Gyoza chef was homesick for mum’s cooking, so she began making the dumplings. Rie McClenny on how they changed her life
- BuzzFeed Tasty star Rie McClenny began recreating her family’s Japanese recipes during a year abroad in rural America. Now they feature in a cookbook
- Her recipes focus on ‘very approachable Japanese cooking’ – including her mum’s pan-fried dumplings, or yaki-gyoza, that ‘you can basically cook anywhere’
Rie McClenny grew up in southwest Japan with family members who not only loved to cook but, as the owners of a tea room and cafe in their small seaside city, were pretty good at it.
The simple, home-cooked meals her mother, Yoko, and maternal grandmother, Kiyoko, prepared for their rural customers using seasonal local ingredients and traditional recipes were far from fancy.
The women were particularly good at making one beloved Japanese comfort food: the pan-fried dumplings filled with minced pork and cabbage known as yaki-gyoza.
As McClenny recalls in her first cookbook Make it Japanese, they were absolute whizzes at folding dough wrappers around the savoury filling to create dumplings that were juicy and tender on the inside and, when fried, crispy golden-brown on the outside.
So good, in fact, that she never felt the urge to learn to make them herself.