So the other day I was eating spoonfuls of chocolate chip cookie dough out of a big plastic tub while waiting for the water for my Ramen noodles to boil (a rather telling sample of my nutritional habits), when I started to think about dumplings. I’m referring to the dumplings in stuff like chicken & dumpling soup, which are essentially blobs of dough dropped into a boiling liquid, not the filled dumplings in Asian cuisines.
So I was watching my water boil and eating hunks of cookie dough when it dawned on me to drop some cookie dough into the boiling water to see if it would form a chocolate chip dumpling. It failed miserably; the cookie dough sort of fell apart and when I took it out it just tasted like hot, soggy cookie dough. The water was also cloudy and tasted weird so I had to boil new water for my Ramen!
I’m no world-class chef, if you couldn’t tell, so I was wondering why my cookie dough dumpling didn’t turn out. Ideally, I’m looking for an Alton Brown-esque answer explaining the science behind boiled dumplings and the important differences between the two dough types.
Cookie dough has a lot of sugar relative to the amount of flour; every dumpling recipe I have seen does not call for sugar. Sugar is highly soluable in water, especially boiling water, so I’d blame the sugar for your failed cookie dumpling.
Well, my $.02 is that first of all, the cookie dough was too soft and water-soluble, so it just fell apart as soon as it hit the water. I’m no dumpling expert, but most of the ones I know about have lots of flour, and are kneaded enough to develop the gluten, so they stick together like bread dough, rather than falling apart like cookie dough.
I’ll avoid going into the Wonder of Gluten here, except to point out that it’s not water soluble, so it will stay together in water, once it’s been kneaded into a nice network of gluten strands.
Cookie dough is loaded with fats too. Those’ll melt out when you toss it into boiling water.
Deep fat frying might give you an interesting dumpling/donut sort of result. You’d still lose some of the dough’s original fat content, but the sugar should stay, and brown up nicely if you’re careful.
Cookie dough is loaded with fats too. Those’ll melt out when you toss it into boiling water.
Deep fat frying might give you an interesting dumpling/donut sort of result. You’d still lose some of the dough’s original fat content, but the sugar should stay, and brown up nicely if you’re careful.
