Known in Chinese as jiăo zi (饺子), they symbolize wealth as the potsticker is in the shape of historical Chinese silver and gold ingots. One of the must-eat foods we cook every year is potstickers, which are dumplings traditionally filled with meat and vegetables. Now that I have my own family, we celebrate the holiday by passing down traditions which include eating Chinese New Year symbolic foods.
I grew up in a Chinese-American household where we celebrated Chinese New Year. The first day of the holiday is based on the Chinese lunar new year calendar and always falls between January 21 and February 20. The celebration lasts for 15 days, and the start date varies from year to year. A time for family and friends to gather together, the holiday celebrates the incoming new year with hopes of good luck and prosperity. All opinions expressed in my post are my own.Ĭhinese New Year is the biggest holiday in China. If you feel like it needs more salt, by all means, add more salt.Thank you to Ling Ling for sponsoring this post. Most recipes deliberately go low on the amount of salt you should use so you don’t accidentally over salt your dish. Even amongst kosher salt, Morton’s for example is much more salty than Diamond Crystal (which I use). Salt has different levels of salinity depending on the type and brand.If you can’t get tahini you can also grind your own sesame seeds until you have something resembling runny peanut butter. I use a brand called “Al Wadi” that comes in a plastic container with a green label and lid and has a relatively mellow flavor. If your grocery store doesn’t carry it, try finding a Middle Eastern or Indian grocery store. It should be light beige in color and have a thick pourable consistency. Tahini is not the same as toasted sesame paste.The onions should be a deep brown, but they should not be burnt, if they are browning unevenly, turn the heat down, so they brown more slowly.If you’re having a hard time finding it, try asking for it at a butcher. By whisking small bits of minced fatback in at the end, you create an emulsion of soup and fat, so it makes the soup nice and creamy without being greasy. Most of the fat from the stock gets skimmed out, and the fat added at the last minute is what gives the soup it’s rich “sticky” quality.
Don’t omit the fatback (salted pork fat).
Using other types of pork bones such as ribs or neck bones will not give your soup the richness or color. The white color comes from the marrow and collagen in these parts. To get the creamy white soup it’s important that you use pork leg bones and the trotters.Eventually, I got the soup to a place where you could pass it off as ramen to the less experienced palate (which was when I started writing this post), but it never quite nailed the nuanced balance of meat, aromatics, and body. Over the years, my attempts yielded broths that were too porky, too brown, or too canned-meat tasting. Actually, they were more like noodles in pork soup. My first attempts were pale watery excuses for ramen. I don’t know if I’m just crazy or if it’s my fearless American spirit, but at some point in college, it occurred to me that I could make the one bowl wonder that got me through many an all-nighter… from scratch. Given the availability of reasonably good frozen ramens, and the plethora of shops specializing in the one bowl meal, most sane people in Japan don’t undertake the challenge of making ramen at home from scratch. It’s thick, creamy and nearly white in color, from pork marrow bones that have been simmered to smithereens. In case you haven’t been indoctrinated into the wonderful world of ramen, Tonkotsu broth is the Holly Grail of noodle soup broths. This post may have been a year in the making, but I’ve been working on this tonkotsu ramen for the better part of the last decade.
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