Mandu - Korean Kimchi Dumplings

We all love a big plate of steamy dumplings! And lucky for us they are not hard to make at all. What this means, is we can actually make dumplings at home and keep the them coming for days! Toady, I'm going to show you how to make Mandu, Korean dumplings. 

Dumplings are well known in Asian cuisine. Each country has its own version and is no different for Korea. Koreans mastered the dumpling game and created beautiful mouthwatering dumplings which are called mandu. 

Back in the old days, only royals were able to eat and enjoy mandu. Nowadays, mandu is available in pretty much every Korean restaurant or supermarket you come across. They are very popular worldwide and without a doubt, there's a recipe for every like and preference.

Mandu is cooked in many different ways. You can steam, pan-fry, boil, or even deep fry your mandu. And there are so many different kinds depending on the region you go to within Korea. There are the folded dumplings we all know but you will also find squares, balls, and unwrapped ones. 

For mandu, as for any other kind of dumplings, you can make the filling with a bunch of different ingredients. For this recipe, we are making kimchi-mandu. The name is pretty self-explanatory. You guessed it right! We are using kimchi to make the stuffing, and we'll add a few other things to make our mandu even more delicious and filling. 

I love the idea of having kimchi inside a dumpling. Kimchi is an ingredient worth adding to whatever meal you possibly can. It will help your gut stay healthy meaning it will help YOU stay healthy and have a better immune system, better digestion, and more control over your weight management. These are just some of the benefits we can get from fermented food.

But, aside from the health aspect kimchi is such a blast of flavour on its own. We don't really need to add anything else to get an incredible and tasty filling for our mandu. The rest of the ingredients provide this recipe with a lot more nutrients and protein, and they'll give the stuffing a nice texture. But the kimchi is definitely the king of flavour here. 

As you can see I love kimchi and I get super excited about it. I don't like any of it going to waste and I always try to make use of absolutely everything that comes in the jar. So, I'm putting the leftover juice to work by adding it to the dipping sauce.

There's no point on having mandu without a good dipping sauce. Is so satisfying to go extra with the sauce and then shamelessly stuff your face. So make sure you always save that kimchi juice.  We will mix it with maple syrup, rice vinegar, tapioca starch and light soy sauce. The consistency will come out really nice and it will allow the sauce to actually stay on the mandu while it makes its way to your mouth.