Well, the whole “no one reads my blog except my mom” shtick is starting to no longer be relevant. In fact, I’ve begun to accrue some regular non-family readers. Some dude named “Google Web Preview” has been visiting my blog pretty regularly, and he seems to be a ballin’ jet setter who checks in from all over the globe. But the biggest indicator of my blog’s reach is the fact the number one commenter on my blog, according to WordPress stats, is no longer my mother. In fact, that title was recently achieved by a man who I first met because he is my sister’s college roommate’s boyfriend-turned-fiancé-turned-husband. Spaceballs-like relationships aside, he recently posted this comment in response to the What I Really Eat post:
“This is going to sound like a ridiculous white person request, but maybe you could do a walk-through on kimchi fried rice. I have lots of both ingredients on hand at all times, but shy away from the dish because afterwards my wok is always super sticky/burned on and washing it is a pain in the ass.”
And now, introducing the “Ridiculous White Person Request” series (got it’s own category!): Kimchi Fried Rice.
I’m willing to bet that the crap that gets stuck to the bottom of the pan and makes cleanup a pain in the ass is the caked-on-mess that’s left behind when the liquid of the kimchi juice evaporates. I’m sure about this because the same thing happens to me when I’m too lazy to bother with the following pretty simple solution that I’m so confident works, I’m willing to stake the hard-earned seasoning of my cast-iron skillet on it.
Here’s what you’ll need:
1. SPAM, hot dog, sausage, or some other processed pork product. Bacon would probably work, and I suppose you could go with a legitimate protein that’s close to its natural state as well.
2. Kimchi that has been, for lack of a better term, juiced. Squeeze as much of the liquid out as you can. A cheesecloth would make things a little cleaner, but you can do it by hand if you don’t mind the smell/mess. Save the juice. Chop the kimchi into small, manageable pieces.
3. Rice. It should be at least a day old, cold, and grains separated. This works for brown rice too.
4. An egg.
5. Sesame oil to help things along, soy sauce, and some sort of rice wine type product.
6. Random other things that could include: Small frozen vegetables, lettuce is pretty good, green onions, dried laver etc.
A quick tip if you don’t have rice from the day before:
Use an instant microwaveable rice bowl. Don’t cook it, just open it up and separate the grains. If you have the foresight to do it, throw it in the fridge long enough for it to be cold, which’ll help avoid it getting too mush and sticky at cooking time.
Speaking of cooking:
Start by browning and rendering the meat. If things are sticking, throw a few drops of sesame oil in there.
Next toss the kimchi in and let it do its thing.
Cooked kimchi takes on a different flavor and texture entirely. It loses some sourness and toasty browned flavors start to take over (you know the ones…they taste like toasty brown).
Once the kimchi’s all cooked, push everything to the sides of the pan (or up the sides of the wok), drop in a few more drops of oil, spread it in a little circle, and drop your egg in.
Let the egg cook for a little bit before breaking up the yolk and scrambling it, and let it cook for a little bit more after that. The rice comes next, so if the egg isn’t cooked enough then everything gets coated in a non-descript and mush-ifying coating of egg, rather than having discrete pockets of egg.
Again, push the egg off to the sides, so there’s a nice exposed heating area for the rice to drop in. At this point, if there’s frozen veggies you want to add then do so now, and if you do add frozen stuff, splash a tiny bit of the rice wine in with them, before pushing them to the side. If the middle of the pan has lost a bit of heat, then let it warm up again, little more sesame oil, and then dump the rice in.
Start by cutting down into the rice with whatever you’re using to mix things around. The goal is basically to separate the grains more and spread them out into an even layer. Then splash in just enough kimchi juice to tinge everything red, a bit of soy sauce, and a little Sriracha if you want. Mix everything up until incorporated. Too much liquid will create a starchy slurry that will also cause a sticky mess, so be careful.
And there it is. Kimchi fried rice, no gunk on the pan. My cast-iron skillet’s predominantly bacon-fat seasoning is still marvelously intact. Just remember to juice your kimchi first.
If you’re white (or not) and you have a request for something Asian or junk-food related that you’d like to see, send it along and there’ll be a RWPR post on it! It’s the least I can do for the fan(s).
Spring Break…the traditional period in which a young person gets drunk and makes regrettable decisions. That is my excuse for what I just ate…only I can’t blame alcohol, and I have no regrets (yet).
Nacho Cheese Doritos are only the third best flavor (1. Salsa Verde, 2. Cool Ranch, end of discussion), but it’s the only flavor you can get in taco shell form.
My love of Taco Bell elicits the range of mild surprise to outright disgust among those who find out (and admittedly…I’m pretty vocal about it). In old school Lafayette, before the rise of fast casual Mexican and the burrito joint, there was El Charro’s (still love it) and Taco Bell (where all the troublemakers would congregate after junior high let out). I’m leaving out Jack-In-The-Box, even though I do enjoy their tacos. There were other options in the greater East Bay area, and my family did go to Chevy’s for a brief period, mostly because my sister liked the fried tortilla ice cream cone and I liked watching the tortilla machine. Sure, high school was a little different. Casa Gourmet Burrito was the go-to place in Lafayette, but the Mucho Grande Burrito (famous for containing more than an entire day’s worth of fat and calories), was one of the unofficial foods of Blueprint deadline weekends.
Only later did the burrito chain come along. I’ve been trying to remember what the first chain I went to was called, but I do remember that the color scheme was heavy on teal, that there were little hearts next to the “healthy” menu options, that it took me about four tries to get the hang of tearing the foil correctly (there was a handy picture guide they provided).
Despite the evolution of my tastes in food and better access to good Mexican food, my love of Taco Bell hasn’t gone away. When a new product launches, I’m there to try it. Fire sauce? Can’t live without it. Crunchwrap Supreme? Debuted while I was in Amherst, and had to drive 15 miles to the nearest Taco Bell to try it. Volcano tacos? Cantina-style? Beefy crunch burrito with Fritos? Breakfast? Check, check, check, and check. So howsabout these new Doritos Locos tacos?
You can tell that Taco Bell is just as excited as I am…with this deluxe cardboard sleeve ensuring the taco shell doesn’t get destroyed.
Yes indeed…it is a taco shell covered in orange nacho Doritos powder. To really appreciate it, you should probably compare it to a normal taco. Luckily, for completeness of the taste test I had the foresight to do just that. The shell is certainly different in texture from the normal option, but not entirely like actual fresh Doritos. The taste? Not as overwhelming as you might expect. It makes it saltier, and you get a lot of the Dorito flavor in the aftertaste, but it’s not hugely different from your baseline taco bell experience. It’s not as disappointing as the volcano taco, but won’t knock the regular taco out of my order. I would avoid the supreme version (which I recommend for all Taco Bell tacos), due to the excessive amount of sour cream.
Definitely worth trying once, but I don’t think I’ll order it again. If they ever introduce a salsa verde or cool ranch Doritos taco, that’ll require some re-assessment…delicious, fattening re-assessment.
Well the last experiment with turducken didn’t go all that well. My mini-turducken roll ended up falling apart as soon as I cut into it, but it tasted pretty good. Stuffing, though delicious, doesn’t quite act as an appropriate way to glue different meats together. So what could?
How about meat glue? Officially known as transglutaminase and manufactured under the Activa brand name by Ajinomoto (the same folks who brought you MSG), transglutaminase is an enzyme that catalyzes the crosslinking of proteins. The bottom line…you can glue protein-y meats together. Transglutaminase comes in different forms, based on what it’s mixed with to help it along. There seems to be some controversy about the stuff, but it really isn’t used to trick consumers into buying frankensteaks that are constructed from scraps, and it’s not some crazy chemical that doesn’t belong in our food. In fact, if you’ve recently had a cup of good ol’ mass-produced non-artisanal yogurt (unlike the $3-a-pop Liberté my sister demands), you’ll likely have ingested transglutaminase, as it is used to enhance the yield and consistency of yogurt. My other question to Ajinomoto was whether this would piss off anti-transglutaminase antibodies in Celiac patients…they said no.
So I got my hands on some of the stuff, but really had no idea how to use it. Thankfully (as mentioned previously), Barnes and Noble had a display copy of Modernist Cuisine, and I took photos of the relevant pages:
Seems simple enough, sprinkle it on, press the meat together, voila…glued. After this whole thing, I remembered that David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook calls for transglutaminase in his brick chicken recipe…and Wylie Dufresne wrote a little piece on the stuff for the book, in which he too mentions the idea of making turducken with the stuff.
Once again, duck on the outside:
Layer of turkey:
Chicken thighs in the middle:
I decided to be bold and instead of actually tying, just go with plastic wrap:
But then got nervous and tied it anyway.
The next day: a nice uniform mini-turducken. I decided I’d proceed like the last time, cook the outside and finish in the oven. Of course I had to have stuffing, so I made some, but stuffing is best when it’s actually been IN the bird, soaking up all the er…for lack of a better term…meat juices.
Solution…throw some scraps from the butchering up the turducken on top of the stuffing then throw it in the oven (stole this from America’s Test Kitchen). Also there’s a little bit of butter…just a little.
I decided to be bold and forgo the ties when cooking, which was a mistake. The skin ended up pulling apart my glued seam between duck and turkey, also it looked a little pale.
This is why you need a proper torch. Not one of those teeny pencil-flame “kitchen” torches you pay too much for at Williams-Sonoma. This thing is a proper hardware store plumber’s soldering torch. It’ll handle a dainty little creme brulee AND throw off enough heat to properly crisp up a big duck skin for about half the price. Seriously…everything is better torched.
Cutting into it, it’s clear that things stayed well glued together:
Just ignore that there’s some separation at the duck layer. I think I was a little heavy-handed with the meat glue on the duck breast, and I really should’ve tied the thing up when cooking. Also…I need to butcher the duck into a thinner envelope to make it more uniform.
Still…the whole thing is pretty delicious, and much more manageable than making an entire turducken. To accompany my mini-turducken, I made a mini-Thanksgiving meal:
Yes…it’s a mini baked potato:
Except it’s not actually baked. It’s a cooked fingerling potato that’s then split and deep fried. I wish I could take credit for that idea, but it was Hubert Keller’s.
Something funky happened further down the roll:
Looks kinda cool right?
The best part of a Thanksgiving meal is the leftovers, and mini-turducken came through for lunch the next day.
I’m sure there are quite a few vegetarians at my public health school. I wonder what they would’ve thought had they seen that my lunch contained four different kinds of meat (five if you count bacon and sausage separately)?
So my first experiment with transglutaminase was fun. It did indeed glue meats together, and I managed not to glue my hands together or my eyes shut.
The world is often fooled by what I present on this blog and the food that I make for them. That includes family, friends, and you dear reader (and as a reader…you are indeed family. I don’t mean that in an “I care about my readers so much that they’re like family to me” way…I mean it in an “only my family…specifically my mom…actually reads this” kinda way).
One of the questions I frequently am asked is “Hey man, cooked anything new lately?” The answer is very rarely something interesting like:
Chicken chile verde:
Served in a cheddar popover.
In fact, creativity and originality are rare commodities these days, both in my own kitchen and on the interwebs in general. For proof, look no further than the meme phenomenon. One person has a somewhat clever idea, then within a matter of days everyone has copied the idea, and very rarely do they contribute anything more to society, in terms of humor or life enrichment. The world doesn’t need a “Shit that girls taller than 5’9″ who are on gluten free diets say” video. In order to celebrate the fact that the six-picture “What I REALLY do” meme is finally dying down, I’m presenting a “What I Really Eat” post. I’ve instagrammed the photos to create the illusion of significance and interest.
Salad. Everything in this was obtained from Costco. My strategy is to buy salad greens there because they’re cheap, and then I’m forced to eat a lot of salad before it all goes bad. Coupled with some avocado (Costco 5-pack), cherry tomatoes, and the outrageously cheap rotisserie chicken, it accounts for about 4-5 days of meals.
More from Costco. Spaghetti and meatballs. The frozen meatballs were a coupon deal a long time ago, and a box of spaghetti from Costco is like 8 lbs. The limiting reagent is sauce, and three jars lasts about 15 meals.
Good ol’ instant Japanese curry…with meatballs. That surplus of meatballs had to go somewhere, so what better way to use them up then by fusing Italian with Japanese style pseuo-Indian. I do caramelize the onions in there for fun mostly, but other than that it’s basically just one step above instant ramen. Speaking of which…
Yeah, it’s exactly what it looks like. It actually does take some amount of effort to boil the water and all. It’s certainly more time-consuming than:
Rice and kimchi. I always make the full pot of rice and it usually lasts about a week. I’ll either eat it this way or:
As kimchi fried rice. Definitely what I’ll make if I have some SPAM lying around. Rice, kimchi, pasta, and salad account for probably 90% of what I eat on a regular basis.
And now for some one-offs:
A two-dollar Papa John’s pizza. The one-topping was free from that Super Bowl coin toss promo they did (Can you imagine how pissed they were when that happened? I’m sure whatever dude came up with that promo was thinking “Dammit! What are the odds?”). I splurged for two extra toppings.
One time I ate this bag of popcorn for dinner over the course of two nights. It was kinda awesome because I love white cheddar popcorn, but probably not so nutritionally complete…just guessing.
The coffee truffle is one of my favorites to make and eat. It’s got chocolate, it’s got coffee flavor, likely some caffeine…quite often a bit of booze. It’s a far superior coffee/chocolate delivery system than the chocolate-covered espresso bean, because with beans you just end up chewing on coffee grinds after the chocolate melts away.
The difficulty for me is in obtaining predictable results. My usual method involves steeping ground coffee in hot cream that eventually gets strained into a ganache. It works pretty well most of the time, but it’s tricky to get a handle on consistency of grind, amount of coffee, and steeping time. Get things wrong and you either waste beans on no coffee flavor, or ruin chocolate by making it way too bitter. The one time I got this perfectly right was the first time I ever made coffee truffles, using my parents’ burr grinder and beans from Peet’s. In my own apartment I also have a burr grinder but one that’s vastly inferior, and no access to Peet’s. Even with all the correct factors in place, even the finest strainer and the most consistent grinders will create small flecks of coffee that will find their way into the final strained ganache. As with the aforementioned chocolate covered espresso bean, you end up chewing on coffee grinds. This whole steeping and straining process also makes you lose time/heat and some volume of cream, leading to inconsistencies in the finished product. So what’s the fix?
My other go-to truffle is the Mexican hot chocolate. I do steep a dry ancho chile in the cream, but it’s easy to pluck out and doesn’t really absorb any of the cream. Most of that flavor comes form directly mixing in spices…a bit of cinnamon, cayenne, and finely ground ancho powder. Instant coffee or espresso powder come to mind as being analagous to this process, but these products are generally poor. The flavor is just too weak, too “off,” to survive when mixed with dark chocolate. Don’t get me wrong…I love instant coffee, especially in its Korean stick form, premixed with loads of sugar and creamer in convenient single-serve packets (though I usually use two at a time). Just rip one (two) open, dump it in a cup, add hot water, then use the now-empty packets as a stir-stick.
When I was in Korea, my sister gave me some Starbucks VIA ready-brew packets (that came from America…yeah we’re jet-setters like that). They look similar to stick coffee…but each packet consists of instant coffee powder and micro-ground coffee. No milk, no sugar, no nothing. The biggest surprise is that it actually yields something that tastes like coffee. Stale, signature Starbucks-burnt tasting coffee, but coffee nonetheless. Definitely much closer than any other instant coffee product I’ve tried. It’s not the best cup of coffee you’ll ever have, but in the end it doesn’t really matter for my purposes. More important for a truffle is the flavor and quality of the chocolate.
Speaking of which…I normally buy Trader Joe’s pound plus bars for truffles. They’re cheap and good. But for coffee truffles the 72% dark is a tad sour and their regular dark (54%) is a bit plain. I’ve been buying one of each bar and blending, but two pounds of chocolate is a massive amount of truffles and inevitably I have a massive amount of chocolate left over that I’m forced to eat plain, or make cookies with, or do something equally unhealthy. Instead, I bought some relatively sweet and mild 68% dark chocolate.
One packet of VIA makes an 8 oz cup of coffee. Therefore I arbitrarily used 4 ounces of cream. Your basic ganache is a 2:1 ratio of chocolate to cream, which I gleaned by scaling down the CIA textbook (thanks Jungjoo) recipe that starts off with 1 kilo of chocolate. 8 ounces chocolate and 4 ounces cream (yeah yeah…I know…they’re not the same type of ounce, but it works). Another trick from the book is to use a little butter to improve mouthfeel. Don’t trust any ganache recipes that call for corn syrup. It’s unnecessary.
I chop my chocolate fine with a serrated knife, but to make extra sure I also give it a couple of quick pulses in a food processor to make an easy-to-melt gravel consistency. I sprinkled the VIA packet and tossed it into this chocolate gravel. Scalded cream goes in next:
Ah ganache. Nice and shiny, no coffee grit floating around. The microground coffee doesn’t dissolve, but it’s so fine that it doesn’t end up being noticeable. At this point, I also like to add a dash of some sort of liqueur (Kahlua in this case), because it helps later on by keeping the cooled ganache just soft enough to not break your disher (I’m on my third one at this point).
A #100 disher is the perfect size and they’re much more pleasant to eat than the 70 I used to use before it broke.
The next consideration is wheter to coat or not. Coating in some sort of cocoa powder mixture is great because it covers up any flaws and inconsistencies. Especially with my warm hands, the chocolate gets a little tacky/nappy if you look up close:
It’s also a way to sneak some extra flavor accents on there (cinnamon when coating a Mexican chocolate truffle), or basically be the main source of it (dehydrated strawberries ground into a powder…reverse chocolate strawberry). But plain old cocoa powder isn’t always the most pleasing thing to eat. Unlike the delicious powdered sugar on donettes that melts in your mouth…cocoa powder just kinda lingers, not dissolving…being bitter…drying your tongue. It does look nice though, so you can use the point of a knife and carve a little stencil out of wax or parchment paper, then press the truffle down into cocoa powder through the stencil.
Normally, a coffee bean shape would be helpful to identify what kind of truffle it is, but in honor of Valentine’s day, I went with a heart (also, as making snowflakes out of coffee filters in kindergarten taught me, it’s easier to cut symmetrical shapes into paper with the fold-in-half trick).
Yes, I know they look janky…I got lazy about scooping perfectly in the end and my hands were warming up. The important thing is that I ended up with consistent, noticeable coffee flavor. Not too bitter…no grinds to chew on. For stronger flavor, maybe 1.5 packets per 4 oz of cream would work (or make one pound of chocolate, one cup of cream, 3 VIA packets). Those little packets are pretty expensive though, but in the context of truffles, which are INCREDIBLY cheap to make compared to what it costs to buy them, it’s not a bad deal overall. I’m just waiting for Peet’s to come out with its own super awesome pre-measured instant brew…but I’m guessing they’re a bit too focused for that kind of nonsense.
Okay so that doesn’t really exist…but why shouldn’t it? Home cooks have pretty much found a way to appropriate every other aspect of the professional food world. If willing to pay the price, the home cook can get the same ingredients found in restaurant kitchens. As ingredients have evolved, so too have the ways home chefs can obtain them. Nowadays, anyone can hop online and obtain the materials necessary to enter the realm of foams, spherification, glued meats, and even the insane world of reverse spherification. The Adria brothers and their Texturas line make these items somewhat easier to understand and use.
Even those techniques that would require a more expensive buy-in are finding their way into home kitchens. Want to sous vide? Just get 50 bucks of parts, a soldering iron, and a crock pot and you’re good to go. Or skip the trip to Fry’s and buy the Sous Vide Supreme. Need a PolyScience smoking gun? Williams-Sonoma has you covered. Normal griddle just too college-dormy for your fancy kitchen? The anti-griddle could be yours for $1,200. And there’s no shortage of people out there willing to pay. These days everyone has a gigantic-ass TV and surround sound in their living room, so the kitchen is becoming the place to show off new toys and make the neighbors jealous. Still…even with all the gadgets and the access to the same pantry…home chefs need instructions, and the manual arrived about a year ago:
It’s impressive, it’s beautifully illustrated, it’s really expensive, yet still available at Barnes and Noble. It’s also daunting. I opened to a page on foodborne illness which included a good deal of CDC figures and charts. It all made perfect sense…because I had just completed a course in foodborne illness…taught by the people at the CDC who make the figures and charts. The rest is fascinating stuff, but is pretty heavy on physics and chemistry. The science of cooking is incredible and, when presented in an interesting and accessible manner, can help deepen the excitement and fun of cooking. Kenji’s food lab column on SeriousEats (OMG HE TWEETED ME AGAIN!) is a great example of this. If Kenji is Bill Nye or Mr. Wizard, Modernist Cuisine is like an Orgo textbook. No matter how pretty the pictures are, it’s overwhelming.
The Modernist Cuisine book, despite its wide availability to the general public, is probably best reserved for the professional kitchen. It almost comes off like a “FUCK YOU GENERAL PUBLIC! YOU THINK YOU CAN DO WHAT WE DO?! CAN YOU EVEN FATHOM HOW MUCH WE THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT!?” Not all the pros are unified behind the whole modernist/deconstructivist/molecular gastronomy thing either…or at least aren’t so in-your-face about it, but these techniques and methods are pretty much everywhere now.
Maybe that’s what’s so appealing about a food truck. The food is satisfying, creative, and interesting without spectacle. With the rising complexity and admission price of the fine dining experience, maybe we’ve responded by flocking to the cheap and (theoretically) unfussy food truck. It seems like it’d be a pretty good gig for a chef too. I would imagine operating costs on a truck are much lower than a 60-seat restaurant and bar, and (perhaps troublingly for diners), you can outrun a health inspection. The home cook might very well be able to replicate any food that comes out of a truck, seeing as a lot of them were started by home cooks…but they could never replicate the experience. Veterans…amateurs…all could become professional food truck operators. More on that later though…
Food trucks have always been exciting, popping up in office parks and near college campuses or concert venues. People would flock to these things, figure out schedules, and spread the word. If a great food truck comes to an event where you wouldn’t expect it (the In-n-Out truck during homecoming float building and the late night taco truck at my friend’s wedding), no one will forget the time they had.
The dynamic has changed somewhat. No food truck is complete without a Twitter feed (though my favorite food trucks are still the low-profile Mexican food trucks), and instead of the trucks coming to us, we seek them out. But I can’t help but wonder if all food trucks secretly want to be restaurants. Back when I would do ATDP summer classes at UC Berkeley (because I’m Asian and wasn’t supposed to be wasting my summers having fun), my favorite lunch was a pizza spud from the Spud brothers cart. Eventually, their success turned into a brick and mortar location just a little ways down Bancroft. I dunno what happened to it. I don’t think it exists anymore and I don’t know how long it’s been since they have. Did the operators of the cart get way in over their heads with a full restaurant? Did the Atkins craze kill them off? Were they just not that good…merely successful due to convenience? Who knows. Maybe the novelty of the cart experience is what makes it so appealing. You’re getting a good quality meal in a place you might not expect. Several brick and mortar Korean taco locations have popped up in Atlanta over the past couple years…and the overall experience is generally poor. If they’re expecting me to pay for crappy bulgogi in a stale tortilla, they better be driving to me…not the other way around. Risks aside…these food truck operators dream of being in the traditional restaurant game.
Maybe the next logical step for a food cart is to occupy another established restaurant’s space…an intermediate step to full restaurant ownership. Pop-up restaurants are what Ludo Lefebvre’s LudoBites concept is all about. Maybe it’s a necessity for him because no restaurant financier/manager would ever get along with him…at least that’s what I would imagine based on the way Top Chef Masters was edited. The model seems to be working out for Mission Street Food, which has been operating Mission Chinese Food within the Lung Shan Restaurant since 2010 and has become a media/blogger darling. Finally, back in the Bay Area for winter break, I got a chance to go with my whole family.
There was already a sizable crowd when we arrived at a time for dinner that’s usually reserved for people WAY older than us, but even I felt like I was on the older end of the crowd spectrum. Not necessarily in terms of actual numerical years…but more in terms of “OH MY GOD IT’S SO LOUD IN HERE HOW DOES ANYONE EAT? WHY IS IT SO DARK?” The entire restaurant was bathed in red, like a photo darkroom back when people used film. In order to get the full experience when viewing these photos:
1. Immerse yourself in red light. Everything should look like this…
2. Sit down with your parents and siblings.
3. Plug your computer into the loudest speakers you own and turn them all the way up.
4. Press play on the following video:
5. Get your hipsteriest non-Asian friend to pour water for you every now and then.
All set? Let’s go.
The savory egg custard was first.
It was okay. At this point that I gave up trying to position things under the Christmas lights at the side of our table. Time for the iPhone flash to come on.
7-spice beef tendon. 7 is better than 5.But i think the two extra spices were both salt. Holy crap this thing was salty. Aggressively, distractingly salty. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The sprouts were a little astringent as well. Too bad, otherwise this could’ve been an incredible dish.
Thrice-cooked pork belly.
Okay. I get it now. This dish was incredible. Go eat it.
Chicken wings with explosive chili pepper.
Full disclosure. I’ve never really had anything with explosive chili or numbing spice before. These wings are worth that experience alone. Also they’re really delicious. Appropriately spicy, incredibly well fried.
Salt cod fried rice.
My sister protested this choice all the way. My mom and I insisted. To be fair, the dish it’s based on (Salted fish fried rice) can have an incredibly bad odor…and flavor to match. It’s an acquired taste, and yes…I know it’s weird for me to have talked about how crazy salty I thought the beef tendon was when I can handle salted fish, but those super salty bits are contained and predictable and create a burst of salt, rather than a steady saltiness all the way through. The MCF version is much less aggressive, doesn’t smell unpleasant, and the fish isn’t salty/rotten. You don’t really have to be adventurous to try it.
Broccoli beef cheek.
I dunno why it looks so purple. After ordering this, our waitress was like “Oookay…we’re getting into the territory of a LOT of food.” Yup…that’s how the Kim family rolls. No n+1 rule for us. Try n+3. I did respond with a “We’re expecting to take quite a bit home,” so she wouldn’t judge us. Mmm…cheek. I don’t really think the oysters did anything.
The famous and admittedly very interesting Kung Pao pastrami.
Potatoes were a good call.
In any case, I definitely think I’d get takeout or delivery from them, but unfortunately the chicken wings are dine-in only. Doesn’t matter though…they’ll do just fine without me.
So why this talk about food trucks? Well…I like cooking. I like being at home. I like cooking at home. Am I a home cook though? I don’t really cook for anyone but myself. My apartment doesn’t really accommodate dining for more than one or two. So for big events like the Super Bowl, I rely on the gracious hospitality of my friends, and am willing to bring whatever I’ve cooked at home for them.
The problem is, the food’s just never as good when it leaves the house. Especially when it’s been fried.
For the Super Bowl party I attended, I wanted to make wings. Wings and football just go together. David Chang’s recipe involves confiting then pan-frying the wings. The Mission Street Food book recommends a slightly-hotter than confit initial fry, freeze, then second fry. Kenji’s Food Lab recipe splits the difference. Confit first, then fry hard. I had tried the two former methods, so decided to check out the Food lab version.
The confit step has the great benefit of allowing me to cook all the wings in one go:
That’s 4 lbs. I wonder how many chickens that came from. I didn’t count because I had unequal numbers of flats and drumettes.
It’s absolutely perfect after the second fry. The skin shatters. The meat is tender and moist. It tastes like chicken. No cheat with batter or breading.
And then there’s the sauce. I went Korean-style instead of Buffalo. This test-batch was crazy awesome.
Then to gameday. Frying in batches, keeping warm in the oven, transporting all the way to my friends’ house, saucing. The wings ended up dry…tough…lacking crunch…sad sad sad.
I could bring the frying party to my eventual house…but it would be rude to presume that I can commandeer the kitchen then fry stuff up with spattering hot oil. Plus that dutch oven weights a billion pounds.
So why not introduce a home cook version of the food truck? Not to sell anything, but just so that you can have a great kitchen wherever the hell you want. You could drive to your friends…make the food without messing up their kitchen, and they get the same freshly cooked experience that you get in the comfort of your own home. Drive back to that home. I’m not talking about an RV, or a dedicated mobile kitchen. This thing has to be your personal vehicle…with a kickass kitchen shoved into it. The implications for tailgating, road trips, and group picnics are incredible. Someone needs to get on this now…build the thing…market it…sell it, and as soon as they do not only will I buy one, I’ll sue their ass for stealing my intellectual property.
Alternatively, if anyone is an avid DIY-er…I need detailed plans and instructions on how to install a deep fryer, gas range, oven, refrigerator, and storage into a 2006 Honda Civic Coupe. Thanks.
It’s been awhile since I posted…last October to be exact. Clearly I haven’t stopped eating, and to some degree I’ve still been cooking. The glorious extra time I was to have during my MPH year to cook has only partially panned out though, and though a good amount of stuff has happened food and life-wise, I got lazier about keeping the blog updated. The lazier I got, the more intimidating it became to think about putting in the time and effort to catch up with actual posts. So instead of doing that, I’m just going to post everything in one gigantic rest-of-year recap.
First off, the iPhone 4S was my Christmas present…a couple months in advance of Christmas. Yes, my blog will still rely entirely on iPhone photos as I can’t afford a fancier camera nor would I know how to use one, but the pictures should be a bit better from here on out. Observe:
<- The old 3GS camera
The new 4S camera ->
It really is much much better…though it may bring into glaring 8 megapixel clarity my lack of food styling ability. Whatever…it’s not like anyone other than me eats the stuff.
So without further ado…all the rest of the stuff I cooked/ate of note in 2011:
Coq au vin. It tasted like chicken…in wine.
Chicken and dumplings. My old family buffet favorite.
Cinnamon rolls. Had leftover buttermilk from the chicken and dumplings, and the closest Cinnabon is in the airport.
Korean chicken and ginseng soup. My Le Creuset oval oven was getting a heavy workout during October-November.
A Choco Taco! Still…I’d murder someone for an It’s-It right about now.
A fusion-y Bulgogi Burger. This was freezer clean-out stuff.
Jean-George style fried rice. Fried ginger and garlic bits are what make it ridiculous. Just put fried ginger and garlic bits on everything you eat from now on.
A small turducken roll. More on this later…I’ll be re-doing this with transglutaminase, using instruction pages I photograph-pirated from the “Modernist Cuisine” book on display at Barnes and Noble.
Thanksgiving dinner with the Cai family! (Amanda on planning day: “IF IT’S NOT IMPRESSIVE AND COMPLICATED IT’S NOT EVEN WORTH MAKING!” Amanda after cooking for ten minutes: “This is too complicated…I don’t wanna do this anymore. Let’s go watch Breaking Dawn.”)
Carnitas and chipotle rice burritos. Made all of the stuff before finals week…ate one every night during.
Taco Bell in KOREA! Finally, that country is making some progress…
Some sort of chicken-based instant ramen that was really popular and sold out everywhere. Not worth the hype.
A salad with bacon, bacon-fat vinaigrette, and poached egg…gotta throw in some healthy food every now and then.
This Christmas ice cream cake…
Because it came with this hat.
Really fancy kimchi (among other really fancy things) at Yongsusan. More on that later.
Panettone French toast. Italy invades France…with deliciousness.
Hot grapefruit juice. It totally works…but it costs $6.
My cousin’s two-year old son. Yeah…so I tried to eat a baby. The little dude was eating candy with the wrapper still on though…so who’s weirder?
@serriere I suppose if a cow were to evolve in a way maximizing their deliciousness when butchered it would be disadvantageous for survival. 1 week ago
@lydiashin I haven't tried making it. I thought about making it over in Korea for my sis. Got an extra packet of spread and everything. 4 weeks ago
@wtbwise That's him. He founded Partners in Health along with Paul Farmer. 1 month ago
@TheFoodLab Hey Kenji! Any tips/hacks for how to brighten up a cheaper jarred sauce in the time it takes to boil up the pasta? 1 month ago
1. SPAM, hot dog, sausage, or some other processed pork product. Bacon would probably work, and I suppose you could go with a legitimate protein that’s close to its natural state as well.
Start by browning and rendering the meat. If things are sticking, throw a few drops of sesame oil in there.
Next toss the kimchi in and let it do its thing.
Cooked kimchi takes on a different flavor and texture entirely. It loses some sourness and toasty browned flavors start to take over (you know the ones…they taste like toasty brown).
Let the egg cook for a little bit before breaking up the yolk and scrambling it, and let it cook for a little bit more after that. The rice comes next, so if the egg isn’t cooked enough then everything gets coated in a non-descript and mush-ifying coating of egg, rather than having discrete pockets of egg.
Again, push the egg off to the sides, so there’s a nice exposed heating area for the rice to drop in. At this point, if there’s frozen veggies you want to add then do so now, and if you do add frozen stuff, splash a tiny bit of the rice wine in with them, before pushing them to the side. If the middle of the pan has lost a bit of heat, then let it warm up again, little more sesame oil, and then dump the rice in.
And there it is. Kimchi fried rice, no gunk on the pan. My cast-iron skillet’s predominantly bacon-fat seasoning is still marvelously intact. Just remember to juice your kimchi first.
