Yes, the OP started out with travelogs and stories about how great my great grandmother's dumplings were. At least the OP omitted the stuff about have to sti

Yes, the OP started out with travelogs and stories about how great my great grandmother's dumplings were. At least the OP omitted the stuff about have to stir the pot counter clockwise or the food will be no good! :-)!! Finally, in this thread, no one has mentioned the recipe! I saved a copy of the OP, but only because of the recipe. The recipe was well written in places, e.g., the measurements. Good! At least the recipe left out the stuff about needing sour cream butter and adding flour until the dough "feels right": If I already knew that much about the dough, I wouldn't need the recipe! Points about the recipe: (1) Use pork shoulder or pork belly. Really? In the US pork belly is raw bacon and nearly all fat. Pork shoulder has much less fat and, in some hogs, can be quite lean. So, those two sources are not nearly the same. I happen to have some pork loin, very lean, and some US bacon, nearly all fat but with standard bacon flavor. So, I should mix in by weight maybe 15% bacon? (2) Fold the dough to make an infinity symbol. Really? As a mathematician, I understand the infinity symbol, but I can't visualize how to take a circle of thin dough and make an infinity symbol. An instructional picture is needed. (3) Master the dumpling pleating folding technique. I'm willing to do that, wanting to do that, waiting to do that; now teach me how to do that! Or is not explaining that just one of the secrets of kitchen hazing for newbies??? Somehow such issues are standard in recipe and cookbook writing. E.g.: At one time I subscribed to the Time-Life series Foods of the World. Finally I wrote them a letter cancelling the subscription. I got back a letter from some Time-Life person with hurt feelings. Their point was that they were showing lots of really good foods. They were. My point was that they were also showing me travelogs with colorful stories about the cultures and with beautifully done, often full page, photographs of smiling faces, peasant costumes, interiors of high end Paris restaurants, gorgeous landscapes, and spectacular displays of what looked like fantastic foods: All of that made me want to learn to cook such foods! But the emotional grabbing got in the way of the instructional part: For instructional pictures, they had only a few and they were small. E.g., I saw lots of dumplings from Eastern Europe, Russia, China, etc., but nothing at all on how the heck to fold the dumplings! There was a fantastic Bavarian Black Forest Cherry Cake, but after many hours in the kitchen, with lots of money on groceries, there were two research problems, (A) getting the chocolate curls on the sides of the cake and (B) getting whipped cream strong enough to serve as cake filling and frosting. After hours, I got a good solution to (A) and a partial one to (B). And there were other issues, e.g., the cake was basically an egg foam with coca powder and nearly no flour so took some special handling. All the books in the series went on this way -- "bait" with lots of gorgeous emotionalism and then a "switch" with far too little instructional rationalism. For an explanation of this bait and switch stuff, I conjecture that in cooking writing, editing, and publishing, there are many more English majors than chemistry majors!!!