Bierocks, Beer Rocks, Berrocks

I made the mistake of posting a food photo on Facebook last month without explaining how to make the things. Yesterday several friends took notice and asked for the recipe. For those who cannot do without bierocks, here’s that recipe. Bie-what? Yeah, we had that conversation at home. Between a Midwesterner and a native Californian, it went something like this:

"What are they?"
"Bierocks."
"What?"
"Bierocks."
"They're what?"
"German bao."

"Oh!"

Coastal Californians, of course, have more intimate knowledge of dim sum dumplings such as xiaolongbao than they do of Midwestern comfort food, so appealing to a bao sensibility was simply a fast way to get at the heart of the meaning. I could have just as easily called them Kansas empanadas. Bierocks, brought to the American Midwest by 19th century Mennonite immigrants, are stuffed rolls that fit in the palm of your hand.

Norma Jost Voth writes in Mennonite Foods and Folkways from South Russia (volume 1):

Bierocks, among Molotschna Mennonites, were bread pockets amply filled with a mixture of ground beef and cabbage. A little like a hamburger sandwich, they made a hearty meal, were conveniently served hot or cold and made ideal traveling companions for trips or picnics...The word Bierock is related to the Turkish word berok or boerek. Today, in the Crimean city of Simferopol (where Russian Mennonites went to school or went shopping) they are called cherbureki and sold on the street.

Also spelled beer rocks or berrocks, the word is also a cognate of piroshki, pierogi, pirogi, and the dozens of other spellings for those thick, filled dumplings popular in Polish families, and are similar to Russian, Ukrainian, and other central and eastern European dumplings. These, however, are a bit bigger and baked rather than simmered and pan-fried. In the American Midwestern states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri, even larger versions are sometimes known as runzas (because, wags that we were in college, we figured a meal of the low-grade examples from our dorm’s cafeteria would deliver a nearly immediate, and perhaps fatal, case of the runs).

No worries. These shouldn’t cause such gastronomic distress — unless you gorge a dozen or so. Then you deserve it. In fact, I am under orders to make more “German bao.” The recipe below is one I adapted, slightly, from Bruce Aidells and Dennis Kelly’s good book, Real Beer and Good Eats. The filling is classic: cabbage, onions, and sausage. It is, however, a versatile recipe and practically begs to be tweaked. Some variants I like: (1) Make a pseudo-Reuben by swapping out 2 cups of rye flour for 2 of all purpose flour, add some caraway to the dough, and use sauerkraut, pastrami, and Swiss cheese (deli Swiss is fine or class it up with a nice Comte or cave-aged Emmenthal), (2) Use any or all of mushrooms, fried onions, spinach, or Swiss chard as fillings. (3) Try roast pork, garlic, broccoli raab, and sharp provolone. You get the idea. Keep the stuffing moist and fully enclosed when you make the buns and you should have no problems.

Bierocks

Filling
1½ pounds/680 g fresh sage or smoked sausage, removed from the casings
1 cup/300g onion, diced small
4 cups/300g shredded cabbage
1 Tbl fresh minced garlic (or 1 tsp powdered)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dried onion powder
½ tsp pimento/smoked paprika

Dough
⅓ cup/75g sugar
½ tsp salt
1 package (1 ounce) active dry yeast
1½ cups/350ml warm cooking water (at about 100° F.) from the potatoes
⅔ cup/150g butter, softened
2 eggs
1 cup/265g warm mashed potatoes (at about 100° F.)
7—7½ cups/about 900g all-purpose flour

To make the filling: Fry the sausage over medium heat 3-5 minutes to render some of the fat. Pour off the fat, and add the onion, cabbage, salt, and spices. Cover and cook for 10 minutes, or until the cabbage has wilted. Set aside to cool while you prepare the dough.

To make the dough: Dissolve the sugar, salt, and yeast in the warm potato water. Proof in a warm spot (80-100°F/27-38°C.) until the mixture becomes bubbly, about 5-10 minutes. Pour into a large mixing bowl. Blend in the butter, eggs, mashed potatoes, and 7 cups of the flour.

Knead on a floured surface until the dough becomes elastic and easy to work, about 5-10 minutes. Add the remaining flour if needed. Place the dough in a large oiled bowl and cover loosely with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for 45 minutes to 1 hour until the dough doubles in size.

After it has risen, punch down the dough and form into 24 equal balls. Pat the balls into ½-inch-thick rounds, about 2 inches in diameter. Place about ¼ cup of the filling in the middle of each round. Form the dough around the filling to make round rolls. Pinch the seams together and place, seam-side down, on a baking sheet. Put in a warm spot and let the rolls rise for 20-40 minutes. It the surface of the dough has dried out, brush lightly with water.

Heat the oven to 375°F/175°C. Bake the rolls for 20-25 minutes or until the beer rocks have a nice golden color and a mouth-watering aroma. The rolls freeze well.

Makes 24 rolls, 3-4” diameter.

Adapted from Bruce Aidells and Dennis Kelly (1992) Real Beer and Good Eats: The Rebirth of America's Beer and Food Traditions.

Goes well with:

• Aidells and Kelly's book can be had for ridiculously little money on Amazon. 
• Speaking of homey Midwestern foods, it's still cold and wet in huge swaths of the US; try some German bacon dumplings or homemade egg noodles to take the chill off.  
• Norma Jost Voth's Mennonite Foods and Folkways from South Russia is not quite as cheap or common as Real Beer and Good Eats, but it should be easy enough to track down copies in the US and Canada. Volume one can be found here and volume two here.
• Finally, if you just can't bring yourself to make dough from scratch, you could — in extremis — pop open a tube of ready-to-bake biscuits, stuff them, and bake them off as above. It's ok: I've cooked drunk before, too. Tart them up at least a little, though; an egg glaze, maybe, sprinkled with flaky salt, caraway seeds, or a blend of cumin and smoked paprika. 

Bacon Dumplings for a Wicked Hangover

Though I make Speckklöße only, at best, once a year, I lust after them each and every week. Speckwhat? Think of them as bacon dumplings. Think of them, also, as restorative after a night of debauchery and something you can make almost on autopilot. Hot, cheap, smoky, lightly greasy, carb-heavy with bacon’s ineffable umami loveliness, and better than aspirin when that bottle you hit last night smacks you right back. I could eat a dozen. Which is about how many this recipe makes.

Dumpling eaters. Don't make yours so big.

In Germany, Klöße and Knödl are names for poached dumplings made from potatoes, semolina, yesterday’s bread, flour, breadcrumbs, even crumbled dry pretzels. These dry ingredients are softened with stock, milk, or other liquids and are generally bound with eggs and flavored with fruits, nuts, or various proteins such as fish, cracklings, or — in this case — bacon.

Sidestepping the intricacies both of territorial nomenclature and of nearly infinite dumpling species, we’ll call these simply “Klöße.” That weird character, that ß, represents a sound we often make in English, but for which we don’t have a single character. It’s called an eszett and is pronounced like a double-s, so you’ll see these sometimes as Kloss (singular) or Klosse (plural). Speck is smoked bacon so Speck-Klöße are simply bacon dumplings.

Like all the German foods I ate growing up, I learned to make these in the American Midwest where German, Swiss, and Austrian bakeries, Konditoreien, sausage shops, and butchers were commonplace and the Germanic (or, as we called it, “Dutchy”) influence on home cooking was pervasive. The older I get, the less I eat the German foods of my youth. But as I work through our bacon inventory, I’ve been building a craving for a bowl of Speckklöße.

Today, I capitulated.

Speckklöße

The recipe calls for simmering the dumplings. Seriously: simmer. If you boil these, they are likely just to fall apart in the pot. Edible, but in the same way a fistful of dough is.

3” square of slab bacon, diced into tiny cubes (about 8 slices if using pre-sliced)
1 medium loaf of crusty bread
1 cup/250ml hot milk
2 eggs, beaten
Salt and pepper
q.s. rich chicken stock

Cut the loaf into slices (crust or no crust: your call, but save the cumbs) and pour the hot milk over them in a large bowl. Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen towel or a cutting board (careful that it doesn't tip the bowl) to keep in the heat and moisture. Fry the bacon pieces in a medium pan. When the bacon is browned, pour it, grease and all, over the soaking bread in the bowl. When the mixture cools, add the eggs, salt, and pepper. Mix gently but thoroughly.

Shape into small round dumplings about 1.5”/4cm in diameter. If they seem too wet, add some of the reserved breadcrumbs or even a small bit of flour. If they’re too dry, add a bit of stock. Then simmer the dumplings gently in rich chicken stock (I flavor my stock with roasted garlic and cumin) until they float and are cooked through (about 10-15 minutes).

Serve hot in shallow bowls with some of the stock.

Notes

About the bacon: Use the very best you can find. I like slab bacon, but pre-sliced is fine. Allan Benton’s stuff is amazing, but if you’ve got a local shop making or selling high-quality smoked pork belly, by all means shop there. And do check out Maynard Davies' Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer.

About the bread: It’s easier to get good cupcakes in San Diego than good bread. Fortunately, we have Bread & Cie, a bakery that consistently puts out the sorts of high-quality breads I knew in the Midwest, on the East coast, and in Europe. Go for something with some character, a tight crumb, and a crisp crust. By all means, use flavored breads if you want to experiment; just keep in mind the effect that things like olives, rosemary, or jalapenos may have on the final dish.

For that matter, you can play with the poaching liquid. I find the idea repugnant, but you could — if you possess the perversity to do such things — swap out the bacon with country ham and poach these in coffee as a red-eye dumpling concoction. But beef stock, fumé, and vegetable stocks are all fine. Water, too, in a pinch, if it’s salted. Deep-fried in fat takes it an entirely different, though no less delicious, direction. Want to sauté some onion and include it in the dumplings? In. Got cracklings from rendering your own goose fat? In. Knock yourself out.

The version above is the no-frills classic I prefer at home, but there’s no reason not to take the basic idea and run with it.

Lord knows the Germans have.

How About You Drink China Instead?

One street behind San Diego's pan-Asian supermarket 99 Ranch Market, beyond banners announcing its perpetual grand opening and the all-you-can-eat $18 hot pot, lies Mr. Dumpling, one of my default lunch joints.

I am enamored of Mr. Dumpling's xiao long bao (called on the menu "pork juicy buns" and elsewhere known as Shangahi soup dumplings). The steamed dumplings are little more than tiny pork meatballs and a splash of stock wrapped in a thin caul of dumpling wrapper. The trick to eating them is to bite a small hole at the bottom edge, slurp out the stock, and only then tackle the rest of it. Invariably I dunk mine in a soy/chile/black vinegar concoction I mix at the table. Sure, I'll order other things once I'm there, but those fat little rascals are the reason to go.

Naturally, the staff have come to know me. Small dishes sometimes appear unbidden on our table; pickles, boiled peanuts, little pancakes. One day when eating alone, I was engrossed in Chris Bunting's book Drinking Japan. When the waiter brought dumplings, I set the book aside and he read the title.

"Drinking Japan?" he exclaimed, in (mostly) mock indignation. "How about you drink China instead?"

"Sure, ok." You see, I'm agreeable about these things. "Where can I get Chinese liquor in San Diego?"

"Hmm. Maybe 99 Ranch Market."

"Yeah, I saw their sake and shōchū, but I didn't notice any Chinese spirits."

"They also have umeshu," he offered, naming a Japanese plum liqueur.

"Chinese umeshu?" I pressed.

He smiled, caught. "Yeah, Chinese stuff is pretty hard to find. Maybe it's ok if you drink Japan sometimes."

And so I do.

Mr. Dumpling
7250 Convoy Court (not Convoy Street)
San Diego, CA 92111
(858) 576-6888

[Edit 10.9.12: With a change of staff for both the front and back of the house, the quality of the restaurant has suffered. I can't in good conscious recommend a meal here any longer. Pity. Those were great dumplings]

Goes well with:

• My take on Andrea Nguyen’s excellent book, Asian Dumplings.
• Mr. Dumpling staff aren't the only ones who disapprove of my drink choices. An eerily similar remark came from a TSA agent in Kentucky who took a dim view of my Tuthilltown Spirits bottle as I worked my way through Louisville airport security.

Bookshelf: The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook

Want to cook Asian food at home, but aren't quite sure which cookbook to get? Got one for you: The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook.

Pan-Asian cookbooks exist and some are great starting points to explore recipes or learn about ingredients. But in the end, many are disappointing because they are little more than catalogs of recipes from diverse cultures sometimes thousands of miles apart. Patricia Tanumihadja's book also draws from widely separated cultures, but anchors recipes to specific grandmothers and great-grandmothers whom she profiles in succinct little oral histories. It's these stories and their ancillary headnotes in the various recipes that really make the book shine.

We learn, for instance, about Kimiye Hayashi from Bellevue, Washington. Born in Pueblo, Colorado to Japanese parents from Hiroshima, she lived in Southern California at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When Japanese Americans were being rounded up for relocation camps during the war, she fled to an abandoned farm, but was eventually put into an Arkansas camp with her family. Tanumihadja writes that while Mrs. Hayashi cooks hamburgers, fried chicken, and other typically American foods, she also scoured Japanese cookbooks — especially those from church groups — for recipes. "You want to eat something you want," she says, "you just learn how to do it."

She's hardly alone. Asian-American grandmothers from Thai, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Burmese, Lao, Indian, Nepalese, Indonesian, and other cultures contribute recipes for dishes that are representative not only of their ancestral homes, but of the American influences in their families' cooking. Somen salad, for instance, isn't traditional Japanese cookery, but the noodle dish with shredded lettuce and barbecued pork is a popular at many Japanese American gatherings. Then there's the leftover Thanksgiving turkey rice porridge.

The familiar and the tantalizing are there, too: Thai basil pork (pad gkaprow mu); chicken adobo; potstickers; caramelized pork belly braised in coconut water; marbled tea eggs; lumpia, lechon, and sinangag; there's shrimp toast, shiu mai, and (my personal weakness) the Shanghai soup dumplings known as xiao long bao; mulligatawny soup from India; and sai oua, a Lao pork sausage with cilantro, culantro, lemongrass, chilies, garlic, etc. — perfect for grilling.

There's banquet food, appetizers, comfort food, and more. I'm lukewarm about the recipes in so many cookbooks, but nearly every one in the Asian Grandmothers Cookbook makes me want to change dinner plans and fix that.

Well done, Ms. Tanumihadja. This one's a treasure.


Patricia Tanumihadja (2009)
The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook: Home Cooking from Asian Kitchens
368 pages, hardback
Sasquatch Books
ISBN: 157061556X
$35.00

Goes well with:

• Want to get in touch with Ms Tanumihadja? Visit her website. She claims, and there's every reason to believe her, that she'd be happy to hear from you.

Bookshelf: Asian Dumplings

I have lost count.

I have simply lost count of the number and variety of potstickers, lumpia, shuijiao, shaomai, mandu, har gow, and ridiculously tasty xiaolongbao I’ve devoured since Andrea Nguyen’s book Asian Dumplings showed up at the Whiskey Forge this summer. That last one, known sometimes as soup dumplings, Shanghai soup dumplings, or even cryptically as juicy pork buns, is one of my all-time favorite Asian dumplings. The little steamed pocket of dough holds not just pork, but a small puddle of rich soup. Bite a small hole in the bottom, slurp out the soup, dip the rest in a chili sauce, and down it. I knew in theory how to make them using a gelatin-rich stock, but the particulars had escaped me…until now.

With thousands of food books around the house, some inevitably are used more than others. After spending a week plucking through Asian Dumplings, I knew that if I had to trim down to 100 cookbooks, this would be one of them. In fact, it’s one of maybe five cookbooks I use in the kitchen. I try to keep it clean, to keep it away from splatters and spills, but like a good knife, this a tool, not an heirloom for future generations. If future generations want to make dumplings, they can find their own damn copies. This one is mine and I’m guarding it with my good knives.

Pork dumplings at the Whiskey Forge

It’s true that there are a half dozen different dumplings in my freezer, all made with my own hands using Nguyen’s straightforward directions. Her master shapes sections show clearly how to make crescents, half-moons, pleats, and other common shapes. Some get slightly more complicated, but nothing harder than tortellini. Those dumplings I made following her instructions are for when I want to make a quick and easy dinner.

But I’ve been going out, too, using Nguyen’s book as a sort of field guide, ordering trays of dumplings at area restaurants. As a child growing up in the Midwest, the range of Asian dumplings available to me was limited — egg rolls, potstickers, wontons, and sometimes spring rolls. My tastes, budget, and exposure to new foods have evolved, but I still learned new styles and names from Nguyen. After reading the book, it’s reassuring to enter a new restaurant, review the dumpling offerings, and know exactly where to start.

Fry them? Why would you not?

Both Asian and dumpling are defined broadly in the book, so we have the expected wealth of Chinese pan-fried, deep-fried, and steamed dumplings, but also samosas and moong dal vada from India, Filipino lumpia, Spring rolls, and Indonesian lemper ayam (spiced rice and chicken wrapped in a banana leaf). There are snacks from Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Japan, Mongolia, and Korea — stuffed buns, pastries, various rolls, and sweet dumplings. Eat them plain or dip them in the flavored oils, sauces, chutneys described at the end of the book.

The recipes represent a transcontinental dim sum feast from India to Japan. Whether you follow Nguyen’s recipes to the letter or use her clear techniques and line drawings to develop your own fillings, folds, and doughs, there is enough inspiration here to last months. Or, in my case, years.

Come over and have dumplings if you like. Shoot, have a seat and help me make a few dozen, but if you want the book, you’ll have to get your own copy.


Andrea Nguyen (2009)
Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More
240 pages, hardback
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1580089755
$30.00

Goes well with:

• Asian Dumpling Tips, Nguyen’s website and blog. Also check her out on Twitter: @aqnguyen
• Perfectly Edible's take on those little Shanghai soup dumplings I love so much, adapted from Asian Dumpings.  
• Caring for Old Cocktail Books — Why taking a book into into the kitchen is a big deal for a collector like me. Nguyen's is so good I don't mind if it gets destroyed. Just gives me a reason to get another copy.