Wonton soup is not really a recipe, it is an inventory strategy. You spend one afternoon folding a few hundred wontons, freeze them on a tray, and then for the next month dinner is six minutes away whenever you want it. Boil water, drop in eight frozen wontons, add broth and greens, eat.

I make a batch every few months. It costs about twenty dollars in ingredients and produces something like twenty five bowls of soup. A single bowl of wonton soup in a San Francisco restaurant is twelve dollars before tip. This is the best return on an afternoon in my kitchen.

What you need #

For the filling:

• Ground pork, about a pound. Get the fattier grind if you have the choice. Lean pork makes dry wontons.
• Shrimp, half a pound, peeled and roughly chopped. Optional, but this is what makes a wonton taste like a good wonton rather than a small meatball.
• Ginger, minced fine, and scallions, sliced thin.
• Soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, sesame oil, white pepper, a pinch of sugar, a little salt.
• Cornstarch, a tablespoon, to bind.

For the wrappers, buy them. A pack of thin square wonton wrappers is about two dollars and contains fifty or sixty. Making wrappers from scratch is a fine hobby and a poor use of a Sunday when the store version is this good.

For the broth: chicken broth, a splash of soy sauce, a drop of sesame oil, and whatever greens you have. Bok choy, spinach, and napa cabbage all work.

Making the filling #

Put the pork in a bowl with the ginger, scallion, a tablespoon of soy sauce, a tablespoon of Shaoxing wine, a teaspoon of sesame oil, a half teaspoon of white pepper, a pinch of sugar, salt, and the cornstarch.

Now the part that matters. Stir it in one direction, hard, for a solid two minutes. The mixture should change from loose ground meat into a sticky paste that holds together in a mass. This is not optional fussiness. Stirring in one direction develops the proteins, and that is what gives a wonton filling its springy, bouncy bite instead of a crumbly texture. If your homemade wontons have always tasted slightly wrong, this is probably why.

Fold in the chopped shrimp at the end, gently, so it stays in recognizable pieces.

Cook one teaspoon of the filling in a pan and taste it before you wrap two hundred of them. Adjust salt now, because you will not get another chance.

The fold #

There are elegant folds and there is the one everybody actually uses. Use the second one.

1. Wrapper flat on your palm, a scant teaspoon of filling in the middle. Resist the urge to overfill. Overfilled wontons burst, and a burst wonton takes its neighbors down with it.
2. Wet two edges with a fingertip dipped in water.
3. Fold into a triangle and press the edges shut, pushing the air out as you go. Trapped air makes them split in the pot.
4. Bring the two long corners together in front, wet one, and pinch them. It looks like a small folded hat.

If the corner-pinch is annoying you, stop at step three. A triangle wonton tastes identical. The fancy shape exists so the wonton has a fat head and a ruffled tail, which is nice, and nice is optional.

Get a rhythm going and you will do sixty an hour on your first try, twice that by your third batch. Put on something to listen to. This is meditative work, not skilled work.

Freezing, which is the whole point #

1. Line a baking sheet with parchment and lay the wontons out so none of them touch. This is the critical instruction. Wontons that touch while freezing become one large wonton brick.
2. Freeze the tray flat for about an hour, until the wontons are hard.
3. Dump them into a freezer bag. Now they will not stick together and you can grab exactly as many as you want.

They keep for about three months and cook straight from frozen, no thawing, which is the entire reason this method beats making them fresh.

The soup, six minutes #

1. Boil a pot of water. Drop in as many frozen wontons as you want, six to ten per person.
2. When they float, add a cup of cold water and bring it back to a boil. Do this once. It is an old trick and it makes sure the filling cooks through without the wrappers turning to mush.
3. Meanwhile heat your broth in a separate pot with a splash of soy sauce and a drop of sesame oil. Throw the greens in for the last minute.
4. Scoop the wontons out with a slotted spoon into the bowls, ladle broth over them, top with scallion.

Cooking the wontons in separate water instead of directly in the broth keeps the broth clear. Starchy cloudy broth tastes fine but looks like dishwater, and it costs you nothing to use two pots.

Swaps and substitutions #

All pork with no shrimp is a completely standard wonton and much cheaper. Add a bit more sesame oil to compensate.

Chicken works, but use thigh meat, ground. Ground chicken breast makes a dry filling no matter what you do to it.

For a vegetarian filling, use finely chopped shiitake, pressed tofu, and napa cabbage squeezed dry. Squeezing the cabbage is mandatory or the filling turns to soup inside the wrapper.

Leftover wrappers dry out fast. Cut the extras into strips, fry them, and use them as crunchy soup topping, or freeze the pack flat and use it next time.

For chili oil wontons, boil them, skip the soup, and toss with chili oil, black vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic. Completely different dish, same freezer bag.

Tips #

Keep the wrapper stack covered with a damp towel while you work. They go brittle in about ten minutes of open air and then crack when you fold them.

Under-fill on purpose. A teaspoon looks stingy in your hand and is exactly right in the pot.

Do not salt the filling heavily if your broth is already salty. The two stack up.

Make the whole pound of filling even if you get bored. The wrapping is the boring part, and stopping halfway leaves you with filling that has to be cooked as meatballs anyway.

Twenty dollars, one afternoon, a month of six-minute dinners. The same logic applies to dumplings, which use a thicker wrapper and get pan-fried instead. For something even faster on a weeknight there is pork and seaweed soup, which has two ingredients and takes ten minutes.