hey there welcome to my home kitchen I'm going to show you how to roll out agent dumpling wrappers by hand today you may be thinking that it's really hard to do this but it's not and all you need is a minimal amount of equipment and the skills you can develop over time I'm going to show you how okay first you're going to lightly flour your surface so take the dough out of the bag I've had it resting in this plastic bag cut the dough in half you want to work with half the dough at a time if you are starting out then work with one quarter of the dough at a time okay and put the other portions of dough away so that it won't dry up this is one quarter of the amount of dough that we have and so from this piece of dough you're going to get eight wrappers again starting out just go ahead and use one quarter of the dough just lightly flour your surface and roll it into a little log if you're unsure about the size of your pieces you can use a scale to weigh it or you can even use a ruler like this so if I'm going to cut eight pieces then I want you know along roughly eight inches long and now I'm going to cut it into eight pieces you know I always try to cut smaller pieces by starting off in the middle like this because it's easier to cut things in half than to go eight times from one end to the other so I cut it in half and now I'm going to cut this half in half again and when you cut dough pieces remember that the end pieces are tapered so they're going to be a little e you want to cut them a little longer then at the other pieces there you go now that you've got your cut dough pieces what you want to do is flatten them out a little bit to give yourself a head start so just take the dough pieces kind of put them on it's one of their cut ends meeting them up like this so that you kind of have a scalloped shape do that with all of your dough pieces like that just be very gentle soon you won't get that you can work a little harder smack them down now we're gonna smack them like I just said put them into some flour give it a press turn it over give it a press do this with all of them this is great for kids you know they don't have to be ginger with the dough they can just really coat them nicely sort of like as if you were making dusted sugar cookies you know with powdered sugar coating nice like that like so let's move these over to the side and then what we're going to do is flatten them out a little bit more what I use is a tortilla press this is my handy dandy multicultural Asian dumpling wrapper and a tortilla press is something that really goes a long ways to helping you form perfectly shaped different clean wrappers all you do is get the tortilla press cut two squares of plastic wrap I use I got these from freezer zip-top plastic bags cut them into squares put one of them down put one of my little circles down there you can even neaten it up a little bit if you want put down the other piece of plastic closed press and then open up wallah look at that it's practically a round circle then just peel it off and you have the beginning of a perfect dumpling wrapper after you've pressed out your dough disk into thinner circles you're going to start rolling them out what you're going to use to roll them out with is an Asian dowel rolling pin it's made out of wood I bought mine in a Chinese market but you can just go to a hardware store get a dowel and make your rolling pins from there I've got a little handy do-it-yourself tutorial on Asian dumpling tips.com so go there if you need to learn how to make yourself a little dowel now you've got your dowel and what you want to think about is the dough disc here is our little you know sort of nubile Asian dumpling wrapper and imagine a nice quarter sized circle in the middle so about an inch wide okay and this is what the Chinese call the belly of the wrapper keep that a little thicker than the edge because what happens is once that you wrap everything up and close up the wrapper around the filling you're going to have a double layer at least of dough on the edge so if you were to make the edges thinner than the middle then what you're going to do is have a really nice distribution of dough around the filling that said let's open up the wrapper again put it down on your work surface here's a rolling pin you're going to be working the rolling pin downward in this kind of motion and look how I am using this flattened part of my hand this part of the palm is flat you can use it much more efficiently to roll out the wrapper than the fingers which don't exert as much pressure so one hand will work the rolling pin this hand is going to turn the dough disc they're going to work like a little machine just watch me roll turn roll turn roll turn an exert pressure as you're rolling you may even get to a point where there is a little rhythmic sound like this this is the sound that is music to a dumpling makers apart and you're aiming for a lot of times about three and a quarter inches wide for the wrapper and there you go not hard huh