No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
I think you're running into a brand specific thing. The last box of frozen gyoza we got said to warm/steam then crisp in a pan.
I'm trying to think and remember if the ones my best friend used to get had the same instructions. I think so, and I'm remembering the smell of them hitting the pan, which wouldn't be the case if they were frozen still. I'm 85%+ confident that brand said to warm then pan fry, though it may have been the brand that wanted you to put them in and get the edges crisp and then add water cover to steam.
But I've seen both processes on different brands for sure.
I tend to prefer starting off with direct heat to get the edges crispy, then steam. Usually, my the time they're finished, enough of the water has escaped the pan so that the edges get nice and extra crispy while the body of the dumpling wrapper gets this elastic and soft texture that lets you take multiple bites without it falling apart, which often happens doing it the other way around.
Hell, I'm okay with only steaming them tbh. I enjoy the soft edges just as much.
But, to answer your title question, I think that it's less about efficiency than it is making sure they get cooked through properly. When you steam/nuke first, you're more likely to try and rush to fry and end up with cold centers. Steaming in the pan doesn't lose much edge crisp (when heat is maintained well), but you're almost guaranteed to have an even temperature throughout. Frozen foods have some unusual processes because reheating or cooking from frozen can radically shift outcomes.
That's why you used to have frozen dinners with weird instructions for the different segments of the tray, like leaving one section covered, another slitted, maybe stopping to stir the dessert partway through, that kind of thing. Dumplings are fairly simple to make fresh because you're actually cooking them. Most of the frozen ones are par cooked before freezing, which means you end up with wonky results if you follow the same procedures as fresh.
Edit: awesome question btw