Croissant gyoza: Pie-like dumplings take Japan by storm

This gyoza with a flaky croissant crust is so sought after it took a year for our order to arrive.

We’ve tried a lot of gyoza in Japan, ranging from Wasabeef wasabi gyoza through to varieties covered in gold leaf and ones made by former prisoners in Kabukicho.

However, there’s one type of gyoza that’s alluded us since we heard about it a year ago, and it’s caused such a sensation around Japan that 4,000 boxes of them have been known to sell out in 30 minutes.

Called Croissant Gyoza, this very special type of pot sticker comes from Tareya in Kagawa Prefecture, and when we say we’ve waited a year for them, we’re not joking. This screenshot of our receipt below shows the order date of 11 November 2019, and the scheduled delivery date — 11 November 2020!

▼ One year equates to 8,760 hours, if you convert 365 days into hours. So in terms of seconds, we’ve been waiting 31,536,000 seconds to eat these pot stickers.

When the package finally arrived on 11 November, our gyoza specialists Go Hattori and Takashi Harada couldn’t wait to get them out of the box and taste them. Thankfully for us, though, they captured a few images of the pack before they tore into it.

▼ The package reads “Croissant Gyoza” in Japanese

▼ Inside, the pack contains two layers of 25 gyoza (50 in total) and some gyoza sauce.

Go decided to take charge of the cooking, arranging the pieces in a circular pattern in an oiled pan before adding some water and popping the lid on top for five minutes.

They didn’t really look all that different to regular gyoza during the early stages of cooking…

But once they were done, and Go flipped them out of the pan onto a plate to show them off, we could immediately tell these were no ordinary gyoza.

Unlike usual pot stickers, these ones had an unusual, flaky appearance that made this look more like a pie than a mound of gyoza. 

Finally, the time had come to taste the gyoza we’d waited a whole year for. Seeing as he’d cooked them, Go was the first to taste them, and so he picked up a piece, his hands trembling in excited anticipation.

So how does it taste, Go?

Go’s face said it all, as he gleefully announced:

“These are amazing!!! It’s…a croissant (laughs). They’re fantastic — the outside of the gyoza tastes like pie pastry. Fragrant, crispy, and the balance is just right. The baked surface is thick, yet the contents are an exceedingly good match for the texture.

There’s an amazing sweetness, probably from the cabbage, and it’s all really delicious because the contents are so tightly wrapped up in the pastry-like exterior. In the end, I’m left with the impression that this a croissant. The person who named it ‘croissant gyoza’ is a genius.”

According to Tareya, an incredible amount of care is taken with making the pie-like gyoza wrappers, which use four different types of flour to get the right crispness, firmness, fragrance, and elasticity. This texture gives the gyoza their distinct croissant-like exterior, and people around Japan can’t get enough of them, as repeat customers make up 90-percent of the company’s orders.

Go might now become a repeat customer himself, as he couldn’t believe how good the dumplings tasted, and the crispy, crunchy, pastry-like texture had him hooked. Begrudgingly, he shared a few with Takashi, who couldn’t believe what he was tasting after popping the first morsel in his mouth.

▼ “How is this possible?” Takashi asked. “How can this taste like a gyoza croissant and yet taste so good?”  

They didn’t know the answers to these questions, but that’s part of what makes these dumplings so appealing. There’s nothing that compares to them on the market, and the fresh, locally sourced ingredients used to make them have reviews describing these as “the best gyoza in the world”.

It was definitely worth the year-long wait to get them, and if you’re patient enough to wait for them, you can enjoy them too. Tareya ships the 50-pack boxes within Japan for 2,650 yen (US$25.44) plus 1,280 yen for nationwide postage.

If you can’t wait for your gyoza fix, though, there’s always this unstaffed chainstore that’s open 24 hours a day, so you can enjoy gyoza at any time of the day or night. Croissants not included.

Related: Tareya
Photos © SoraNews24
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