Oh Taiwan! I miss you so much!

Wooooow I am so impressed you made bagels and biscuits! I have only made a single attempt at pie crust, and while it wasn't a complete failure, it also wasn't tasty. Sourdough! I am hoping that now I have time, I will start making bread again! And maybe graduate to pizza dough!

[trinker]

http://hubpages.com/hub/Homemade_bagel_recipe_Make_great_nadrolled_water_bagels__its_as_easy_as_baking_a_loaf_of_bread/ (ignore the unfortunate typo in the title!) is my go-to recipe for bagels. It is very, very easy, but you should make sure to have bread flour, and to knead and knead and knead (if you don't, you'll get pretzels, especially if you put baking soda in the boiling water. Which are tasty, but not quite the point!)

Ohhh Islamic Chinese food. So tasty! I dragged la famiglia to the one in the SGV last time I was in L.A. *with* the ex. Knife-cut noodles of the seriously thick and ragged sort. Lamb everything. Hot bread. Aahhhhh...

Boston has the best Taiwanese food I've found anywhere, although the upstairs food court on Ste. Catherine in Montreal was good, too.

Biscuits were easy in the South. (They have the right sort of flour available there, easily. It's hard to make bad biscuits there.) But it's like pie crust. Gotta get used to the idea that you don't overwork the mixture, make sure the butter is cold, and just get everything to hold together, and then roll out.


My grandmother writes *beautifully*. Which means illegibly, to me. My uncle-by-marriage has (had?) a mother who learned to write late in life (unusually for Japanese), and when I praised her writing as easy to read, I was mocked, and also thought to be being unkindly pointing out her shortcomings! Oh, so confusing, the contrast between that, and Western calligraphy. (And so personally *argh*, that I can do Western calligraphy, but not Eastern.)

I don't like the texture of sea cucumbers, and I've yet to find tripe worthwhile, but everything else...ohhh, nomnom.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Biscuits are not really that hard to do, part of the trick for best results is to use the right flour, keep your fats cold (so you get that nice flaky-layers effect) and don't overwork the dough. Pie crust, I am a total pie fiend -- another one of those things that apparently skipped a generation from my grandma to me -- I can totally talk you through hints on pie crusts, they really don't have to be scary things! Bagels are a lot more work, with the rising and parboiling and baking: I've tried them once or twice but they never quite tasted as amazing as stuff I've had from traditional bakeries in New York City, so for the results-to-work tradeoff I'm personally just as happy getting so-so bagels from local bakeries rather than going to all the trouble myself. Pizza dough is not really any harder than yeast bread in general, what's tricky is if there is a very very specific style you want to replicate.

Do you have a bread machine? IK, single-use appliance, etc., but if you are frequently short on time/energy and/or have any RSI/arthritis/etc. type issues in your hands and wrists, just using one to automate the kneading the dough and give it a warm controlled environment to rise in can be a total godsend: even though I have a nice stand mixer with a dough hook, I never used it as often as I would have liked for bread because I can't really pummel the dough like you need to. You can pick up older, used models really cheap on eBay or thrift stores, people get them and don't use them and end up practically giving them away after a few years, and if you are going to be doing all the final baking in a real oven, it doesn't matter if you get an older one that does funny-shaped loaves on the bake cycle because you're only going to be using the dough cycle. I found an old Zojirushi for less than twenty bucks at a local thrift shop and have gotten way more than my money's worth out of it and it is still going strong after several years' use. (I even use it to make the bao dough for my manapua!)

[arboretum]

sobbing

do you come to la often?

have you ever been to luscious dumpling in san gabriel?

if you are in la anytime in the next forever/whenever PLEASE GO and/or LET ME TAKE YOU

they make the most amazing potstickers and jiu3cai4he2zi, i mean the dumplings are good too, but just. oh those potstickers. cos they make the skin by hand and it's fat and chewy and QQ and then when they fry it OH MAN IT'S HEAVENLY

also i'm trying to learn how to make dumpling skin by hand from my parents!! my mom reported to me that she just learned from her friend how to make shenjienbao (i'm spelling that wrong aren't i. is it shenjian? fail chinese person fail lol) and i am SO EXCITED

[trinker]

Hi, you don't know me, except what you've read here, but...I'm in L.A.-ish...

[oyceter]

I don't come that often, but my sister is there now, and I visit Rachel every now and then too! I will definitely make you take me next time I am there!!! Also I will tell my sister. OMG. She hasn't even gone to Din Tai Feng LA yet and I think she only went to Monterey Park once or something -_-;;. She complains it is too far (true).

OMG jiu cai he zi! I have not had that for SO LONG!

Ahaha, I cannot spell Chinese either. I am totally making up all my pinyin because I never really learned it! Google told me it was shengjianbao I think? I always get the eng and en mixed up even in bopomofo! Handmade dumpling skins awesome!!

[mme_hardy]

I've made wrappers from scratch. If you have a pasta machine (ours was a wedding present) it's dead easy. God bless technology.

I was wondering which kind of "dumplings" (English is sloppy) you meant -- you don't mean bao, you mean the kind with skins? God I love those. I made bao once; it works surprisingly well with Southern-style barbecued pork.

[mme_hardy]

By "pasta machine" I mean the kind that rolls dough thinner and thinner, not the kind that pushes the pasta out into shapes.

[trinker]

In Hawaii, it's possible to find almost anything wrapped in "manapua" dough. Curried chicken, sweet pumpkin, Chinese bbq pork, Chinese ground pork hash...I can readily imagine the sweet and spicy versions of BBQ going well. (Not so much the sour Carolinas versions.)

[mme_hardy]

We hate the sweet and spicy kind, so this was Carolina. Incidentally one of the local Chinese places in NC had barbecue fried rice; my husband tried making it at home using just the pulled pork, no sauce, and it's actually a surprisingly good idea. Conclusion: There are few things that aren't better with smoked pork.

My husband's wicked good barbecue sauce (he's from Georgian antecedents) starts with hoisin sauce...

[trinker]

Really, the sour mustard kind of Carolina 'cue?

(I like it with the traditional accompaniment of soft bread and coleslaw. On the other hand, now that I'm trying to wrap my head around it, I have a fondness for White Castle sliders, which are rather like bao.)

My mother's Asian bbq sauce starts with "start with a tangy master sauce..." There's no recipe, it's based on whatever else she has in the fridge and pantry. Sometimes it's hoisin, sometimes it's black bean sauce augmented with honey...

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

A sampler of manapua filling recipes here, for anyone who's interested -- http://www.manapualabs.com/manaindex.html

I will vouch from experience that you can substitute chopped SPAM for the char siu the classic BBQ pork version if you want some seriously unhealthy-goodness local-kine grindz. ;)

[oyceter]

*is distracted* OMG spam musubi SO GOOD.

[oyceter]

Ha, I have no idea what it is in English? But yes, the ones with skin, usually thinner, although sometimes thicker and chewy, and definitely not the white fluffy skin of baozi (I think the word for dumpling skin and baozi skin are the same in Chinese, oh language).

I love baozi! I want to try making them now... I had some with meigan cai a few weeks ago from an ahyi, and omg. I hadn't had meigan cai for SO LONG! I think I am going to try the Shanghainese shengjianbao for new year!

[mme_hardy]

Oh, I bet my husband would love meigan cai -- did you find it at Ranch 99?

[oyceter]

The baozi themselves were from my ahyi's friends who make them and sell them, but you can get dried meigan cai at Ranch. It's in the other spice/herb aisle where you get all the dried seaweed and dried squid and dried mushrooms and etc.

I know there's a Chinese vendor at the Mountain View farmers market that makes their own dumplings and has added baozi, but it's been a while since I've been there, so I don't remember what kinds of baozi they have!

[veejane]

We'll not mention all the cooking notes I'm taking on these comments, except to say that I had this kind of conversation (only way more muddled) with my sister a month or two ago, in which I realized that the reason I love the dumplings at one particular nearby Chinese is that the wrappers are thick and chewy and substantial, rather than thin like, well, like skin. The thickness, when they're steamed and then finished off in a really hot pan so they have a little crisp but not all the way to crunchy, is just the thing for winter blahs.

(All of this very much confused by neither of us having the vocabulary to discuss these things coherently, and the thin-skinned type of dumplings being so much more common. She was like, Bao? And I was like, No, not bao, but like bao's skinnier, more-transportable, beefy cousin! I've told you haven't I that my region likes to call all Asian dumplings "Peking ravioli." I would say I don't even know except I totally know the origins of that kind of awkward elocution.)

[oyceter]

Yes, I love the chewiness! QQ. I say that, but I also love the delicate skins of Din Tai Feng's dumplings, which aren't quite chewy and hearty, but are really refined and delicious. And also handmade, which makes it scarier... I think they have a set # of folds you have to fold into the top of each xiaolongbao. And the weight of the meat. I know because I have seen them doing it!

Ahahaha Peking ravioli WHUT.

Dumpling in Chinese is jiaozi. If they're boiled, it's shuijiao (lit. water dumpling), and pan-fried ones are guotie (lit. pot sticker). Eh. Although that is mostly the non-dim-sum type. Shaomai/shumai don't have the "jiao" in them, probably because they are open on top. And "bao" can have think skin too, like xiaolongbao. I think they are bao if they are closed in a circular fashion (top or bottom), shaomai if there is that bit on the top that's open, and jiaozi if the majority of the skin is pinched shut in a non-circular fashion. And xiajiao/har gao (shrimp dumplings)... I don't think I'd ever call them jiaozi, but the "jiao" in "xiajiao" is the same character. But! Other people in Taiwan or China might! I feel the non-wheat skin makes them slightly less jiaozi-y.

Wow. I did not even realize I made these distinctions before now!