February Supper Club: Won Tons - Part 1. Skins

For February’s Supper Club, we decided to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
G and I hosted this month, and since a couple of other’s had offered to make entrées, I decided to take on Won Tons. I figured this would give me cause to bust out some Kitchen Toys I had never used before

My Mother-in-law had recently gifted me a pasta attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer. Thus, I decided to use it to attempt to make the won ton skins from scratch. (Trust me, I was ready to run to the store to buy won ton skins should my experiment fail)

I thought it best to go with the manufactures recommendations on my first attempt, so I used the recipe for Egg Noodles that’s included with the recipe booklet that came with the pasta attachment. It was actually very close to the recipe in my Chinese cooking book anyways.

Here’s the recipe:
4 large eggs
1 tbsp water
3 ½ cups sifted all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon sat

Place eggs, water, flour, and salt in mixer bowl. Attach bowl and flat beater. Turn to Speed 2 and mix 30 seconds

Exchange flat beater for dough hook. Turn to speed 2 and knead 2 minutes. Remove dough from bowl and hand knead for 1 to 2 minutes. Let it rest for 20 minutes. Divide dough into 4 pieces before processing with pasta sheet roller attachment. You’ll have to repeat a few times at increasingly thinner settings to get the right level of thinness. Once the pasta sheets are thin enough, cut into squares for won ton skins.

The dough has to be pretty dry to work with it, but can hit too dry, so there is a bit of a back and forth that happens between having to add more water, then getting it sufficiently dry to work with again. Keep lots of extra flour on hand to flour the sheets as you go.

It is mostly a fun experience -- like playing with play-dough you can actually eat. It can even feel a bit meditative at times. However, it does require a lot of time, and can become stressful if you’re trying to rush. After a long while of playing happily with my new toy, at one point at the end of the pasta making process, the last sheet was giving me a particularly hard time. The consistency was all wrong and it kept falling apart or not wanting to feed through the pasta roller. I went back and forth between drying it, then rewetting the dough, then reworking it, but it just did not want to work with me.

I started to realize that the time was slipping away and soon people would be arriving, and the apartment wasn’t even clean yet, and oh, by the way, neither was I. I started to get kind of frustrated and was about to start taking my aggression on the mostly innocent mixer. Luckily at this point G gallantly stepped in and announced that he had not yet had a chance to play with the new toy yet and wanted a turn. He got it going again and kept me from throwing the uncooperative sheet at the mixer.

Lesson learned - To keep it a fun, zen experience, give yourself a lot of time.