It's the fourth and final part of the Four Great Traditions of Chinese cuisine: Cantonese. More accurately, this cuisine is Yue or Guandong but most people know it as Cantonese, representing the southern part of the country. When you go to a Chinese takeout or buffet in the United States, this is probably the type of food that most closely resembles what you'll get. Of course, traditional Cantonese is going to be fresher, have more technique, be less sweet, etc, but American Chinese came to be due to Cantonese immigrants to the US adapting their style of cooking for those around them. While I understand the differences, I still enjoy takeout Chinese; it's still real food being cooked by real people, it's a great treat every once in a while, and it's its own cuisine in and of itself. (I would skip the chain restaurants, though.)
Back to the food I made! Cantonese cuisine doesn't usually include a lot of spice or condiments, outside of the usual soy sauce, vinegar, scallion, garlic, sesame oil, etc. The meal I decided to make for this region is wonton noodle soup, which really doesn't require too many ingredients.
The first thing I did was make my dough. I used the same dough to make both the noodles and the wontons. The dough is a simple egg noodle dough, made with eggs, flour, salt, and water. Everything is mixed together, kneaded, and rested. After resting a first time, you flatten it by bashing it with a rolling pin for 5 minutes. I'm not sure why you do that instead of just kneading it, but that's what the recipe told me to do. My apologies to my next-door neighbor.
While the dough rested a second time I made my wonton filling. Normally they would be filled with pork and shrimp, but I used the veggie crumbles that I used for mapo tofu. The crumbles were mixed with garlic, ginger, scallion, white pepper, egg yolk, soy sauce, sesame oil, and Shaoxing wine.
After my dough had rested, I rolled it out and started cutting my noodles. This is where a pasta cutter attachment would come in handy. I cut every single one of those noodles by hand with a knife. The recipe I used said to fold the dough a few times and cut (kind of like a chiffonade) so that the noodles were long but I found that mine were just sticking together into one thick noodle that way. Maybe my dough was too soft or I didn't add enough flour in between the layers, or my knife wasn't sharp enough. I ended up just slicing long thin strips which worked out fine but took more time.
The noodles were dusted in flour and stretched out just a little bit. They didn't turn out too bad! A little uneven, but for my first time making noodles that thin, I'm not disappointed.
Once I had my noodles cut from half the dough, I used the other half to make the wonton wrappers. I used my pasta roller attachment to make the dough super thin, then cut into shapes sort of resembling squares. They were all different shapes and sizes but at that point I was just ready to start cooking. Each wrapper was filled, then folded up and sealed into a wonton.
As you can see, some of the wontons turned out looking alright, while others look like a drunk but oddly dexterous toddler attempted them.
I tried out a variety of folding techniques, ranging from folding into a triangle, then bringing the corners together (as seen above) to just saying "screw it, as long as it's sealed I don't care." I believe the closest folding technique is known as the "purse" or "money bag" fold. I definitely rolled my dough too thin; if it was easier to work with I would have been more conscientious in my folds. Everything was just falling out all over the place and I was not enjoying the process.
When about half my wontons were filled and folded, I was finally ready to start cooking! I had one big pot of water boiling for the noodles and wontons, and another big pot filled with vegetable broth, in which i cooked some bok choy. I was very glad when I put my noodles in the water that they neither fell apart nor stuck together. Stirring them with a chopstick was the best way to move them around gently to make sure that they didn't stick. The noodles only needed to cook 2-3 minutes before getting nice and chewy.
Then came the wontons...the majority of them turned out fine, but a couple just completely fell apart, which I was expecting. Again, it was the dough that I rolled too thin.
To prepare the soup, each bowl gets some scallions, soy sauce and sesame oil, then some broth and bok choy. Once the noodles are done cooking, they're also added to each bowl. Lastly, the wontons are added as they finish cooking.
The soup ends up a little oily on top, due to the sesame oil, but the amount of other components helps balance that out. Even with a few broken wontons, I think this turned out pretty okay! The best part is that we were ready to sit down and eat at 7:30. The dough itself was easy to make, but was a little time consuming to cut everything and fold everything. The recipe I used for the soup called for both store-bought noodles and wonton wrappers, so at least I'm ahead of the game. If I make wontons again, I would probably make a huge batch on a weekend when I can sit down and bang out a few dozen, then freeze them for a quick weeknight dinner.
Well that concludes the Chinese cuisine series; here are Parts 1, 2 and 3. Happy Lunar New Year everybody!
Recipes Used: Egg Noodles // Wonton Noodle Soup
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