Go to the Recipe: Dim Sum-Style Shrimp Cheung Fun
Good morning, any reason not to use my steam oven instead of a bamboo streamer? And could I then cook all 3 pans at once? Thank you
Same question. I would think you might be able to, although a combi oven produces much less steam volume than a stove top steamer, so it would cook slower. There's a 2 Michelin-star Dim Sum restaurant in NYC that has Rationals, but still uses their steamer instead for this reason.
BTW, in my hands, dumplings are terrible in a combi oven. I tested many different settings, and stovetop steamer always wins.
A commercial combi oven might work (and I've had friends successfully do this, anecdotally). But BostonBestEats is correct, you need a very full head of steam to steam the sheets properly. If you don't have enough steam, then the sheet will not set quickly enough and may crack.
Why does this happen? From what I've observed, the batter is a suspension of starch in water, but it's definitely not emulsified. Every time you cook a sheet, you need to stir the batter to keep the suspension relatively stable before dosing. Fast setting (steaming) locks this suspension in place, so you get the right structure. But if the sheet cooks too slowly, the starches settle to the bottom, and I observe inefficient gelatinazation (likely because the water in the batter is just sitting on top, which means it can't interact with much of the settled starch on the bottom. The result? Cracked sheets.
At the end of the day, it seems like you'll need to play with the combi settings to get as much rolling steam as possible to make this work. But I haven't tried, so give it a shot if you're motivated and let us know how it turns out.
Hope this helps!
Tim. This recipe inspired me to, after @ 10 years, level my stove. My future cakes thank you. As for the recipe itself, I used Bob's Red Mill tapioca and rice flour from Thailand. As expected, the batter separated and need to be whisked before each use. I weighed and whisked the batter just before pouring it into the hot pan as instructed but the 40g first attempt was not enough to give me a usable finished sheet in my 1/8 sheet Nordic Ware pans. Perhaps they are a bit larger than yours? Photo below. For the next ones I increased the batter to 60g and although they did not bubble up cooking, they covered the pan when set. As I made the subsequent sheets the preceding ones pulled away from the sides a bit. Is that normal? My bamboo steamer baskets are 10 inch so I used a small roasting pan with a rack and a foil cover to steam the sheets. The setup worked fine and the results were great. The sauce had just enough sweetness to compliment the shrimp and scallion oil makes everything better. I used the burnt scallions as a final garnish and pan fried some of your shrimp, pork and cabbage dumplings from my freezer to go with the shrimp rolls. Once again, thanks for the recipe.
