If I'm being honest, Ling Ling is not my favorite brand of dumplings, but I know a lot of you like them, so I'm making a recipe for their dumpling sauce. This recipe is very simple and it tastes even better than the one you get in the package.

If you want to try a different sauce, try my Peanut Butter Dumping Sauce.

overhead shot of spoon lifting potsticker sauce out of bowl

🥟 About This Recipe

This is my homemade version of the dumpling sauce that comes with Ling Ling Potstickers. It is salty, garlicky, tangy, and slightly sweet.

My wife and I used to always buy these from Costco, but we always ran out of the sauce so I decided to make my own. It's actually very simple to make, and you only need seven ingredients.

If you want to nail this recipe, you should use a microplane for the garlic and ginger. This will release the most amount of flavor. You can also mince the garlic but try to make them as fine as possible.

🔍 Making It at Home

If you go to the Ling Ling website or Amazon, they have the ingredients listed for their sauce:

"Soy sauce, Water, Sugar, Distilled vinegar, Molasses, Salt, Canola and Sesame oils, Cornstarch, Natural flavor, Ginger and Garlic powder, Spices."

Soy sauce, water, sugar, and vinegar are listed first and that's really a no brainer since they are essential for most dumpling sauces. The interesting bit is that they add molasses. I personally do not have molasses at home, so I'm just going to use brown sugar instead of white sugar. The flavor comes pretty close.

Toasted sesame oil will be better than any sesame oil they are using, and we can also use fresh ginger and garlic instead of powder. I don't know what is under "Natural flavor" and "Spices" but I don't think they are important.

🧂 Ingredients

The sauce is made with light soy sauce, rice vinegar, brown sugar, grated ginger and garlic, toasted sesame oil, and some hot water. The hot water is needed to dissolve the sugar at the beginning. Make sure your sesame oil is the toasted variety, regular sesame oil doesn't have any flavor.

🔪 Instructions

brown sugar being dissolved in hot water

all ingredients being stirred in small bowl

STEP 1: In a bowl, dissolve 1 teaspoon of brown sugar with 1 tablespoon of hot water. Then, add the soy sauce, white vinegar, minced garlic, grated ginger, and toasted sesame oil. Stir to combine and then serve immediately with potstickers. You can easily double or triple the recipe if you want more. It will stay good in your fridge for up to five days.

side view of potsticker being dipped into sauce

📋 Recipe