Big Mouth Gyoza

Big Mouth Gyoza from the Yorkshire Dales were the guest trader at Nottingham Street Food Club over the weekend.

Now those of you who know me will be aware just how much I love dumplings, so it will be no surprise when you find that I took a trip into the club to check these guys out.

I read that they make their wrappers themselves by hand and that they source their ingredients from local producers so I was looking forward to this.

I know that Gyoza are not quite what I fell in love with when I lived in China back in the late 90’s, there I was eating Jiaoza (often for breakfast) and then years later when in the states eating the same thing only there they called them potstickers. So I was delighted to read a shared understanding of the history, and a similar way in which they fell in love with this style of dumplings on their website

Before I arrived I had seen that they had both Pork and Mushroom Gyoza and I had a big plan to just get a plate of each and spend an hour stuffing dumpling down my gob 🙂

That plan kind of disintegrated when I saw it was £8 for each portion. I know that the dish comes with other stuff to make it more special, but really I was only interested in the actual dumplings.

So in the end I just picked out one of the Pork Dumpling options dishes to try 🙁

So the dumplings themselves, as suggested in the name of the vendor ‘Big Mouth Gyoza‘ were bigger than usual and so I suppose you would need to open your mouth wide to slip one in. I really liked that they had cooked them just like your traditional potsticker with the base of the dumpling being left to char or ‘stick’ on the base of the pan and then leave the top of the unturned dumpling to cook as it steams in the covered pan so that it is soft and silky. Total Bonus points for that!

MAMA SAN BENTO

The Mama San Bento was a plate of Gyoza, in my case pork filled ones, alongside sides of Chilli Cucumbers, Soy Carrots and a Secret Sauce. If I am honest you could have thrown away the carrots and the cucumbers, I only ate them because I had paid for them, I am not saying that they were not nice but really they just got in the way of the simple dumplings.

The pork filling was really well blended with herbs and was actually very much a perfect bite. If I am honest I would have to say that there was not enough filling to wrapper ratio, the actual dumpling seemed underfilled, but at the same time I did feel that the dumpling could have been wrapped more tightly as the filling just fell out of a few of them so maybe it was that, which made them seem to be less well packed than I had hoped.

All in all though I did like the flavours that Big Mouth Gyoza put on my plate and If I met them again outside the club I would try their Gyoza out again

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You can check Big Mouth Gyoza out on their Facebook page, on their Twitter Feed and .their Instagram Profile