KFC

Korean Fried Chicken. Well, more like Southern style fried chicken with a Korean kick. The Colonel ain’t got shit on me. King Kong either, for that matter. Fried chicken is hands down one of my favorite foods ever. EVER. It’s probably my “if you were stuck on an island and could only eat one thing for the rest of your life…” – yes, I’d eat it forever.

This can easily work as just a simple fried chicken and it would be bad ass just as it is, but seeing as how I’m equipped with what seems like an unending supply of Korean chili flakes and sesame seeds, I figured I’d put em to good use. This would definitely be better if the bird could sit in the marinade overnight, but the couple of hours I had it in there turned out to be plenty to give it some good flavor.

First step, was to break down the birds. I started with two whole chickens that I broke down and saved the rib cages for stock I made the next day. Recipe for that to follow. I broke them down into ten pieces: two wings, two thighs, two drums, and two breasts that each got split in half. So from two chickens that cost anywhere from $5 to $10 each, you can get 20 pieces of chicken. Basically a buck a piece (at most) for some damn good chicken. I think that’s even cheaper than Popeyes…

Second move is to season the chicken and soak it in the buttermilk. This is basically combining two techniques of either brining chicken in a seasoned bath, or soaking it in buttermilk. The buttermilk helps to tenderize the chicken but if you’re only soaking it for a couple of hours it’s not going to get to do much of that work. If you soak it overnight you’ll see some results. Either way you get great flavor from the buttermilk so why not bring it along for the ride.

I seasoned the chicken pretty liberally with salt, Korean red chili flakes and a bunch of chopped garlic.

The idea was that since the marinade was only gonna to hit the chicken for a short period, I bumped up how much salt I seasoned it with to make sure it was salty enough. If I were going to let it soak overnight I would definitely have pulled back on how much salt was in there to compensate for the extra soaking time. I also imagine it would get a hellofa lot spicier overnight with the chili flakes in the marinade.

I sealed that up and let it hang out in the fridge for a couple of hours.

I headed over to my buddy Kurt’s house where we were having dinner. He made an amazing mac and cheese to go with the chicken… I’m planning to get the recipe and recreate it. It was insane. When it was time to fry I filled up a deep, heavy stock pot with oil and brought it up to about 350F. You want the oil right around 325F for frying but if you start out a little higher, the first couple pieces of cool chicken in the oil will bring the temp back down. You should keep good watch on the temperature until you get a feel for how hot it is by how quick the chicken’s cooking. It shouldn’t ever drop below 325F.

While the oil was heating up I got my chicken all ready for the ball. Obviously I couldn’t just dredge this chicken in flour and call it a day. If you’re frying chicken (or anything really that you want breaded) generally you’ll dredge it in flour to dry it off, then dip it in an egg wash of some sort (or buttermilk), and then dredge it back in either flour or breadcrumbs. You’re kindof just making a batter on the surface that will actually stick, since if you tried to dunk it in batter it would just slide right off. Don’t ask me why, just trust.

Since this stuff was already soaking in seasoned buttermilk – we passed up the massage and the pool and went straight for the flour treatment. I mixed in with my flour some garlic salt and a whole load of sesame seeds. I went with mostly black ones to give it the cool speckled look and added some light brown toasted ones too for the flavor. Now the holy trinity of Korean flavor was complete – garlic, chili and sesame – through the marinade and the breading. It’s really an unbeatable flavor combination… I’d put it up against just about anything.

When the oil was hot I went to town and started bathing those beauties in the tub. You just fry em a couple pieces at a time for about 10 minutes if they’re totally submerged or about 8-10 minutes on each side if you’re doing it in a shallower pan and can’t completely cover them. The oil should be around 325F – no lower – while they’re frying.

You don’t want to rush them or they’ll be undercooked inside and you really don’t want to crowd them in the pot or the oil will get too cool and they’ll just soak it all up

They should come out looking like this and tasting even better…

 
What you need
Chicken
Buttermilk – to soak
Salt – to season
Flour – to dredge
Hot oil – to fry
A lotta soul – to love it

**Added Bonus**
Chili flakes
Garlic
Sesame seeds

The point really though is that you can flavor it however you want… experiment with the coating. Get crazy. Next time I’m gonna pulverize those sesame seeds in my food processor and see if I can get a really dark coating on it. Maybe chop up some fresh herbs into the flour mixture? Or just keep it simple and old school – buttermilk, chicken and flour. Can’t go wrong there…

Forever Lemons

When life gives you… nevermind. The Meyer lemon tree in our neighbors’ yard is packed and they’re ripe. It’s overflowing into our yard so I feel like it’s my obligation to clean off our side of the tree so they don’t rot and go to waste. I’ll never drink enough lemonade to use all these suckers so I decided that since it’s preserving season… I should preserve some.

This is maybe the easiest thing in the world to do with a lemon, other than eat it raw. You just have to be patient… but you don’t even really have to be patient, you just have to be able to forget. This works out great for me because usually my problem is remembering, so I can just forget about these and whenever I do remember they’re in my cabinet, they’ll probably be perfect!

Step one: rinse lemons and slice in half.

Step two: cover lemons in kosher salt.

Step three: forget about lemons for 1-3 months.

Step four: eat.

 
The details (adapted from Charcuterie):

* Use some sort of nonreactive container – I used a glass jar.
* Make sure your lemons are completely submerged in salt. Totally covered.
* They’ll be usable after a month but better after a little longer. They’ll last pretty much forever in the salt… when I say forever I mean months, not like… ten years.

To use them rinse off the salt, scrape out the insides and chop up the rind or do whatever you’re planning to do with it… you can use them in salad too, in which case you should blanch them in simmering water quickly to reduce the intensity.

Soft Pretz

While we’re on things non-meat… I’ve been back on a pretzel-making kick and I’m pretty excited about it. These little doughboys are one of my favorite bready snacks and – as far as breads go – they’re pretty damn easy to whip up.

Flour, water, purple. Wait no… flour, water, yeast. And some sugar and a little bit of salt. I couldn’t find the recipe I used to make these before but I did it from what little memory I could drum up and they turned out pretty good.

Instead of dipping them in lye, like traditional German soft pretzels, you drop them in boiling baking soda water for a minute before baking. It’s pretty similar to making bagels. My guess is that the extra yeasty, pretzel-y flavor comes from the explosive yeast action from the sugar you add at the beginning. Sugar is like fuel for yeast… it eats the sugar and multiplies like millions of microscopic bunnies.

I’m going to make the lye version soon so I can compare…

 
Super Easy Soft Pretzels

1 cup warm water (not too warm – around 80F is the perfect temperature for yeast)
1 package of active dry yeast
2 tbsp brown sugar

3 cups of flour – bread flour is good but plain white works too

Water Bath
4-6 cups water
3 tbsp baking soda

Kosher salt or coarse sea salt.

 

1. Warm water and sugar in a small bowl – sprinkle yeast on top to proof. You’re re-hydrating it to activate it since it’s been put on hold in its dried state.

2. After about ten minutes, the yeast should be a little bit bubbly on top of the water and smell nice and yeasty. Pour it into about half of the flour – 1.5 cups – and mix.

3. Add flour a little bit at a time until the dough comes together and then turn it out onto a nicely floured surface.

4. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes until it’s smooth, adding flour as you need to to keep it from sticking to the surface and your hands.

5. Toss it in an oiled bowl and cover it tightly with plastic wrap for about an hour until it’s doubled in size.

I like to use plastic wrap instead of a damp towel like some people say to because the wrap traps the air in and it seems to make a nice environment for the dough to do its work in. It keeps it warm and humid in the bowl – kindof like a little mini proofing chamber – the little yeasties like that.

6. After the dough has doubled in size, roll it back out on the table and pound it down. Cut it into 8 to 10 pieces and roll them into balls.

7. Roll the balls into snakes and then twist them up into whatever shapes you want.

Stef made some pretty nice twisties. I think this one she’s working on is the “unichorn”.

8. Let them sit and rise again for about a half hour. While they’re rising, put on your pot of boiling baking soda water and preheat your oven to 450F.

9. After the second rise, drop the pretzels one at a time into the boiling soda water. Boil for about 30 seconds on each side then remove and put them on a greased baking sheet or parchment papered sheet.

10. Salt the pretzels while they’re still sticky.

11. Bake until brown – about 10 minutes.

Vegan(!!) Miso Veggie Stew

I know I know, I’m cracking up. I’ve gone bonkers over here… second day of no meat and tonight it was completely vegan! I think I might have to have a steak or some ribs tomorrow…

A lot of the time, especially when I’m just cooking for myself, I have a lot more than I need of something for a meal and lots leftover. Tonight I used some of the same stuff that went into my dinner last night and added a few other things I had around. I made sortof a vegetable stew with a miso soup base – except I didn’t add the bonito. This soup was super simple and actually really tasty and surprisingly filling.

It went a little something like this… First, I sliced sunchokes and boiled them for 15 minutes, according to the reccomendation in my Vegetable Book, by Colin Spencer. It’s a pretty nice reference about vegetables organized by species that I picked up at a thrift store years ago for like a dollar… very informative.

I wasn’t super familiar with sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) but I did know they had a flavor and texture similar to artichokes. They almost look like little balls of ginger root, but when cooked they taste like artichokes. Weird shit… Apparently they can make you pretty gassy and boiling them ahead of time can reduce that.

So I boiled the sunchokes and then set them aside. Drained the water (to avoid the fart fest) and refilled with some new water that I simmered a couple of small pieces of kombu in. Kombu, if you don’t know, is the hard, thick, dried seaweed that’s one of the main ingredients in the broth used to make miso soup. Usually that broth, called dashi, also has bonito (dried, fermented and smoked skipjack tuna) flakes in it but I opted to leave them out.

So I basically just started with a mildly seaweedy broth and added to that some diced carrots first that simmered for a bit and then a pile of chopped kale, some of which I chopped a little more finely to add some color and texture to the broth. After that simmered for a couple of minutes I turned down the heat and added some miso paste. You don’t ever want to boil after you’ve added the miso because you don’t want to kill all that good bacteria. After that I tossed in my leftover cooked quinoa from last night (which wasn’t much and I could have used more), the cooked sunchokes and some finely diced jalapeno. The result, topped with some sliced scallions, was pretty damn good…

My idea with the sunchokes was that they’d add sortof a firm-ish potato-y texture to the soup without totally starching it out and mucking up the miso. You could try potato if sunchokes aren’t around but honestly I think it would have been just as good without em… they didn’t really bring anything amazing to the soup, just helped fill it up. I think they’re probably better to just eat on their own so you can enjoy the flavor.

 
Vegan Miso Vegetable Stew
In order of appearance:

2-3″ of kombu (not the end of the world if you can’t get it, just leave it out)
6 cups water
4 carrots
4 cups chopped kale
3/4 cup miso paste* (more or less to taste – treat it like your salt seasoning for the soup…)
1 cup cooked quinoa (I’d use more if you have it… 2 cups probably would have been perfect)
6-8 cooked sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes)
1 small jalapeno pepper

Chop it however you want, stew it all together, and rest easy knowing that no animals were hurt or even consulted about this meal.**

*When you’re adding miso paste it helps a ton to thin it out with a little bit of hot water in a small bowl before pouring it in – you’ll avoid fat chunks of undissolved miso in your soup.

Vegetarians/vegans stop reading here.

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**I’m sorry I just can’t resist – this would have been awesome if it was started with bacon… I’d simmer the water with the kombu in a separate pot. While that was going on, I’d sautee some chopped bacon in the soup pot. You could leave it in to really flavor the broth or remove it to use later as a topping. I’d then sautee the carrots with the fat (and bacon if you leave it in) for a minute before adding the hot broth and continuing from there.

Vegetarian What?

I’ve been getting a lot of “even though your blog is all about meat and I don’t eat meat, I’ve been sending the link to my friends who do” comments lately… it’s not ALL about meat! So here it is. No meat. I didn’t eat a single piece of meat all day today. I’m cutting back. I don’t even eat as much as it seems like from the pictures… most of these meals last me days. But I’ve decided, after reading Food Matters, by Mark Bittman, that I’m gonna cut back a bit. Not out, just back. I don’t really want to cut anything out completely… I am a huge believer in moderation. Most of my meat-centricity on here is because it’s fun to talk about. But it’s far from the only thing I cook or eat… I have a salad with just about every meal I eat and always have some vegetables around my meat… I don’t like it to get lonely….

My philosophy on food is that the healthiest way to eat is to diversify yo bonds. Eat everything. It’s part of the reason I love Korean food so much – in just about every meal you get cooked, raw, pickled, spicy, mild, vegetables, fish, meat, broth, rice… in one meal! So a lot of the time I try to work that kind of diversity into the things I eat…

Tonight it was meat-free because I had a chance to swing by the Berkeley Bowl and couldn’t help myself with the produce. I came out with a pile of awesome fruits, vegetables and bulk grains and I decided to put some to use for my feeding.

Chanterelle mushrooms, garlic, carrot, zucchini, radicchio, kale and red quinoa. Quinoa is an amazing thing. I owe my knowledge of its existence to Andrea. Apparently it’s a “pseudocereal”. It’s like a grain, but not quite a grain… And, among other things you’d expect to find in something you treat like a grain – it’s full of protein. Which makes it pretty useful if you’re into cutting meat proteins out of your diet. The coolest thing about it though by far… is that it tastes damn good. It has a great texture – somewhere between rice and cous cous, which makes it really fun to eat. Oh yeah and it’s amazingly simple to cook. You can’t fuck it up. It’s like cooking rice except you have a zero percent chance of failure.

It also comes in a few different colors, which makes it pretty fun to use too. White, red and black, that I’ve seen. The best shot I have of it is a closeup of my half-finished plate… you can see how it sprouts little tails when it’s cooked that help the grains cling together kinda like rice.

Super simple meal. Dry sauteed the chanterelles to take out some water and then sauteed the garlic in olive oil then the carrots, then zucchini, mushrooms back in, chopped kale and radicchio just for a bit. The radicchio adds a nice bitterness and the kale adds a nice crunch and some bright color. Sometimes when I make a dish like this I’ll leave the kale raw and just chop it up and mix it in at the end.

Like I said before – baby I like it raaaaw (but not all raw). I like to have a mix of cooked and raw, but this time I just cooked everything. I got my raw non-meats in the form of pickled cauliflower that I made last week – I’ve been pickling my leftover veggies left and right so they don’t go bad when I can’t finish them all in time. It saves waste and gives me another easy flavor boost that I don’t have to do anything for but take it out of the jar. Just had that on the side.

 

The beauty of this is that you can basically use anything. I used:

1 cup red quinoa + 2 cups of water with a little bit of spicy garlicky salt in it (more on that later): boil water, pour in quinoa, cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes

2 big chanterelle mushrooms, chopped
1 small white zucchini, diced
1 carrot, diced
3 cloves of garlic
a few leaves of radicchio, chopped
a few big leaves of kale, chopped
salt + pepper
a nice splash of balsamic vinegar at the end for some good, sweet acid

Shaved some Old Amsterdam aged gouda on top.

I’m not gonna lie – it would have been better with bacon. But anything would and it was fine without it.

Pig Party

I decided to do a little bit of curing… I’ve been in a curing mood lately. I think it must be the season… it’s just natural to want to preserve things in the cold wintry weather. I had a couple of nice pig bits in the fridge that I wasn’t going to get to and it was long past time to do some bacon-making anyway. I had a belly and a couple of gigantic jowls. The jowls were over a pound each and beautiful pieces of meat… that’s right, I said it – those jowls were gorgeous. Range Bros Capay Valley pork never fails to amaze me… it’s always incredible.

Curing meat in this sense is so easy it’s kindof stupid not to do it if you really do love a good piece of bacon. It is one of the oldest methods of preserving food and pretty much every culture utilizes it in some way. The difference between this and store bought bacon is unbelievable. It’s so easy – you salt the meat, let it sit for a week, take it out and smoke it or roast it or hang it to dry and you have bacon or pancetta or whatever. The difference between bacon and pancetta is basically just that bacon is hot smoked after it’s been cured and pancetta is air dried. Guanciale is essentially pancetta made with the pig’s jowls. For some reason the cheeks of a lot of animals are some of the most amazing parts. Some of my favorites are beef cheeks, pork jowls and yellowtail cheeks. Broiled yellowtail cheeks are one of the best pieces of cooked fish you’ll ever taste… but that’s another story.

So with my belly and my jowls, I’m going to make a slab of bacon and a couple of nice chunks of guanciale. The essentials that you need – pig and salt. The things that help make it a little better are some sugar, garlic, brown sugar, herbs and sodium nitrite, a super common curing salt that goes by the name “pink salt”. You don’t absolutely have to have it but it definitely helps. The pink salt helps the meat keep its bright pink color and it helps prevent botulism in other applications… you don’t really have to worry about that here and that’s why it’s really just useful for helping maintain the color.

And salt… I love it. I love salt so much I wanna take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. It’s without a doubt the most powerful ingredient or tool in the kitchen. I swear by Diamond Crystal kosher salt. To me it’s the perfect texture and weight for cooking – nice big grains, but they’re soft and fluffy at the same time. Whatever brand it is, always use kosher salt for cooking… put that cannister of iodized table salt back in the cupboard and go to the store. Now. Save that shit for baking cookies and cakes.

It’s best to weigh out your ingredients when you’re doing something like this where you need specific ratios because the different consistencies of different salts makes it tough to get accurate volume measurements.

The recipes that I use for these and pretty much any charcuterie I do are all based on stuff from the book, not surprisingly titled – Charcuterie. It’s by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn and it’s really brilliant. It’s definitely one of the most used books on my shelf… most cookbooks I just read for inspiration but this is one of the ones that is really a reference I turn back to all the time.

Try it out…

Homemade Bacon

- Get a slab of pork belly(2-4lbs), and mix up some cure. Basically 2 parts salt to 1 part sugar and a little bit of pink salt. I think what I used ended up being about 1/4c of salt, 1/8 cup of sugar and about a teaspoon of pink salt.
- Slather it on the belly, toss it in a big ziplock bag in the fridge and turn it every day or so to redistribute the cure.
- After about a week, if it’s firm it’s done. If not, toss it back in for another day or two.
- At this point you just rinse it off and dry it and it’s almost ready to go. Right now you basically have half-cured salt pork. You can roast it in the oven for about 2 hours at 200F, or toss it on the grill with some wood chips and smoke it. After that you just slice it up and fry it and wallow in that fatty goodness.

*I like the smoking method it because it really tastes like bacon that way but honestly it’s a slab of cured, fatty pork belly… it’s gonna be good no matter what you do with it.

To see the finished product, go here.

 

Guanciale… maybe another day.

Chicken Fried Tonkatsu

 

I love pork. It’s no big secret, and it’s nothing new right? Everyone loves pork these days, it’s cool to like pork. But it’s actually a great thing that it is so hip to like pig because it means we can get amazing quality pork everywhere now.

One of my favorite things to make lately is a brined pork chop. A big thick hog chop brined over night and then pan seared and oven roasted. But you don’t always have time for all that nor do you always have a nice fat center cut chop just lying around. What you can find pretty much anytime anywhere are boneless shoulder and sirloin chops that are cheap and… usually terrible due to the large amount of connective tissue they contain. They just don’t cooperate – sear and sautee as you may, they always end up the texture of a twelve year old truck tire. Not any more. I’ve got the trick – beat it. Beat the shit out of that chop and then bread it and fry it or sear it or whatever you need to do to get it crispy – torch it, broil it(?) toast it, microwave it. I don’t think it matters… once it’s pounded and breaded you can do whatever you want with it – it’s gonna be good.

No no but in all seriousness – chicken fried steak, wiener schnitzel, milanesa, tonkatsu – every culture has their own version of breaded, fried, flat meat… it’s all good any way you fry it. Tonaktsu is usually just a piece of boneless pork breaded and fried. I like to take the chicken fried steak/schnitzel method to make sure it’s tender… you just pound it thin (around 1/4″), bread it and fry it. I’ve deep fried and I’ve pan fried… similar results. Pan frying obviously seems a little bit healthier. I’m not totally convinced that it is, but I’m no expert. You’re also essentially pounding out the meat in favor of having a much higher breading to meat ratio… so let’s be serious – the reason you eat fried food is for the breading so just give it up already.

I put a little bit of a Korean twist on this too… because German/Texan/Japanese just wasn’t enough. I spiked the breading mix with a healthy dose of korean chili flakes and garlic salt. Otherwise it’s just flour and an egg for dipping.

I pan-fried these until they were crispy and cooked and then tossed a little bit of the seasoned flour and a knob of butter into the pan for a quick roux. I poured in a splash of the Belgian style trippel I was drinking and simmered it for a minute to make gravy. Side note – beer makes great gravy. In many many cases, for whatever you’re cooking, you don’t have stock or broth but you do have beer – 90% of the time, if you’d be needing less than say… a cup of broth or stock – I’d say substitute away.

 

I ate the chicken fried pork steak with a soft-fried egg (like katsudon),beet greens (the tops left over from a bunch of beets that I pickled) and pickled daikon over 50/50 rice (half white, half brown).

Eating About Beer

This post is long overdue but since we just met a couple nights ago to start planning for the next dinner, I thought maybe it was time to share. First off, I deserve no credit for the photos – they were all shot by our friend Phil who is an awesome photographer. You can see plenty more of his great photos here.

Last May I met up with a group of five other friends who are all also crazy about beer and food – brewing, cooking, eating, drinking… We talked it out over a few beers, naturally, and decided that we wanted to plan a dinner where we’d each come up with a course, and then brew a beer to be paired with that course.

Over the next six months or so we hashed out who was cooking what, who was brewing what, who was brewing what now because their first batch didn’t work and all the other logistics. In the end it came out to be one course each for four of us, two sharing a fifth course, two splitting duties on appetizers, three making dessert courses and everyone brewing a shit ton of beer. We got a lot of awesome help from friends putting together everything from finding enough plates to sewing custom napkins for the dinner – along the way I got a sewing lesson. We’re calling what we’re doing Eating About Beer. More will be happening in the near future so stay tuned…

Here are some photos of the dishes. Click here to see the menu.

Pickled Sardines (check out Eric’s great blog, Awesome Pickle, for the recipe)
 

Sea Urchin Tempura & Salmon Sashimi with Mustard Su Miso Sauce
 

Madras Goat Curry with Saffron Rice
 

Arugula Salad with Roasted Hazelnuts, Pomegranate & Fuyu Persimmons
 

Borlotti Beans in Mole
 

Beer-Braised Short Ribs & Spatzle
 

Pear Ginger Cake & Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream with Beer Caramel
 

Apple Cinnamon Donuts & Whipped Beer

And Israel made chocolate truffles infused with kriek that were amazing but we don’t have photo documentation.

 
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My dish was salmon sashimi draped over sea urchin tempura with meyer lemon juice soaked tapioca pearls, jalapeno and dried miso powder.

 
The mustard miso sauce on the plate is bad ass and super easy to make. It comes from, not surprisingly… Nobu. You could use it for so many things… you can pretty much use it wherever honey mustard would be good, and more… I would never think to use honey mustard with fish but the miso in this sauce really ties it together and makes it work. It goes amazingly well with fish and is a great dipping sauce. I used my leftover sauce to dip fries in. Mondo-umami.

To make the mustard miso sauce, you first need saikyo miso, which is basically just sweetened miso with sake. This shit will not go to waste in your fridge either if you have extra. If you’ve ever had miso glazed cod or miso eggplant in a Japanese restaurant – chances are this is what was on it. Cod baked with this shit glazed on top is like crack.

 
Nobu-Style Saikyo Miso
adapted from Nobu the Cookbook

3/4 cup sake
3\4 cup mirin
2 cups white miso paste
1 1\4 cups sugar

- Bring the sake and mirin to a boil. Boil it for about 20 seconds or so to burn off the alcohol
- Turn down the heat and stir in the miso paste, mixing with a wooden spoon.
- When it’s completely mixed in, add the sugar and turn up the heat. Stir constantly to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom and burn. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove and let cool.

 
Mustard Su-Miso Sauce
adapted from Nobu the Cookbook

1 tsp Japanese mustard powder
2 tsp hot water
8 Tbsp saikyo miso
2 Tbsp + 1 tsp rice vinegar

- Dissolve the mustard powder in a bowl with the hot water
- Add miso and rice vinegar
- Crack out.

 

Yay Area Borscht

I’d never made borscht before but it always seemed like an appropriate winter soup. It’s not as cold here as it is back in the motherland (no not mine, the Ukrainians’), but we still get plenty of cabbage and beets around here this time of year to make a nice burgundy stew. I’m gonna have to take another photo because this one really doesn’t do it justice… it looks so much better now that the beets have had time to dye everything else purple.

The base typically includes some mix of beets, cabbage, carrots, potatoes and some meat. I went with a beef shank and also had the butcher cross-cut me a beef leg bone into 1″ segments to make a quick stock since I was all out.

One of the first meals few meals I can remember ever having in Los Angeles was with my friend Mark at a place called Doughboys that, after a sad turn of events, shut down a few years back. Strangely I still remember that meal vividly because I was so impressed by the beef stew… it was awesome, cheap and I just loved how it looked and felt in my mouth because everything in it was diced exactly the same size. Potatoes, carrots, celery(I think?), beef, all about 1/4″ dice. Perfection. Every time I make beef stew or anything similar, I come back to that memory for some reason and I end up dicing everything like that. This stuff tonight was a little bigger, probably closer to 1/2″ but I still always try to keep it consistent. Not only does it look cool, it also ensures that your veggies will be cooked evenly and you won’t have some soft and some hard because you cut em all wonky.

Somehow avocados are always around and always cheap here… all year. I grabbed one to throw on top of the soup along with the usual sour cream topping. I hear dill is traditional but I’m generally not a big fan of dill so I didn’t hunt it down for this one. I also had a giant daikon that I was planning to pickle so I decided to dice some of that up in the stew as well. It’s great in Japanese and Korean stews so I figured it’d go well with this mix of stuff too. It has a great texture when it’s cooked and has a very mild flavor – great filler.

First step, simmer the shank in the stock with some onion. Since the stock wasn’t on for as long as I would have liked, I threw the bones in with the shank to try to drag out a little more flavor. This simmered for about an hour and a half or so until the beef was able to pull away from the bone easily but before it was falling apart. I wanted it to still have some shape so I could give it a nice dice to match up with the veg.

After the beef was ready, I pulled it out and diced it. In went the carrots, potatoes & beets (which I think next time I’ll use a little more of). This simmered on low for about 20 minutes or so until the veggies weren’t hard anymore, but before they turned to mush. After that I tossed in the daikon and the cabbage and simmered just until the daikon was soft, which doesn’t take long.

The soup is way better if it sits in the fridge for a day before you eat it. The whole soup turns deep purple and the beet flavor is a lot more intense.

Ingredients:
1 beef shank
4 or so cups of beef stock
1 yellow onion
3 medium carrots
3 racquetball(?) sized beets
2 medium red potatoes
2-3 fistfulls of shredded cabbage
Salt and pepper to taste

Sour cream and avocado to top

*Next time I’ll start it out with some bacon to give it a little bit of smoke. I think I’d render the bacon in the pan till it was crispy, use the fat to saute the onion in, and keep the crispy bacon to chop up on top with the sour cream and avocado. That’s exactly what was missing – the crunchy topping. You know I love a good crunchy topping… especially when it comes in the form of smoked hog.

Fried Slow-Poached Egg & Ground Pork

Minus the slow-poached egg, this is a variation on one of my standard dinners… usually I eat it tossed with noodles and it’s much better that way than with rice. This one wasn’t the best but you get the idea.

The slow-poached egg is another one from Momofuku. The very abbreviated version of the story he tells in the book, is that old Japanese women would take baskets of eggs to the hot springs and the water was the perfect temperature to poach them inside the shell.

 
The recipe says to hold them in a bath of water between 140 and 145F for around 45 minutes. I did it for exactly that long and they were still a little bit too loose. I think something closer to an hour would have been better.

You can also see in the picture below that the eggs are sitting on the lid of another pot inside my dutch oven – this was to keep them from sitting on the bottom where the pot is hotter than the rest. The pot lid proved not to be the best solution because it trapped the water that was heating underneath it and made circulation a problem. I’d suggest using something more porous. The best solution would be a metal steamer basket – the kind your grandma always used to steam broccoli in until it was brown and soggy.

 
The ground pork/sauce thing is something that I make pretty regularly and the ingredients always change but the basic premise is – ground pork flavored with some combination of soy sauce, rice wine, vinegar and chilis. This particular incarnation went something like this:

- Onions and garlic sauteed with whole dried chilis.
- Ground pork, sauteed till brown
- Sauce mixture of: soy sauce, mirin, Shaoxing cooking wine, red vinegar & water steeped with strong oolong and roasted green tea*
- Diced bok choy

 
I poured the meat sauce over rice, topped it with a pan-fried slow-poached egg, and topped it all with some chopped up Belgian endive, a few peanuts and some sesame seeds.

 
*A lot of times when I don’t have stock or broth around, I’ll brew a pot of tea to use as a base for soups and sauces to give them some extra flavor. Oolong and roasted green tea (hojicha) work great – especially for Asian dishes.