Thursday, April 29, 2010

Mmmmm....MoMos

Ever experience the sudden craving for a particular food the moment you open your eyes in the morning? With the craving monster persistently wounding it's long coiling fingers around you throughout the day and no amount of delicacies good enough to drive it away - this can indeed be rather tormenting!

That was exactly what I experienced when I suddenly developed a terrible craving for momos at 7am in the morning. To make matters worse, there is not even the remotest possibility of me getting hold of one such Nepali meat dumpling in the small town of Villach. Absolutely ZERO!

I was so close to compromising my momo cravings with the local chinese dumplings until my fingers unknowingly keyed in "Nepali momo recipe" in the Google search engine. And praise the founders of Google! I found so many recipes for momos ranging from complicated ones with the use of numerous exotic spices to the simple ones where the ingredients are easily available in the local supermarkets!

I combined a few of the simple recipes and came up with one of my very own! Who knows, maybe I might even be able to help save some unfortunate souls who are also being tormented by the momos craving monster?!?

Meat MoMos

Ingredients:
2 cups plain flour
3/4 cup water
500g minced meat (meat of your choice)
1 medium onion
a few cloves of garlic
1 slice of ginger
1 1/2tsp salt
dash of pepper
dash of cumin powder
dash of chilli or hot paprika powder
sesame oil


Method:
(1) Dice the onion, garlic and ginger.

(2) In a bowl, combine the diced onion, garlic and ginger with the minced meat, salt, pepper, cumin powder and chilli powder.

(3) Lastly, add the sesame oil and mix well. Set aside.

(4) To make the momo skin, slowly add the water to a bowl of flour until a smooth dough is formed.

(5) On a lightly floured work surface, knead the dough for a few minutes. Leave the dough to rest in the bowl for ~30 minutes with a wet cloth covering the bowl. This prevents the dough from drying out.

(6) Pinch the dough into similar sized dough balls. The size depends on how big or small you want your momos to be.

(7) With a rolling pin, roll out each dough ball into flat circular dough skins. Roll as flat as possible otherwise you would end up with thick-skinned momos after steaming.

(8) Assemble the dumplings as shown in the video below:




(9) Coat the steamer plate with a thin layer of oil to prevent the momos from sticking onto the plate.

(10) Steam for ~15 minutes or until the momos are cooked.

(11) Serve hot with sauce of your choice!


Verdict:
(+) Relatively easy recipe to follow through which yields reasonably tasting momos.

(-) Flattening the little dough balls and assembling them into decent looking momos can be quite a feat!
(-) When biting into the momos, the meat fillings easily fell out as a whole chunk, separate from the momo skin. This was different from the ones I had in Nepal where the meat fillings are scattered within the skin.

(=) Quite a good first attempt. Will be motivated to make it a second time!

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