How to throw a 400-dumpling party without ruining your sanity (or kitchen)

Chinese New Year done the stupid way

This weekend marked our third annual Chinese New Year dumpling party, an increasingly raucous effort to mark the start of the lunar calendar through the medium of too many dumplings.

The observant among you may have spotted that we’re a bit early — the lunar calendar doesn’t tick over until this weekend. For the actual date I am, as it happens, committed to attending a dog’s first birthday party — I know — so we were forced to jump the gun a little.

Three years in, I think we’ve got this whole thing down pat. So if you, like us, want to bring untold stress and dumplings into your life to ring in the year of the dragon, here’s what you need to know.

1. Chaos is the enemy

In dumplings, as in life, planning is everything. This year we had around 20 guests and made a little under 400 dumplings across the day, and things ran fairly smoothly. Last year we hit the same numbers, but I’m pretty sure I found my first few grey hairs the morning after.

The key this year was a strict separation between dumpling wrapping (afternoon) and dumpling cooking and eating (evening), with a zero tolerance policy for any fillings not ready by the cut-off point.

When the dumplings were prepped, everything got washed to make clean (well, ish) space for the rest of the night, before we all got too drunk to do anything about it. I won’t say the result was a sparkling apartment throughout, but a little bit of system did help.

2. Chaos is inevitable

Let me reiterate: we had around 20 guests and made a little under 400 dumplings across the day. Those are figures it’s impossible to hit while maintaining careful coursing, proper glassware, or clean furniture.

This is drunken, chaotic cooking; a teenage house party, complete with paper cups and disposable plates, but where some idiot has insisted it would be fun to try and run a small restaurant kitchen while day-drunk on cheap sparkling wine.

If you want to maintain decorum, then make a normal, human quantity of food and only invite the people you can sit around your table. Otherwise, accept that your house will be a tip, that the washing up will be endless, and that someone, at some point, will definitely spill chilli oil everywhere.

3. Save your (dumpling) skins

We have the common sense to at least skip making our own dumpling wrappers, instead relying on store-bought skins. In any normal world that would reduce the day’s stress substantially; thanks to a comical miscount on our part it did the opposite, leaving us scrambling to phone round every Asian supermarket in north London for emergency supplies.

Still, we stand by the policy. Making dumplings from scratch is great fun for a small group and my waking nightmare for a full party. No-one wants to roll out hundreds of tiny dumplings wrappers, I promise.

Buy them from the store, and either get fresh ones or give them plenty of time to defrost.

What you definitely shouldn’t do is go ahead and make a whole other dough anyway, just to make life difficult for yourself.

Expecting extra filling, I decided to have a go at making xian bing, doughy filled pancakes that aren’t a million miles from being a bigger, breadier dumpling, fried crispy on the outside but with a little chew left in the middle.

How much was this decision down to the fact that I realised I could get rid of some sourdough discard in the process? No comment.

In any event, the extra filling didn’t really materialise, leaving us with only a handful of xian bing, and me with some extra dough to try making cong you bing on Monday. Fun, but an extra moving part we probably didn’t need (yet will, inevitably, do again next time anyway).

4. White men can’t wrap

Dumpling wrapping is theoretically handled collectively at our parties. 

In practice, it’s actually handled by a small army of Asian and Asian-adjacent (Italian) women, who politely praise the fumbled efforts from the rest of us before returning to the blistering pace required to get everything wrapped in time.

Everyone who wants to wrap dumplings absolutely should — it’s fiddly, but fun, and there’s only one way to get better.

But those who aren’t fussed really don’t need to. It’s arguably easier for everyone to get an aggressive production line going. We’re here to eat dumplings, not have fun, and everyone needs to remember that.

I, for what it’s worth, didn’t contribute much here. I’ve adopted a role somewhere between dumpling admin and kitchen porter, overseeing our supplies while working through the day’s endless churn of washing up. I didn’t wrap a single dumpling this year, and the people actually handling things were probably all the happier for it.

5. Real friends make fillings

I have no appetite for making enough filling for 20 people. I mean, I could — it’s the quick and easy bit of the process — but that equally means this is the bit where outsourcing is more fun for everyone.

Collectively we contributed seven different fillings, ranging from the traditional pork and chive to less common fare like cauliflower and aubergine.

Vivian and I went for pork and kimchi, chiefly because I rather over-estimated the quantities when I last made the latter and we needed rid. I started from a Maangchi recipe — my default for almost all Korean cooking — and stripped out every ingredient I couldn’t be bothered with, leaving a rather simplified take on the traditional.

It’s at this point you might expect me to sing each filling’s individual praises, pick out favourites, or even offer any further descriptive context whatsoever. 

I would if I could, but the truth is that Dumpling Night defies such simple structure. Dumplings, once made, are tossed onto trays and laid haphazardly around the flat until ready to cook, before being boiled, steamed, or pan-fried en masse — we opt for all three cooking methods in the name of both efficiency and variety, but your mileage may vary.

Beyond marking which ones are vegetarian, we’ve not yet found a workable system to organise the remainder, meaning at any given time you’re simply eating miscellaneous dumplings, usually in rapid, drunken succession. The flavours quickly merge to leave only a vague impression of the Platonic ideal of dumplingness, and usually a hint of pork.

Plans are already afoot for Dumpling Night ‘25. This was a year of consolidation, taking the unbridled chaos of last year’s extravaganza and reining it in just enough to save me from spending all night stressing about the teak table. 

But the people want dumplings, and the market demands growth. That means more dumplings, more fillings, and undoubtedly more mess. Maybe next year I’ll even get to actually make one.