These dumplings made for traveling taste buds
Stonington woman packs them with international flavors
Like a lot of people, Terese Kung was cooking considerably more during the pandemic. She was making a lot of dumplings in particular, since those are a comfort food for her.
One day, her husband, Tom Scally, suggested that, instead of traditional Chinese fare, she put into the dumplings the ingredients for an Italian dish she makes for him, with orecchiette and broccoli rabe. The idea was just to have something different, and he loved it.
From then on, Scally only requested dumplings made with that.
“I thought, ‘Maybe we’re onto something here,’” Kung said.
She began experimenting with different flavors. Next up was chicken salsa verde since she and her husband love Mexican food.
Kung — who, with her husband, split their time between homes in Stonington Borough and New York City — brought the dumplings to parties and her friends loved them, asking how they could get more and if she could bring them to the next party.
“Last year, a bunch of things happened in my life, confluence of events, that made me say, ‘If I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it?’” Kung said. “I was laid off from a corporate job. My father died last year. There were a lot of things that happened, and it just causes a total introspection of: What gives you joy? What makes you happy? What gives you fulfillment?”
So here’s what she did: She established her own product, Morsel Dumplings.
She hand-makes the dumplings herself out of Fresh Harvest Kitchen in Westerly and is selling them there and on certain dates at the Stonington Farmers’ Market.
“My husband says, ‘Why did you get into this most labor-intensive, complicated frozen chain?’” Kung said with a laugh. “I’ve always had a dream for the last 20
years of opening some sort of dumpling enterprise. But it was always complicated. I was thinking of dumplings from around the world. After 20 years of maturing a little bit and understanding that life is about simplicity, I decided to just open this up.”
She is taking “baby steps,” she said, and is making three different flavors. The dumpling’s fillings are inspired by Italy (pork and broccoli rabe), Mexico (chicken salsa verde) and Turkey (spiced squash with walnuts and currants).
There are six sizable dumplings in a package, selling for $13.98. They vary in weight by variety, but
Kung said they are between 43 and 44 grams each. That’s almost twice the weight of the average dumpling, which tends to be around 22 grams, she said.
The six dumplings are enough for a meal for one person, or as an appetizer for three people. Kung noted that nine is a good luck number in Cantonese, and the homophone of nine means longevity. “Great for a new business,” she said. And eight means prosperity.
The ingredients are sourced from local farms that raise their livestock without hormones or steroids. The dumplings have no additives, preservatives or MSG. Kung makes the dough from scratch using premium King Arthur organic non-GMO flour.
Kung said, “The way I do my dumplings, it’s almost like a restaurant-quality dish but stuffed into a dumpling. So it’s a little bit more complicated, the ingredients in it, than the regular dumpling you get at a grocery store or at Chinese takeout or Japanese takeout. My dumplings are created so they’re extra juicy inside and have all the flavor in it, so you don’t need to dip it into a sauce.”
She personally doesn’t like dipping dumplings into a sauce, thinking the sauce tends to overpower the dumpling flavor. But if people want to dip, Kung has some recommendations on her website (morseldumplings.com) of what to use with each of her three dumpling flavors. For the pork and broccoli rabe, for instance, she says a chimichurri sauce would be great.
Communicating through food
Kung and her husband bought a home in Stonington Borough in 2017. He used to sail in this area and so was familiar with it. When they dated, they used to come to the region a lot.
They currently still have a place in New York City, since he is head building manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When she was growing up in Stamford after her family emigrated from Hong Kong, Kung lived with her two grandmothers — “traditional Asian, Chinese extended family,” she said. One of her grandmothers used to make dumplings. They couldn’t converse much because, Kung said, her grandmother “spoke a completely different Chinese dialect, and it’s as different as Greek and English, so the way that we communicated was through food.”
She fondly recalls sitting with her siblings and grandmother and making stuffed dumplings, various buns and other wrapped foods, with their grandmother showing them how to do it.
Kung, 54, has loved cooking since. She co-founded a cooking club in New York City, which she was part of for more than a decade. And now, for instance, if she throws a New Year’s Eve party, the menu will consist of five courses and lots of choices.
“That’s my passion. I love to cook to bring people together, give sustenance, and it’s where I have a creative outlet. It’s where I am the most calm,” she said.
“When I wrap dumplings, it’s almost meditative. It’s the same motion over and over again. I just get into a zone. My mind clears.”
During a recent morning interview, she noted she was at Fresh Harvest Kitchen until 2 a.m. making dumplings the night before. She has her day job and wants to spend time with her husband, so she tries to balance everything.
For the last 22 years or so, she worked for an ad agency doing pharmaceutical marketing. She had reached a senior level, and while she said it was very rewarding, it required 60to 70-hour work weeks. Being laid off felt like a signal. While she is still doing freelance work, she really enjoys making dumplings, too.
“I love making things with my hands and seeing the immediate gratification on people’s faces, when they say, ‘Oh, my God, I love it.’ So much of what I did in my last job, you don’t see the results of it for another two years, three years — long term, because I’m on the strategy side of things. This is immediate. It’s so fulfilling,” she said.
It’s her “side gig” for now. Kung noted that she doesn’t have any food industry background, but she has done training to educate herself. In 2023, she took a three-month Food Product Development course from e-Cornell, of Cornell University. She staged (meaning had an unpaid internship) for four days at Scoundrel, a French restaurant in Greenville, S.C., that was a 2024 James Beard Award semifinalist. And she was part of the March 2024 cohort that took part in the Food Business Accelerator CitySeed and Collab, a statewide accelerator for Connecticut early stage food entrepreneurs.
Right now, Kung isn’t licensed for wholesale; she first wants to see what the demand is selling directly to people.
And if this trio of offerings are successful, Kung would love to create new flavors and talks about the possibilities of dumpling fillings inspired by Greece and France.
“It’s traveling the world,” she said. “I love to travel … and the connection to the people is through the food.”