It’s been a serious situation for gyoza (jiao-zi or Chinese dumpling) as the recent toxic Chinese-imported Gyoza incident is causing wide repercussions. More kinds of agrochemicals and insecticides are being detected in investigation before figuring out its cause. On Feburary 2nd, organic phosphate insecticides: dichlorvos, parathion and parathion methyl, were found at the same time from a package of Gyoza that Xingtai city sold last October.
The insecticidal components found from a package of “CO-OP Tezukuri(homemade) Gyoza”, produced by Tenyo Foods in Hebei province, China, were 80ppm of dichlorvos, 1.6ppm of parathion, and 1.1ppm of parathion methyl. Why did as many as three kinds of insecticides get inside the package? Specialists pointed that it is unusual to mix those three kinds, thus they cannot consider it as a coincidence. It is possible that someone did it on purpose.
It is instructed in Japan not to mix the three kinds of insecticides since their effects become unstable if mixed. This leads us to a conclusion that it was not just an accident.
As China is still insisting the impossibility that the insecticides were put into the package during the production process, I think now it’s becoming more and more difficult to prove that the insecticides got in the package in China, not Japan.
So, what are regular CO-OP customers thinking right now? The fact is, the members of higher-level cooperative societies have increased by 30% to 40%. Also, Gyoza rind is selling very well as reported on TV since the people who shifted to homemade gyoza has doubled in number. This is a good tendency, I believe.
At my home, we have never bought gyoza at supermarkets or CO-OP. It is just because they don’t taste very good. It is not that we always make gyoza at home. We usually use online stores that sell their homemade frozen gyoza.
One of my favorite gyoza stores is “Gyoza Oukoku (Gyoza Kingdom)” produced by a maker in Miyazaki prefecture, and the other is “Gyoza no Mansyu (Gyoza Manchuria)” from Saitama prefecture. The reason why I have loved these two online stores for such a long time is that they are both so unique, delicious and above all, the price is reasonable.
The “Gyoza Oukoku” from Miyazaki is less fatty as it contains less pork. I wonder if its system is patented, but the gyoza is covered with quite a few starch, and all you have to do is just pour 150cc of hot water in the pan after cooking a little brown, and cover the pan for 4 or 5 minutes until the gyoza get crispy.
Normally, you have to put in starch mixed with water later and steam in order to make gyoza with crispy wings, but with this “Gyoza Okoku”, anyone can make crispy-winged gyoza easily. It’s OK even if you don’t have starch in your kitchen.
On the other hand, “Gyoza no Mansyu” has a lot of pork in it and the cabbage is a “real” cabbage, which is purchased from farmers on the same day it is cooked. Their raw material management is so severe that they mince pork every morning for only the amount they use on that day, because minced pork can get oxidized and its flavor fades away as time goes by.
Their biggest sales point is this freshness of the materials. “Gyoza no Mansyu” is rather a wholesaler for ra-men restaurants and gyoza restaurants around Kanto area than for general consumers. I’ve heard that the restaurants that serve “Gyoza no Mansyu” become very popular because of its freshness.
I think there should be more online stores like these two who sell more delicious and safer frozen gyoza as a solution for the concerning and terrifying gyoza poisoning. If you target only customers in your prefecture, you could also use the newspaper advertisement. Online sales are convenient for consumers, so it can contribute to domestic demand expansion too eventually. Thus, online sales can be a solution for not only gyoza poisoning, but also for another domestic issue.
Gyoza no Mansyu (http://www.mansyu.co.jp)
Reference: Chugoku Shimbun
