Momo’s are dumplings famous in Sikkim, Darjeeling and Nepal. These became a popular street-food in delhi and before long in the last few years someone decided to skewer them and put them in a tandoor.
We have never tasted the tandoori momo’s in our life, only seen and heard about them. We had made some gyoza’s which are Japanese or thai dumplings or pot stickers. This allowed us an opportunity to try tandoori gyoza’s.
We checked a few videos and recipes. There are lot if variations. We decidedly like our Dumplings soft and moist. Some people fry their momo’s before marinating and grilling them and this seemed too much for us. We infact tried to keep them moist even through the grilling session.
Tandoori Gyoza marinade
We kept it quite simple. We used our tandoori chicken marinade, but kept it quite wet by using plain yogurt instead of greek. We wanted the gyozas to stay moist and the wet marinade helps. We just reduced the chili powder a bit since we will be doing a chili garlic sauce too to brush the gyoza after they are cooked. More on that later. After marinating them they can go straight onto a skewer. We used flat skewers which make sure the gyoza don’t turn or fall apart. Be gently when piercing the gyozas.
We also made some onions in the same marinade. We put them on the skewer very close to each other so that they don’t dry out but yet get flavorful edges.
Our Gyoza
We had made our gyoza using finely diced haricot verts/green beans. These were stir-fried with some freshly grated ginger used to finish off.
You can also ise a mixture of green peas, mint and ginger/garlic. You can also use scallions and ginger mixture. If you want to give this recipe a quick try or make it a weeknight meal, trader joes has some acceptable gyoza’s that can be repurposed. We pimp the recipe enough to make it quite interesting even when you use readymade gyozas.
Our gyoza’s were steamed a day early. You can steam them the same day too but wait till they cool off a bit.
The Matter of chili – garlic sauce
Now many times the momo’s come with a chili garlic dipping sauce. We wanted to bring in those flavors.
We saw this as an opportunity to incorporate the flavors as a kind of glaze to the cooked gyoza when finishing to keep them moist on the plate.
We decided to use a mixture of garlic sauce and chili oil to get these flavors. But just pureeing garlic would have been far too strong and overpowering. So we took a large amount of garlic cloves and put them in a pan with enough milk to cover. We cooked till the milk came to boil and when it did we drained the milk out. We did this thrice. This takes the sharpness of the garlic down many notches allowing you to use it in large quantities to get a delicious garlic sauce.
Then we pureed the garlic with a few tea spoons fresh milk, a few drops of oil, salt and some lime juice.
We also had some oil on low heat mixed with kashmiri chili powder. We cooked slowly without burning the chili powder till the oil warmed up gently obtaining the color and flavor of chili powder.
We mixed some melted butter, some cooked garlic paste and some oil, adjusting for flavor by adding more or less chili oil and garlic. We seasoned with lime juice and salt.
We cooked the gyozas at 400 F for 15 minutes and when we removed them we brushed each of them generously with this chili garlic glaze.
We brush the serving plate too with some of the chili garlic sauce. We then plated the wet and hot gyoza with a squeeze of lime, some scallions and a drizzle of chili oil on top if needed. We made a side salad with scallions, carrots and daikon radish. This pairs well serving as a nice palate cleanser between bites of the tandoori gyoza.
The chili garlic sauce really does make a difference. Since its already cooked when you brush it on it can be done last-minute to add to the wet mouthfeel of the dish.
