ShuiJiao at the Five Spotted Horse

While in KaoHiung we had ShuiJiao at the Five Spotted Horse restaurant. In Chinese the name of the restaurant is shown in the business card below.

ShuiJiao is similar to pot stickers which are called "guo tie", but unlike potstickers, ShuiJiao are steamed not fried. Being steamed is healthier than fried and the ShuiJiao doughy skin might be a little thicker than the potsticker skin.

The most important part is the filling. Usually is meat and some vegetables and the steaming(or frying) cooks the inside and brings out the flavor. I remember, Ely and I were once in Xian and had a dinner of 20 different ShuiJiao. The fillings started with the usual pork, beef ... but towards the end there were the unusual ... frog, pigeon. I think after the first three or four we stopped seeing a difference. 20 ShuiJiaos is a lot.

Here is the spread four of us had at the restaurant:

The dumplings in the steamer are baozi. The millet soup was complimentary. There were also leek stuffed in fried bread, a chunjie which is a meat and onion stuffing rolled in fried onion bread. The Shuijiao are the black and green dumplings. ShuiJiao is normally uncolored but the green coloring comes from yam leaves. That's not too unusually, Italian pasta is often green with spinach extract. But what about the black ShuiJiao. Here the coloring comes from the ink of octopus. It must be healthy.

The story about the name of the restaurant comes from a poem written by LiBai(701-762) of the Tang Dynasty. The restaurant name is the subject of the poem. In the poem LiBai meets and old friend and wants to go drinking with him because this chance may never come again. At this time, Libai is poor but because this chance might never come again he says he will sell his "painted horse" to buy wine to drink with his old friend. The poem is kind of a "carpe diem" to friendship.

Florence translated the poem for me but it's amazing that the same Chinese written 1300+ years ago speaks to Chinese with the same sentiment of those bygone days.

The 3 characters of the restaurants name are in the upper right corner, marked with red commas.