Dear Diary,
Honestly, my hopes for the Wonton Soup were not high. You’ll note that one of the points in my Manifesto is: Don’t pay a restaurant to serve you something you could make just as well (or better) at home. The corollary to that would have to be: Don’t bother making something at home that they can make better (and much faster) in a restaurant. Normally I would refer to this as the “French Fry Corollary,” because to me french fries are the very archetype of a food you don’t want to mess with in your own kitchen, but an awful lot of highly desirable ethnic foods also fall into that category because they often involve somebody’s grandmother slicing and dicing and chopping for hours in advance, or a brick oven that has to be super-heated with birch twigs, or the one exotic spice that happens not to be stashed away somewhere in the vast darkness of my oils-vinegars-spices cabinet.
The recipe for Wonton Soup by Julissa Roberts in the April/May issue of Fine Cooking magazine seemed suspiciously simple. Just 10 ingredients, really? These did include a half-tablespoon of
When you cook gournet, you’re going to want the very best.
Shaoxing (Chinese rice wine) or dry sherry, and even though I did have dry sherry on hand I thought it would be worthwhile to buy an entire bottle of Shaoxing partly because I suspected it would lend some indefinable authentic Chinese flavor to the soup that plain old dry sherry wouldn’t and partly because the brand I found in favorite market had a little promotional collar tag on it that claimed it was “Best for Gournet Cooking,” and I was trained as a child who often ate in New York’s Chinese restaurants that you can identify the quality of an authentic Chinese retaurant by how many charming typos it has on the menu.
The wonton wrappers came frozen in a solid brick, dear Diary, which meant that although I was hugely excited by this project I had to delay it by a whole day to wait for them to defrost. In the meantime I amused myself by finding something interesting to do with the pound of pork I had left over from the big package I had to buy to get the mere quarter-pound that was necessary for this recipe. So that got mixed up with chopped onions, oregano, and a bit of vinegar, shaped into meatballs, and baked in the oven with a yogurt topping–a delicious Greek recipe we can talk about some other time.
But, speaking of Greek food–the ethnic cuisine I do most often undertake at home–I am very happy to report that for anyone who’s already successfully dealt with the fussiness of phyllo dough (and I’m just talking about the frozen stuff here, which, despite being possibly the most convenient form, still needs to be babied with damp towels and caressed with endless delicate coats of oil or butter and STILL sometimes maddeningly breaks or cracks or sticks to something you didn’t want it to stick to), frozen wonton wrappers are a sheer delight! Unlike phyllo, which sometime evens refuses to come out of the package intact, these little squares just peel ever-so-easily apart, and since they come lightly floured, don’t immediately decide to adhere to the first surface you plunk them down on.
The part that seemed intimidating somehow–the actual creation of the filled wonton–turns out to be really easy, and fun in a sort of Montessori-school, Play-doh Fun Factory way. My children, I know, would have adored this activity at the right age, and it would have been perfectly fine to give them a few to mess up even when they were too young to do it right, just to give them the sense of participating. You just plop a teaspoon of your ground-pork mixture into the middle of each wonton wrapper, run a moistened finger around the edges to make them slightly gluey, fold them over into triangles, and fold the points of the triangles together to form little “pope’s hats.”
Pork-filled Pope’s Hats, perfect for your next catered conclave!
This seems appropriate since, as I make these, Sylvia Poggioli is actually speaking to me through the miracle of NPR about the cardinals huddled together in the Sistine chapel trying to agree on their next pope. Note to self: If Martha Stewart hasn’t already published ”Conclave Party” instructions in one of her magazines or manuals, making Pope Hat Soup could be my breakthrough contribution to the literature of party planning!
A couple of other comments on the process: I used home-made broth, because I had enough (2 quarts) in the freezer, because I’m a total stock-making geek and can’t ever ever ever let an animal bone depart from my kitchen without first boiling it for hours in a pot with onions, carrots, celery, and other aromatics. Half the broth I used was actually what was left from my Thanksgiving turkey, still socked away in the freezer and perfectly good four months later. My thinking was that soup is one of those things whose whole original point was to accommodate whatever kinds of leftovers you have, and surely there was enough other flavoring in this recipe to mellow the gamey-turkeyness out of the broth, which is in fact what happened.
Diary, this soup was absolutely SPECTACULAR! It completely confounded my Manifesto prejudice about Chinese food by being actually much much better than the wonton soup I get from my nearby Chinese take-out place, where the broth is watery and tasteless. I don’t know if it would have been quite so spectacular made with store-bought broth, but certainly there seemed to be enough real
Snippets of romaine and scallion make it pleasantly crunchy.
exotic flavor from the ginger, the Shaoxing, and the Asian sesame oil (I used chili-sesame oil to give it a little kick) to make it work. It probably took 45 minutes start to finish–making it a perfectly plausible weeknight dish–and was possibly even better the second day, once all the flavors had had more time to blend and mellow.
Worth it or not? Yes.
1. The wontons are fun to make–probably much more fun if you can do it with kids or friends.
2. You get to control how much meat is in the wonton. I thought the amount in the recipe (a teaspoon, which I interpreted as a rounded teaspoon) was just about right, but I sometimes feel that restaurant wontons are all noodle and very little filling.
3. The fragrance of the fresh ginger that gets released as you grate it is lemony and wonderful and possibly in and of itself justifies making this from scratch.