I first tasted pot stickers in the late 1980s at the tiny Mandarin Deli in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Behind the glass window, a dumpling maker steadily worked, rolling out thin wrappers, filling them, and creating large pea pod–shaped dumplings. I watched intently, distracted only when my fragrant pot stickers arrived. The hearty dumplings were so hot that I burned my mouth, but they were well worth the minor injury. Pot stickers supposedly started out as boiled dumplings that a chef forgot about in the wok (guō) and they stuck (tiē) after the water had cooked away. His guests loved the contrasts between succulent filling, tender-chewy skin, and crusty bottom, and thus the pot sticker was born. The modern way to mimic the chef ’s delicious accident is to cook pot stickers in a skillet with water and oil, which steams the dumplings and fries their bottoms to a golden, toasty finish. They are technically called jiānjiao in Chinese, which means shallow-fried dumplings; but in the West, we commonly know them as pot stickers and pan fried dumplings. “Fried” dumplings can be pan fried or deep-fried.
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