Momofuku grilled lemongrass pork sausage Ssam

Mr Himself was hosting a pot luck party and I decided to make Momofuku’s grilled lemongrass pork sausage Ssam. In a way, it is kinda a twist on nem nuong. The pork is served with picked carrot and daikon radish, herbs, rice and fish sauce. I decided to leave out the herbs part out which consists of mint and coriander and the rice. I also stuck with using Luke Nguyen’s fish sauce recipe since I found Chang’s version ratio a bit strange, but I should give it a go one day and compare.

The pork requires cooking twice. The pork is placed in the oven to cooked the pork most of the way then grilled afterwards. I found the pork really dry afterwards but once pair with the carrot, daikon, butter lettuce and fish sauce you can barely feel the dryness of the pork. It was a bit fussy having people combine 5 components of it to make the ssam, is one part of the outcome I didn’t like. I figured that you probably combine everything and make a salad of it . The recipe is overall very simple and I would recommend it to make this recipe if you have the cookbook.

Momofuku Pork Buns

There is a lot of bookmarks in my momofuku cookbook. I been wanting to find an opportunity to make the pork buns for a while. When the food bloggers spring picnic event pop up, it sprang to mind that the pork buns can feed enough people as the recipe makes 50 buns.

I did decide to break down the recipe over two nights as there is no way I could cook everything on Saturday morning as I definitely want to reserve my mornings for sleep. (I generally would sleep until 2pm given that I have free time shhhh)

Recipes used in momofuku:
Pork belly recipe
Quick pickles recipe
steamed buns recipe

Also to tie everything together the Momofuku Pork bun recipe which is basically how to prep your bun.

The steamed buns is very much like a mantou. A problem occur with my dough, it didn’t double in size so I suspected it was to do with how cold my kitchen was. In the end the result was about 32 buns.

Mr Chang tells us to get the pork belly without the skin or to simply buy pork belly with skin, but to cut it off. I am sorry Mr Chang but I can’t do pork belly without the lovely crackling of pork skin, pork skin stays okay? The sound of Pork crackling in the oven is music to my ears mmm.

I wouldn’t say the recipe took very “long”. It just felt very long because there is time intervals involved i.e leave dough to rise for 1.5 hours etc then *insert step* leave for another *insert time*. I love this recipe! I would say its my 2nd favourite after the ramen. If I didn’t love ramen and noodles so much it would definitely top the list.

Pork belly straight out of the oven.

End result – steamed bun, pork belly, hoisin sauce, quick pickled cucumbers and spring onions. Didnt look as pretty as I want it to be but oh wells! (Picture re-stolen from suze due to her better colouring of my photo )

Thinking of making your own?
The recipe can be found on gourmet traveller here and here. There is a few other parts but google can help with that

P.S. It was lovely to meet everyone from the Food bloggers spring picnic. Will be blogging about it soon need to go through many photos! Also thanks for polishing off my pork buns!

Momofuku Kimchi stew

I am slowly cooking from the momofuku cookbook as you can see. I am hoping maybe at same point I can cook about half the recipes in here, I could never cook every recipe in there especially the pig’s head torchon *shudders*. Now with the kimchi I made previously I just have to make the kimchi stew.

The broth in the stew is actually the ramen broth that took 9/10 hours+. I left out a few things in the recipe the ricecakes, radish kimchi, the roasted onion and the pork shoulder. Instead of the shoulder I had some fillet left so I ended substituting that instead. The roasted onions was going take 1 hour to make and I probably needed a small amount anyways so skip. Rice cakes I think I could easier do without …or more so because I was lazy to run to shops and buy some.

The result was a sourish stew but quite sweet due to the mirin. The verdict is I will probably won’t make this again. Reason? I enjoyed this dish very much but I think I prefer to used the ramen broth in ramen rather the kimchi stew.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup neutral oil
roasted onions
4 cups radish kimchi
4 cups Chinese cabbage kimchi
8 cups ramen broth
pork shoulder
6 tbs mirin
salt & pepper to taste
1 cup sliced rice cakes
1 cup sliced green onions
1 cup of finely julienned carrots
rice

1. Heat oil in a pan and added the roasted onions
2. Add kimchi and broth, turn the heat up to medium-high and let the flavors mingle and integrate for 5-6 minutes after the broth comes to a simmer. Skim off impurities.
3. Add the pork, mirin &pepper. Add more mirin if needed
4. Then add the rice cakes until they are warmed through. Top with green onions and carrots. Serve with rice

Serves 4 people
- recipe from Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan *instructions were shorten a little.

Momofuku Kimchi – Chinese Cabbage

I can never managed to put down david chang’s cookbook. It is almost like an addiction. Kimchi is probably the simplest recipes in his book. I always wanted to make kimchi but was daunted that it was much more complex task. I think hardest part of Momofuku recipes is actually locating the ingredients rather the recipe.

I first washed the chinese cabbage then salted it and added sugar. I left the kimchi overnight, the next day the amount completely shrinked to this size.

Here is the mixture of garlic, ginger, red pepper powder, fish sauce soy sauce, salted prawn and sugar. I actually decided the reduce the ginger, red pepper powder and sugar. I think 1/2 cup of sugar was a too much. Since I lacked the spice tolerance I also reduce the red pepper powder to 1/3 of a cup. Ginger was something I didn’t like eating directly (I enjoyed it as a flavouring but not when it was eating raw). It took me forever to minced the ginger and garlic by hand.. I was so into it that I lost track of time and realise it took me 30 minutes.. urm..

Then add the spring onions and carrots.

1 small to medium Chinese cabbage, discoloured or loose outer leaves discarded
2 tbs kosher or sea salt*
1/2 cup of white sugar plus 2 tbs extra
20 garlic cloves, minced
20 slices of peeled fresh ginger, minced
1/2 cup korean red pepper powder*
1/4 cup fish sauce
1/4 cup usukuchi light soy sauce*
2 tsp jarred salted prawns*
1/2 cup 1 inch pieces spring onions
1/2 cup julienned carrots

* I gave up hunting kosher salt, I just used normal salt and it turned out okay. Korean red pepper powder can be found at the most larger Asian supermarkets or korean grocery stores. Jarred salted prawn can be found at most Asian grocery stores in the cold section. Usukuchi may be very hard to hunt down, I think normal light soy sauce will do okay. Even if you do locate a bottle it isn’t cheap!

1.Cut the cabbage lengthwise in half, then cut the halves crosswise into 1-inch-wide pieces. Toss the cabbage with the salt and 2 tablespoons of the sugar in a bowl. Let sit overnight in the refrigerator.
2. Combine the garlic, ginger, red pepper powder, fish sauce, soy sauce, prawn, and remaining ½ cup sugar in a large bowl. If it is very thick, add water 1/3 cup at a time until the brine is just thicker than a creamy salad dressing but no longer a sludge. Stir in the spring onions and carrots.
3. Drain the cabbage and add it to the brine. Cover and refrigerate. Though the kimchi will be tasty after 24 hours, it will be better in a week and at its prime in 2 weeks. It will still be good for another couple weeks after that, though it will grow stronger and funkier.

* I did change the words a little so its a little more catered for the Australian kitchen rather then American.
Recipe from Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan

The result:

I haven’t let it ferment yet but I did taste a piece omg fresh kimchi is awesome! Would i revisit this recipe? Certainly.. won’t go back to buying kimchi ever again.

Momofuku Ramen

This is the second recipe I cooked from David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook. First time making ramen and also the last time too. I think in total I took about 9-10 hours to cook the whole “damn” thing.

There is several pages on ramen in the momofuku
1 page on an overview
2 pages for the ramen broth
2 pages for the tare
2 pages for the dashi stock (which in the ramen broth recipe already)
1 page for the noodles
2 pages for the pork (belly and shoulder)
2 pages for the slow poached eggs
2 pages for the toppings (nori, bamboo shoots, naruto, vegetables)

In the end I used the recipes from the pages of ramen broth, tare and a bit of the pork recipe. It isn’t at all a difficult recipe but just rather time consuming.

Ramen Broth:

The recipe for broth is rather interesting. David Chang’s dashi stock goes on the basis of Konbu (seaweed) and smoky bacon. He uses the smoky bacon in replace of bonito flakes. I had the hardest trouble trying to locate smoked bacon. I went to a few delis and the closest they had was smoked speck. I also found smoked bacon bones at woolies but funny how they don’t have the bacon. Finally hunted down the smoked bacon at some point down the track. I had a few friends questioning why I was hunting bacon and using it for ramen, I too wondered.

Chang mentions that pork neck bones are the best are hard to find. I located it at butcher at $3 per kg (ouch!). The amount of used items in this broth does not come cheap. I had problems with the wasted chicken, shiitakes & bacon.

This is step 6 of the ramen broth. The bacon goes in for 45 minutes and gets fished out. Chang mentions to discard the bacon afterwards. I wasn’t willing to let go of the bacon! I had a taste and boy was it foul… goodbye bacon.

Step 7, where the vegetables (scallions, onions and carrots) are in the broth for the last 45 minutes.

After reducing the broth almost by 1/3-1/4 I ended up with this condensed broth.

Tare

Tare is the extra flavouring that goes with the ramen broth. I think the ramen broth will be okay without.

The recipe says it will yield 2.5 cups. I halved it and it reduced down to this smidget of an amount. Less then 1/4 cup! One taste omg most saltiest thing ever

Pork part

I didn’t want to purchase 3 pound shoulder and 3 pound pork belly. In the end I used pork fillets that was about 400grams and used a few tablespoons of salt and sugar.

Finishing touches

I got lazy and didn’t bother with the egg and other toppings. I left these out as I was only going to serve two-three bowls and rest of the broth will placed in the freezer. There was a recipe on making your own ramen noodles but chang mentions it isn’t necessary.

The end. Ramen broth with pork fillet, nori, spring onions, naruto and aburaage.

The broth reminds me of the broth at ichi ban ramen. Very tasty and flavoursome but still ..Never again… I think I shall stick to just eating ramen at the restaurants.