Tuxum Barak (Dumplings Filled with Raw Egg)

Variations

• With suzma or strained yoghurt: a thicker fermented milk than qatiq makes it richer. The job is the same — the sourness carries the weight of the butter.
• With herbs: a handful of chopped dill or spring onion in the filling. Stir it once more just before pouring or it settles to the bottom of the jug.
• Fried: leftover barak set firm as they cool. Fry them in butter until golden on both sides and they come back crisp outside and warm through.
• As the pair to xiaolongbao: both put a liquid inside a dumpling, in opposite directions. That one is a solid when it is wrapped and a liquid when it is eaten; this one is a liquid when it is wrapped and a solid when it is eaten.

Tips

• This dish breaks one rule of dumplings, and the way it does so is the whole recipe. Wrapping and sealing settles it in one line for fillings built on stock: "Added as liquid they cannot be wrapped at all". So xiaolongbao sets its stock before it goes in, and its own page says so: "At no point is any liquid poured into the filling". Tuxum barak pours raw egg in as a liquid. What it changes is not the filling but the order: it does not wrap and then seal, it seals and then fills.
• Why the order changes is in the next section of the same guide. Its heading says it: "Nothing sticks to a sealing edge with oil or filling on it". Put a liquid filling down and wrap round it and it wets the edge you are trying to seal, all the more so as egg with butter in it. Seal first, and the only seam the filling can reach is the last 2-3cm gap, which is the only edge you have to keep dry. That is why step 5 leaves the gap dry and step 6 fills only half to two-thirds: a pocket filled to the top overflows the moment you pinch it.
• Why a boiled dumpling can have a 1-2mm wrapper. In the guide's thickness table boiling is the thickest row: "Convection in boiling water and thermal shock in oil hit the seam directly". But straight after the table the guide qualifies it itself: "the filling decides whether there is anything to turn". This filling is egg, which starts to set in the 60s, by the numbers in cooking eggs. A thin wrapper lets that heat in fast, so the filling does not stay a liquid for long. A thick one would go soft outside before the inside had set.
• The 4-5 minute stop comes from the third number on the same page. Past 80°C "the proteins contract hard and squeeze water out — dry curds sitting in liquid", and inside a thin sealed wrapper that water has nowhere to go. The moment the inside springs back firm is the end; cooking beyond it only dries the filling and leaves water pooling inside the pocket.
• Beat the filling without foaming it. Egg with air in it takes up more room, so the same tablespoon fills the pocket further, and in the pot that air expands and pushes on the seam. No strands of white is all it needs.
• Cook what you fill straight away. A pocket of raw egg left on the tray softens the dough from the inside and tears when you move it, which is why the recipe fills 6 to 8 at a time.
• The dough has egg in it too. Wrapper and filling set on the same protein, so a cooked barak holds together as one piece and the seam does not open.