As @TheLibrarian requested, what are your favorite brands of frozen dumplings? Do Costco or Trader Joe’s versions stand up to any of the Asian brands?
Trader Joe’s occasionally carries shrimp dumplings, which are pretty good. Not to be confused with their shrimp potstickers, which suck.
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I find Ling Ling to be pretty good for both frozen dumplings and spring rolls. Both come out excellent in my air fryer (saves time and cleanup, and they come out crispy). Have not had Trader Joe’s in a while, but they were pretty good.
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I like the bibigo steamed chicken and vegetable dumplings from Costco. I like to add the Lao Gan Ma spicy chili crisp to it for some crunchy spiciness. Thanks to @mq7070 for the recommendation on the chili crisp. This is an older picture before the chili crisp. I just microwave them for a couple of minutes and let them sit for a minute.
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Unfortunately I’m not sure you can get my favorite dumplings outside of the Boston area. Since moving here and finding them they are always in my freezer for a quick meal and I’ve gotten my whole family hooked on them.
The are from a company here called “Boston Spaghetti Favtory” (I know strange name but why can you do). If you ever see them I’d buy them. My favorite is the pork and leek.
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It looks lime they are located at 83 Newmarket Square in Boston. Too bad they don’t ship.
I can buy them at my local Hannafords (grocery store for those not here). I’ve also seen them at Hmart.
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I’m going to stick with finding a few of several Asian market options for now since they are easier for me to get, and the choices are already bewildering. So…I’ll just be lurking in case anyone wants to mention anything. I could use help understanding the various options, including country of origin, wrappers, and fillings.
Besides “home made” (with store bought wrappers), here is what’s in the freezer right now. Don’t hate me, but I don’t even know what language this is!
Haven’t tried them yet.
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Ling Ling and Tai Pei are okay in a pinch. I find storebought very doughy with very little filling. The vegetable mostly consist of cabbage. The Asian market frozen dumplings aren’t much better. When I have the time, I make them at home, using wonton wrappers. It doesn’t take long if you have a wonton maker. I assemble them in front of the TV. Finecooking has a good recipe for duck &
shiitake dumplings, if you’re interested.
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For my $, I prefer Ajinomoto brands, which I can only find in Asian stores, or general grocery with a large Asian foods section. They have multiple flavors. My favorite is the beef.
I don’t like Ling Ling and after many years of getting the Trader Joes gyoza, we’ve kind of burned out on those. They aren’t as tasty as the above anyway - but are a little leaner.
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Like @Thimes’ suggestion, I am also partial to the local Chinese Spaghetti factory dumplings. I cook them like mini-potstickers, so that the bottom skin gets crispy.
For the non-pan fried kind, if you have an Asian market in your area, I like the Wei-Chuan brand of dumplings (non-soup dumplings). They have quite a number of variety, and I’ve generally found them to be pretty tasty, especially the “hand made” and “Beijing style” lines. I personally have never enjoyed any of the frozen soup dumplings, as they don’t even come close to half-decent soup dumplings you can get at a restaurant.
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Good to know about Hannafords. They definitely have some varieties at HMart. and Super 88 in Allston/Brighton also carries them.
Thimes, the pork and leek are also my favorites.
At the risk of sounding super dumb it looks like French to me. With English above it of course and Chinese on top.
And Product of USA plus in another language. The rest of the mumbo jumbo is bringing up nothing with Babelfish. I can’t distinguish who it’s distributed by in lower corner. Proceed at your own risk but they look good to me.
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Thanks! It was the Asian looking characters I was wondering about.
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i see. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten involved with this one… Now I know why no one else did.
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I can’t actually read 'em, but I do recognize the different writing systems and from left to right, the languages in your later post are Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. It’s also Chinese on the front above the English in the previous post’s photo. I’m pretty sure those are traditional characters, implying a “non-mainland Chinese” target audience, as one might expect from a “Produit des Etats-Unis” 
, and fwiw, I assume the French labeling is there to comply with Canadian labeling law…
If no one chimes in with translations here and you can get an equally clear photo of the rest of the Asian language texts, you can try machine-translating them using newocr.com to capture the text and Google and/or Bing Translator to translate them. NewOCR works pretty well on Asian characters (though not perfectly); the translators, on the other hand, often produce, shall we say interesting English translations from Asian languages… You might try first searching for a company website and using the translators directly on that, if they don’t have what seem to be side-by-side texts in all the relevant languages…
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Thank you! Just what I needed. I was mostly trying to figure out if they were "gyoza " or…that other one…I think “potstickers”. I’m guessing if they are Chinese letters they are "potstickers ". (I was also wondering if the French was a clue. Never would have guessed the Canadian angle).
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