Easy vegan potsticker dumpling recipe, plus four variants

Headshot of Adam Jones

Adam Jones

I asked Claude for a vegan potsticker dumpling recipe, cooked it, and it was good: crisp-bottomed, savoury, and we scaled it to 60 dumplings without too much difficulty.

The recipe is below, followed by four variations: adding tempeh, blueberries, blended mushroom and err... baked beans.

A blue and white plate piled with pan-fried dumplings, beside a bowl of dark dipping sauce with chilli flakes and a bowl of sesame seeds

The recipe

Serves 4 hungry people · makes about 60 · 1 hour 15 minutes.

Dough

  • 700g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
  • 385ml just-boiled water
  • ½ tsp salt

Filling

  • 600g vegan protein mix, e.g. firm tofu or tempeh
  • 900g mushroom mix, e.g. chestnut or shiitake
  • 4 spring onions
  • 4 garlic cloves
  • 4 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 tsp oil, plus about 4 tbsp for frying
  • 1–2 tsp chilli flakes
  • Salt and black pepper

Method

Steps 1, 2 and 3 can all start at once, and the waiting times overlap:

A dependency graph of the nine method steps. Make dough, press tofu and chop veg all start in parallel. The dough waits 30 minutes before rolling wrappers; the tofu waits 10 minutes and the mushrooms cook for 8 to 10 minutes before mixing the filling; wrappers and filling then meet at fill and seal, followed by fry and steam for 9 to 10 minutes, then eat.

  1. Make the dough. Twice (given 700g is too much to knead in one lump): stir 350g flour and ¼ tsp salt together in a large bowl. Add up to 195ml just boiled water a little at a time, stirring with a fork, stopping when it appears to be a workable dough. When it's cool enough to handle, knead on the worktop for 5 minutes until smooth and springy, dusting with flour if it sticks or wetting your hands if it cracks. Then, leave it to rest for 30 minutes in an airtight container.
  2. Press the tofu. Wrap it in kitchen paper or a clean tea towel, sit it on a plate and weigh it down with something heavy. Leave it for 10 minutes while you chop.
  3. Chop vegetables. Dice the mushrooms to a rough crumb. Thinly slice the spring onions, white and green parts. Finely chop or mince the garlic and keep it aside separately.
  4. Cook the mushrooms. Heat 1 tsp oil in your widest frying pan over high heat and add the mushrooms. Cook for 8–10 minutes, stirring occasionally: they'll release a lot of water, and you want to keep going until the pan is dry again. Add the garlic for the final 30 seconds, then take off the heat.
  5. Mix the filling. Crumble the pressed tofu into a large bowl with your fingers. Add the mushrooms, spring onions, 4 tbsp soy sauce, 1-2 tsp chilli flakes, a good pinch of salt and black pepper. Stir well and taste — it should be a little saltier and hotter than seems right on its own, since it's about to be wrapped in plain dough.
  6. Roll the wrappers. Tear off small amounts of dough and roll them out to be about 2cm diameter balls. Squash it flat with your palm, then roll it flat with a rolling pin. (Or use a pasta machine, which is much faster!).
  7. Fill and seal. Put a small amount of filling in a wrapper (less than you might naively expect). Wet the edge with a finger dipped in water, fold over the filling, and pinch firmly all along the curved edge. Optionally pleat or fork-crimp the edge.
  8. Fry and steam, in rounds. Heat 1 tbsp oil in a lidded frying pan over medium-high heat. Sit the dumplings in flat-side down in a single layer, without crowding, and fry undisturbed for 2 minutes until the bottoms are golden. Pour in about 80ml water — it'll splutter — and immediately cover. Steam for 6–7 minutes until the water has boiled away, then uncover and crisp the bases for a final minute.
  9. Eat as you go. Serve each round straight from the pan while the bottoms are crisp, and start the next one. Sixty dumplings takes four or five rounds; using two pans at once halves that.

Leftovers:

  • Cooked dumplings reheat well in a dry pan, or okay in a microwave.
  • Uncooked dumplings can be frozen and bagged, and steam cooked from frozen.

Variants

Tempeh instead of tofu: excellent

Swapping the tofu for Tiba Tempeh sweet chilli pieces was the best variation of the four.

Chop the tempeh coarsely — roughly pea-sized chunks — so you get distinct bites of tempeh rather than a uniform paste.

Blueberries added: good

Adding blueberries to the standard filling works. This adds a fruity, sweet and slightly acidic flavour which works well with the salty mushroom.

The juice usually stains the wrapper purple, so you can spot them on the plate.

A pan-fried dumpling split open showing purple blueberry filling, on a blue and white plate

Baked beans replace filling: decent

We had some dough left over in one batch. Using just tinned baked beans as the filling worked decently. The result is something a bit between a dumpling and a tomato and bean pasty.

Drain the tomato syrup and make the dough slightly thicker to avoid overhydrating the dough and causing it to rip.

Hands pleating a dumpling wrapper around baked beans, next to an open tin of beans and rolled dough discs on a wooden board

Image: Me making baked bean dumplings. Photo by Maja Kolomaznikova

Hand-blending the mushrooms: don't

The recipe says to chop the mushrooms finely, and I tried to shortcut that with a hand blender.

Mushrooms gunk up the blades without breaking down, and the bits that do break down go straight past "diced" to a thick sludge.

Closing

Overall this is a surprisingly good recipe for how simple it is in practice. If you give it a go, tell me how it went!

Also, if you're making sixty of these, the slow part is rolling the wrappers — see my article on using a pasta machine to make dumpling wrappers faster.