Fine dice holy trinity of ginger garlic scallion.
Saute and add ground pork until brown.
De glaze with black vinegar and rice/sherry vinegar.
Add light soy sauce, sweet soy sauce, Chinese black vinegar, sesame paste, chili garlic oil, and XO sauce.
Add finely ground Szechuan peppercorn.
Add noodles.
Category: Main Course
Cumin Lamb
This dish could be made and eaten as is, but I’ll add the part where it is incoporated with the BiangBiang Noodles. For this dish, you need a fattier cut of the lamb so avoid using shank, I like using rib meat.
Ingredients
– 300g lamb meat (diced)
– Half cup light soy sauce
– Half cup zhejiang vinegar
– 1/2 tbsp ground cumin
– 1 tbsp fermented garlic/ginger
– 1/2 tbsp potato or corn starch
– 1 tbsp dried red pepper flakes
– 1/2 tbsp ground Szechuan peppercorn
– 1/3 cup peanut oil plus some for cooking
Optional
– 3 cups cabbage and/or bok choy
– Cilantro to garnish
Mix everything but the pepper and oil, cook in a very hot pan with peanut oil. Once the meat is seared, add the greens. Cover to cook through (~10 mins) and take lid off to cook off excess liquid.
Biang Biang Noodles
This recipe is for the noodles only. The recipe for the sauce and the meat are HERE. I separated them because it would have been confusing and too long. Flour to water ratio is 2:1 but it’s not exact, it depends on ambient humidity.
Ingredients
– 250g flour
– 125g water
– Pinch of salt (optional)
– Oil
Mix flour, water, and salt in a bowl and knead by hand until everything is incorporated, should be around 5 minutes. The texture should resemble that of fresh playdough. Roll into a tight ball and place in a clean bowl with about a tablespoon of oil. Roll the dough in the oil to coat it and cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Let it rest refrigerated overnight or at least 1 hour at room temperature.
Cut the dough into 8 even pieces and roll into logs. Things move at a fast pace after this so have water boiling when ready to pull the noodles. The bigger your pot with water, the better.
Place a log on a clean board or countertop and press into a long rectangular shape with your fingers.
Optionally, roll with a rolling pin to make it evenly thick throughout. With a chopstick, make an indentation lengthwise where it will be ripped.
Hold the ends and in a up and down motion, start smacking the dough on the counter while you stretch the noodles out.
Then, rip from the middle where your indentation was to make two strands of noodles. Immediately place in boiling water. It should cook fairly quickly so keep an eye on it, no more than 5 minutes.
Spaghetti Carbonara
If there was one thing I had to eat everyday for the rest of my life, it would be eggs. This dish makes perfect use of them. The only ingredients that need to be somewhat measured are the pasta (to know how many people you can feed) and the eggs (also to match the amount of pasta). The general rule is that a person eats 100g of pasta per plate so just scale it up from there. I’m writing this recipe for two so 200g of dried pasta is what I’m putting down. As for the eggs, it’s one per person and the italians say, “one for the pot”, to account for the little bit left on the sides on the pot. I like to use that “extra” egg as just the yolk for extra richness without the extra liquid. Everything else is up to you but I don’t think there’s such a thing as “too much” cheese or bacon so whenever you think is enough, add a bit more.
A note about the ingredients. Guanciale is bacon made with the jowl of the pig, yes the face. If you can’t find it, you can use pancetta. The curing method for both is pretty similar so it’ll give you a close-enough flavor. Use fresh eggs because yes, we are not really cooking them. If that makes you uneasy, I feel like you might be in the wrong blog. Peccorino is NOT the same as parmesan cheese, it’s sharper, saltier, and generally just more of a jerk. So make sure you use the right cheese. As for the pasta, you can make fresh pasta or get fancy pasta but I think dry pasta is pretty damn good, as long as the brand sounds mildly Italian.
Ingredients
– 200g spaghetti
– Guanciale
– 2 eggs and one extra yolk
– Peccorino Romano (grated finely)
– Black pepper
– Salt
Boil a pot of water and salt it enough so it tastes like ocean water. Once boiling, add pasta and cook per the directions on the box. This is the one time you want the pasta actually cooked all the way or at least slightly past al dente. Do all the next steps while you wait for the water to boil.
Slice the guanciale thinly and spread in a cold pan. Put it on a medium flame until it renders most of the fat out of the pork. It’s done when golden but not extra crunchy. Save the fat.
Whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Once homogeneous, add the peccorino cheese and the pepper. When the guanciale is done cooking, add that to the mixture and finish incorporating it. Let the rendered fat sit in the pan with no heat.
If you’ve timed it right, it should all come together like a well synchronized ballet at the end. Drain the pasta, add it to the warm pan that had the fat in it. Add the egg mixture on top and toss the pasta until it’s all coated evenly.
You should not need to salt it since the guanciale and the peccorino are salty enough, but if you so desire, do so with a finishing salt.
Shakshouka
This is one of the best breakfast foods ever. The only reason I say it’s a breakfast food is not because it’s an egg dish, but because I make the sauce and let it rest overnight. Shakshouka is so vast and is made by so many cultures that you can differentiate where the person learned it by tracing the spices and flavors it has. I learned it from an Egyptian chef in Queens but adapted it to spices my palate is adapted to from Mexico.
Ingredients
– 9 roma tomatoes
– 1 onion
– 4 garlic cloves
– 1/2 cup olive oil
– 1-3tsp smoked paprika
– 1-3tsp oregano
– 1-3tsp toasted cumin
– 1-3tsp turmeric
– 1-2 heaping tablespoons Harissa
– 4 eggs
– Feta cheese
– Handful of spinach
– Za’atar
– Salt & pepper to taste
Score the skins of the tomatoes in a cross pattern and blanch them in boiling water for 30 seconds so you can peel them easily.
In a dutch oven or deep skillet add oil and chopped onions on medium heat. Sweat the onions for 5 minutes and add crushed garlic. Saute for a couple minutes and add the peeled and rough chopped tomatoes, no need to seed them. Add all the spices without the Za’atar and let it simmer until tomatoes are broken down. Crush the tomatoes further with a masher or blend roughly with an immersion blender. There should still be pieces of tomatoes left, it’s not a sauce. Add the harissa to taste, I add two heaping tablespoons because I like it spicy. Pepper it to taste but salt it shy of how you want it.
Simmer for 30 minutes on medium-low heat where it’s bubbling but not splattering. Let cool on counter and place in fridge overnight.
The next morning, add the spinach and bring back to boil uncovered then simmer for 20 minutes. Crack the eggs carefully and cover the whites with the sauce. Cover with the lid and let simmer for 5 minutes. Turn heat off and let sit for a minute more. Uncover and serve with crumbled feta cheese and Za’atar. The feta and the reducing of the liquid should bring the saltiness up enough. The egg yolks should be runny and the whites should be barely set. Enjoy with some crusty baguette.
Bulgogi
Korean recipes are almost never measured. At least the people I have watched, like my mom and aunts, never measure and just go by eyeballing measurements and taste. I guess it’s an old school thing because I’ve seen similar behavior from other ajummas, Mexican doñas, Italian nonnas, and the like. My mother scoffs at measuring cups and instead, gives me measurements from one of our tablespoons and different levels of hand-cuppings. Measurements are given like half a handful, a full handful but with the hand slightly splayed, just the fingers but from the second knuckle up. I have done my best to turn these measurements into standardized cups and spoons but since most of these recipes are scalable, just eyeball them.
Bulgogi might be THE taste of Korean cuisine. It’s the marinade that everyone has tried and associates with Korean food. As soon as you smell the garlicky, soy sauce-y, sesame seed-y fumes, you know someone’s cooking a variation of bulgogi. The name bulgogi translates to fire meat. Technically, it can be any animal and any cut of it, but it’s usually beef. Any variation on animal is usually noted in the name, like dweji bulgogi which is pork bulgogi or dak bulgogi which is chicken.
In this recipe, I’ll concentrate on the marinade. Use any beef you’d like that your budget will allow. Most people use top sirloin or tenderloin when going the inexpensive route, and short rib or ribeye when splurging.
Ingredients
– 1/2 cup soy sauce
– 1/4 cup garlic honey (or regular honey or a bit less brown sugar)
– 4 tbsp mirin (rice wine)
– 1 onion
– 4 tbsp fermented ginger garlic (or 2 tbsp ginger + 2 tbsp garlic, chopped)
– 1 large asian pear
– 5 tbsp sesame seed oil
– Pepper to taste
Slice your meat thin. It helps to either buy it sliced or freeze it for a couple hours before cutting. Blend all the ingredients and marinade the meat for about 5 hours. This is one of those recipes that is hard to mess up. Add more or less honey depending on how sweet you like it. You can’t go wrong with a lot of garlic, so play around with that, too. If you choose to go with less garlic than I recommended, gtfo and don’t come back. Just kidding, but no, really.
Cook on a skillet or grill on medium heat, you don’t want the sugars to burn before the meat is cooked. If you crowd the pan, you end up steaming instead of grilling the meat. It’s not the worst thing to happen since you get a bunch of “sauce” you can mix into your rice, but you won’t get the delicious char. You know what you like, so play around with it. The recipe makes a lot of marinade so you get a few tries to find out how you like it.