Photo by Eugenia Bone
Provenance of Dish
Another tasty use for your mushroom duxelles. Duxelles is minced mushrooms and shallots cooked down to a paste, sometimes flavored with herbs and/or cream. It is great to have on hand as it has many uses. Lately, I’ve been combining duxelles and sausage meat flavored with ginger and scallions in a gyoza wrapper and frying them. The gyoza can be frozen, too. Just defrost and reheat in a pan slicked with a little toasted sesame seed oil. You can definitely do this as a vegetarian or vegan dish. Just double the amount of duxelles, and flavor them with minced ginger and minced scallions and a dash of soy. This recipe makes about 1 half-pint of duxelles. You will need about ¼ pint for gyoza with sausage but the whole half-pint is you want to make an all-mushroom gyoza.
Recipe
Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 large shallots, minced (about 1/4 cup)
10 oz white button mushrooms, minced (about 3 cups)
2 tablespoons white wine or dry Marsala wine
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
3 oz sausage meat
2 tablespoons minced green scallions, plus a little more for garnish
½ teaspoon minced ginger
1 small garlic clove, minced
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil, plus more for frying
½ teaspoon soy sauce, plus more for dipping
14 round gyoza wrappers
Instructions
Heat the oil in a large non-stick skillet over a medium heat. In batches of about 3 cups, add the shallots and mushrooms and sauté until the mushrooms give up their liquid, and the liquid evaporates, about 10 minutes. (Don’t cook all the mushrooms and shallots at once because then the skillet will be crowded and the mushrooms will steam rather than dry out.) Once all the mushrooms are cooked, return them all to the pan, and add the wine and salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking until the duxelles is quite dry and the mushrooms are just beginning to take on a golden color, another 10 minutes.
In a bowl combine the sausage, scallions, ginger, garlic, sesame oil, and soy sauce. It is okay to pulse this in your food processor if you like. Add the duxelles and stir in by hand.
On your countertop lay out the gyoza wrappers. Place 1 tablespoon of the sausage and duxelles mixture onto the lower half of each wrapper, moisten the edges of the wrapper (I just dip my finger in a small bowl of water and paint the water around the rim) then fold the upper half of the wrapper over and seal. With a strong pinch the water will seal the gyoza closed.
Heat 2 tablespoons of sesame oil in a large non stick skillet over a medium high heat. Add the gyoza, as many as will fit comfortably in your pan. Brown the gyoza—about 3 minutes, then flip over and brown for another minute. Most of the browning will happen on the center of the gyoza. It’s okay. Add enough water to cover the bottom of the skillet. It will boil up and some wrappers may open slight. That’s okay, too. Cover and poach the gyoza for about 3 minutes, then uncover and cook another minute until the water cooks out and the gyoza skins are somewhat translucent, yellowed, and wrinkled looking.
Slip the gyoza onto a serving plate and prepare the remainder of the gyoza, if any.
In a small bowl combine soy sauce and chopped scallion, for dipping.
