My Two-Part Dipping Sauce For Dumplings

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This is a moreish dipping sauce that I designed for use with dumplings. It’s a two part sauce because the first part is used while cooking the dumplings to create crystallized sugar flavours on the walls of the dumplings, while the second part of the sauce is used to melt the crystallized sugar into the dipping sauce to sweeten it to perfection.

If you’re wondering how good this dipping sauce is, fifty percent of people I’ve served this sauce to have straight up drunk the remaining dipping sauce from their plates after finishing the dumplings. It’s pretty good.

Ingredients

• Mirin
• Cooking sake
• Soy sauce
• Dashi powder (seaweed based, though the bonito based one will work if that’s all you can get, it’s just not as good)
• Sesame oil

Directions

1. First make the second part of the dipping sauce by mixing mirin, soy sauce, dashi powder and some cooking sake in a bottle. Sorry, I don’t work with measurements so I can’t tell you how much of each to put in, and you can’t work off taste because the final result will not taste as this does now. The best I can say is that you should add the mirin first, then add the soy sauce until you get a darker colour but not so much that it makes it taste too strongly of soy sauce. Then add some cooking sake to dilute the sweetness of the mirin and one sachet of dashi powder per 300ml of sauce, ish.
2. Fry the dumplings in sesame oil (this sesame oil residue will end up making part of the dipping sauce).
3. When the dumplings are pretty much cooked, turn the heat right down and pour some mirin mixed with soy sauce over them (again, enough soy sauce to make the mirin dark, but no more). Turn the dumplings over in the sauce and turn the heat up a little (but not too much) to evaporate much of the sauce away. The dumplings will look slightly burnt, but that’s just the sugar in the mirin crystallizing in the dumpling walls.
4. Serve the dumplings on a plate and pour over part two of the dipping sauce (made in step 1). Turn them over to they’re nicely coated in part two of the sauce. The combination of the two sauces will melt the soy and sesame oil infused sugar crystals in the walls of the dumplings and the flavour of the sauce will completely change.