Normally, this should have been a subject for Twitter, but being blocked for a week, I resorted to the only censorship-free place: my blog.

I normally don’t care about Asian food, and even less about Japanese, especially as I cannot imagine myself eating anything that goes by the name of sushi. But then, yesterday I had this exact experience:

Obviously, it was the junk food edition of something that, as I’ve heard, can be seen as junk food even in Japan. It’s the junk of the junk food because it’s the supermarket edition, sold among the plastic-wrapped sandwiched and roll wraps. But it was surprisingly tasty!

This Natsu brand of junk snacks has only recently introduced the Gyoza Chicken and the Gyoza Vegan to Germany; it’s not even on their website yet! I only tried the chicken edition, with sesame sauce (and lots of garlic!), and it was marvelous!

Apparently, gyoza is the Japanese version of the Chinese jiaozi, commonly called potstickers, Chinese dumplings, Chinese raviolis, or Peking raviolis. The problem is, I don’t care of the Chinese original, as long as it’s the Japanese recipe that this junk food company tried to mimic, apparently successfully! (Why on Earth would I be interested in the Boston Style Chinese Dumplings?) Oh, and there are Thai and Korean variations too!

A quick search for some gyoza recipes revealed that most Westerners sometimes prefer to use pork instead of chicken, and that the sesame sauce isn’t always mandated:

召し上がれ！ (Meshiagare!)