MARBLED SKINS

As promised in the book here is one of my favorite art skin techniques. I started doing all sorts of really beautiful art skins toward the end of dumpling recipe testing and it was such a wildly fun and creative time. I became pretty obsessed with all of the different ways to combine and craft all sorts of colorful, patterned, bright and eye-catching dumpling skins. This particular technique of combining two or more doughs and “marbling” them is easy peasy and foolproof. Please tag your fun creations with #dumplingsequallove so I can see!

I recommend “marbling” 2 to 3 different colored/flavored skins to start (pages 52-57 in the book). Any more and the dough can get unwieldy and the colors frenetic or muddied. To do this, on a lightly floured surface, squeeze and roll 2 to 3 portions of different dumpling doughs (start with about 1/4 of each dough) into a 1- to 2-inch diameter sausage shape. Once you have all of the dough portions roughly the same length and width, stack them, and then squeeze and push them together. Once combined into one sausage shape, twist the dough from top to bottom as tightly as possible.

Join the two ends of the twisted dough and press the entire form onto a lightly floured surface with the heels of your hands . Pull and stretch it into a 1/2-inch-thick rounded rectangle. Then either roll it by hand, by hand-crank or mechanized pasta roller, to your desired dumpling thickness. That’s it! The tighter you twist the doughs together the more marbled the doughs get. If you twist lightly you’ll often get big bands of color throughout, as you can see above.

These are all photos of some of the many various beautiful marbled skins I’ve made. I hope you try this technique! I’ve never had bad results with marbling dumpling dough and it’s always sooooo fun to cook them up and see the colors transform.