Constructing a Meal

(This article was written earlier but Blogger has a rather annoying "auto-save" feature and the article got deleted. The CC had to rewrite it from scratch.)

One of the things that perennially bugs the CC is that neither home chefs nor professional chefs give any insight whatsoever into how a meal is actually constructed.

This has something fundamentally to do with the "recipe" format of cookbooks. One really needs an entirely alternate model that works at the meal level.

Cookbooks also rely on the entirely unreliable fact that people just magically absorb knowledge by "osmosis" and "culture". Both of these seem to be demonstrably false assertions. Since one is not always granted the luxury of an Italian nonna or an Japanese obaachan and since kids are not born knowing complex culinary logic when yanked from the womb, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that all knowledge is learned.

That means one should be able to both teach it and learn it.

The CC is going to use himself as an example.

The only thing planned before the Saturday was that the meal would be Japanese and it would feature some form of clams - either asari gohan (= あさりご飯 = clam rice) or asari no miso dashijiru (= あさり味噌汁, clam miso soup.)

The CC arrived at the farmers' market on a frigid Saturday morning only to find that most of the vendors were missing. It was already turning into a disaster.

Thankfully there was one vegetable vendor and the fishmonger was around.

Cauliflowers were obtained (purple, romanesco) as were some carrots. The CC noted that he had exactly two Italian flat beans and two cherry tomatoes at home. This was going to be a tricky operation.

The CC noted that there were no scallions at home and none at the market neither. However, he did have some homemade furikake already prepared. That put paid to the idea of the asari gohan (because of the black furikake) and hence it was going to the be the clams with miso soup.

(Note how we rarely make decisions. They are made for us already.)

Luckily, the CC still had one of the last of the late summer cucumbers so a quick sunomono (vinegar pickle) was added to the mix. The CC still had some pickled ginger in his cabinet. The vegetables were steamed and combined with a modified tare sauce that the CC just loves. The dish can be made ahead of time and is actually better at room temperature rather than warm.

The CC needed a fifth dish (rice doesn't count) and he had carrots so he made the classic quick stir-fried dish with carrots and hijiki.

The meal follows the entirely Japanese principles of washoku (= 和食) — there are five vegetables of different colors, five methods, five tastes, etc.

The rules above might have a Japanese origin but they are not laws of nature. They are just an excellent set of rules-of-thumb to ensure nutritional completeness and stave away boredom. The CC finds himself using the rules even if he's making a classically French dinner or an Indian one.

Dinner is served.

Five autumn vegetables with modified "tare" sauce
♦
Clam miso soup
♦
Cucumber sunomono
♦
Sweet-sour hijiki
♦
Pickled white ginger
♦
White rice with furikake

Japanese Dinner

Tuna croquettes (マグロのコロッケ)
♥
Baby potatoes fried in duck-fat with gomashio ♥ Truffled foie gras
♦ ♦ ♦
Oyako Don (親子丼)
♥
Miso soup with acorn squash & ginger
♥
Greens with calamansi vinaigrette
♥
Homemade Japanese pickles — carrot; watermelon radish; ginger ♥
Winter vegetables in tare sauce.

Beef Rendang

This is the CC's second-favorite beef dish with the honors going to steak tartare.

A true masterpiece of Indonesian cooking but it does take some work to make. It requires a ton of time and it's even better the next day. The CC once started it at five in the evening which turned out to be a terrible idea. The hungry hordes waited and we ate at ten at night.

The CC suggests starting at noon for dinner. The dish literally makes itself. All you need is a timer and towards the end a little bit of stirring every 10 minutes. (This is one of those places where a large non-stick flat pan works great!)

Rendang is actually a preservation technique not significantly different from the French duck confit or the Philippine adobo. It's as much a mechanism of preserving the meat in the absence of refrigeration as it is a cooking technique.

(There's a reason that the meat is tender but almost dry and coated with a fatty sheen and the list of spices includes garlic, shallots, ginger, galangal, and especially turmeric all of which have strong anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties.)

The recipe is adapted from James Oseland. (He skips a few crucial spices but since these are old-hat to people used to Indian cooking, the CC has restored them.)

Traditionally, made with water buffalo, you really want the leanest cut of beef that you can get — boneless chuck, top round, bottom round, or even shoulder. It's going to be braised in coconut milk and a ton of spices so there will be the plenty of time for the dish to turn meltingly tender.

James Oseland does have one of the great lines of all time:

Rendang has its own lethargic cooking rhythm, so that the more you try to rush it, the longer it seems to take.

This is talking truth to lazy cooks. Just let it do it's own thing, stir it occasionally, indulge in a book or a crossword, and it will make itself.  It has its own meditative rhythm which cannot be rushed.

The accompaniment (shown below) is a classic nasi kuning (= turmeric rice) which is nothing more than rice boiled with fresh turmeric and salt — pandanus leaves if you have them.

(Note that traditional nasi kuning would generally be cooked with coconut milk but if you do that for such a rich dish, the two would clash so you should go with the simpler style.)

While the recipe is complexly spiced, it's emphatically not "spicy". It has a layered complexity not pure heat.

You will need a side salad and while the CC went with greens and tomatoes (which is a tad French); you'll be equally well served with the classic — slices of cucumbers, salt, and whole chillies.

 
Ingredients

Flavoring Paste

1 whole nutmeg (cracked)
5 cloves
2 cardamoms
1/4 tsp cumin

5 candlenuts (read notes)

1 largish piece of turmeric (or 2 small ones)
2" ginger
2" galangal
3 stalks lemongrass (sliced diagonally very thin)

5-7 fresh red chilis (more if you like it spicy)

3 cloves garlic

6 shallots (coarsely chopped)

dash of palm sugar (substitute by brown sugar)

Main

2 lbs boneless beef chuck (or bottom round) - cubed in 2" pieces
2 1/2 cups coconut milk

1/2 cup asam keping water
1/2 cup roasted dried coconut

3 thick stalks lemongrass (tied into a knot)
1 piece cinnamon stick
7 whole kaffir lime leaves
5 whole daun salan leaves (read notes)
salt

To Serve

1 tbsp kaffir lime leaves (very finely shredded)

Note 1: You will need a mortar and pestle. No, the food processor will not work. Deal with it! The CC knows that people claim it does including Oseland but it gets the textures all wrong. Oddly, the shallots are not soft enough to just dice finely. You need to pound them.

Note 2: Add kosher salt to the mixture while you are pounding soft ingredients. It makes it far easier to control the texture. You won't need to add salt to the final product.

Note 3: Candle nuts are hard to find outside of specialty stores. While most recipes call for macadamia, the CC finds that hazelnuts actually provide the right kind of fat content and taste. You will need 10 hazelnuts since candle nuts are larger.

Note 4: You're bluntly going to have trouble finding asam keping (= "garcinia atroviridis".) Your best choice is to use kudampuli from Southern Indian cooking (= "garcinia cambogia"  or "garcinia gummi-gutta".) If you are totally stuck, use the North Indian kokum (= "garcinia indica") or even in the worst case, plain ol' tamarind. (This makes less difference than you think. It's primary job is the both tenderize the meat and make it less "meaty" while adding a subtle sour flavor.)

Note 5: The remaining fresh spices are easily available at your local Thai store. They're so popular now that the CC found all of them this weekend at his local farmers' market. The dried spices are Indian classics. You should be able to find them in any supermarket or even cheaper in the Indian markets. Use whole ones freshly ground not pre-ground ones!

Note 6: The leaves known as daun salan are actually dried leaves of the cassia tree. Not cinnamon but cassia. They are called tējapattā in Hindi (= तेजपत्ता, literally: "cinnamon leaves") and you find them in Indian stores labeled as "bay leaves" which is complete nonsense since they taste nothing like traditional bay laurel. (If you don't have them, your best bet is a smattering of cinnamon or cassia although the dried leaves are stronger in flavor so amp it up a notch or two.)

Note 7: The two absolute non-negotiables are lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves both of which add very strong citrus notes. In fact, as you read in the recipe below, you need more kaffir lime leaves finely slivered to add to the beef as you serve it (easily seen in the picture above.)

Note 8: Nutmeg is also crucial. Enjoy your happy vivid dreams!

Recipe

To make the asam keping water, just add the dried ingredient to some water and boil it for a few minutes. This is one of the places the microwave works great. (If using tamarind, just cover it with boiling water. When it cools down, squish it with your hands and pass through a sieve. Discard the solids.)

Take all the ingredients for the flavoring paste and pound them using a mortar and pestle. First do all the spices and the hard ingredients then all the soft ingredients. (They are listed in the order that you should do them above.)

Don't worry if your mortar gets full. Just empty it into a bowl and mix afterwards.

This pounding will take the better part of 20-30 minutes so patience is required.

(It's harder to pound soft ingredients rather than hard ones since they just squish and slide around rather than get pounded into a paste. Very counter-intuitive but important to know.)

Combine the paste, all the other ingredients including the beef, coconut milk, leaves and spices into a large pan. Stir gently to mix them all. Bring the mixture to a boil and immediately turn the heat down to medium-low.

Let it bubble away stirring every 20 minutes so that the paste and coconut milk do not stick to the bottom and burn.

James Oseland describes the rest vividly:

The meat, coconut milk, and flavoring paste will now go on a fascinating journey. At first, the broth will be thin and gorgeously bright orange^†. As it cooks, the coconut milk will reduce, its fats (as well as the fat the meat renders) separating from the solids. It will be become progressively thicker and darker eventually turning brown.

Keep stirring until the meat becomes rather glossy with a very thick sauce. This will take the better part of anywhere between 3 to 4 hours^‡. The meat should be tender enough to easily poke with a fork. (You may need to add some water from time to time.)

When all the liquid has evaporated, reduce the heat to low and allow the beef to brown in the fat. Stir every 5 minutes because it has a tendency to stick.

The beef should be coffee-colored and barely moist with a glossy sheen.

(As a general rule, there should not be any fat left in the pan but if there is skim it with a spoon and store for later use. It's great for a classic Indonesian dish made with new potatoes!)

Discard the whole lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, daun salan leaves, and cinnamon.

Allow the beef to rest at least 30 minutes before serving. More if you can swing it. It's best served at room temperature (or slightly warm rather than hot) topped with the finely slivered kaffir lime leaves.

---

† from the turmeric.

‡ This may very well be an underestimate. Five hours is not out of the question if the cut of the meat is extremely lean.

Sri Lankan Fish Patties (Malu Paan)

One of the great things about "fusion" cooking is how seamless it can actually be.

Canned tuna is not exactly the most exotic of ingredients. It's quite boring and bourgeois and very middle-American. We're just going to use Sri Lankan magic to amp it up a few notches.

There's nothing new about Sri Lankan spices either. They're all there in India but it's the combinations that are new and as the CC has pointed out endlessly, this is just a combinatorial game.

You're most likely to encounter this stuff as "fish cutlets" — the mixture is deep-fried. However, a little dig underneath the surface and you see it also as "fish patties" and "fish rolls" and "fish balls".

There's also the ubiquitous malu paan which is the same fish filling inside a bread that is baked.

For the record, the paan is from the Portuguese pão and is the same as the Japanese パン (pan), the Filipino pandesal (bread with salt), and the Indian paav (a much more accurate transcription of pão.) The Portuguese spread the cult of yeasty bread baking all along South-East Asia.

What matters, of course, is the filling at the center of these concepts.

All the CC has done is to take the patties and stick them in a burger bun (which is vastly simpler) and achieves the same purpose.

Dinner is served.

Ingredients

1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp black pepper

1 sprig curry leaves
1 piece of fresh turmeric (or 1 tsp ground turmeric)
1" ginger
4-5 green chilis

2 large potatoes
1 can tuna

1 medium-sized onion (diced finely)

cilantro (finely chopped)
1 lime

salt (to taste)

Note 1: The combination of cumin, coriander, and fennel in the ratio 2:2:1 along with ground turmeric is often used in Sri Lankan cooking particularly in dishes involving fish. It gives it that characteristic "Sri Lankan" taste.

Note 2: While this mixture is freely available in Sri Lanka pre-made, the CC assumes that the majority of the audience will not have access to this. Also, if you're going to add black pepper to the final mix, you might as well grind it all together.

Note 3: Fresh turmeric adds a complexity that ground turmeric simply doesn't. The CC vastly prefers the former but feel free to use the later.

Recipe

Grind the spices to a fine powder.

Grind the ginger, green chilis, and turmeric to a paste. (If you grind the spices in a mortar and pestle, you can do this in the same step.)

Boil the potatoes in water until tender. Peel and mash gently.

Heat some oil in a pan. Add the diced onions and curry leaves and fry for a bit until the onions have softened. Add the spices and ground paste and fry till the raw smell has dissipated. Roughly 2 minutes.

Add the tuna from the can and break it up. Let it cook for 4-5 minutes. Add the boiled potatoes and mix it all well together.

(If you are going to deep-fry into "fish balls", make it drier than normal. Otherwise it should be wet enough to form into patties.)

Dump the whole stuff into a bowl. Let it cool for a bit. Pick out the curry leaves and discard. (They don't do this in Sri Lanka but then the leaves there are more tender than the ones found here.)

Add the chopped cilantro and the juice of one lime and crush gently using a potato masher. Mix and check for salt.

To make the patties, you can just either pan-fry them with some oil (which is the way the CC prefers) or for a fancier richer taste, do the same after an egg-wash and coated with breadcrumbs.

Hiyashi Tan-Tan ((冷やしたんたん)

One of the wondrous things about ramen is that it gives Japanese chefs full freedom to explore creativity outside the traditional norms of washoku. It allows them to escape the "wa" (和) of the washoku (和食) — the "Japanese-ness" of meal formats, rules, etc.

Every culture has some escape pod by which they can break the rules and are no longer subject to the dictates of "traditional culture". You need a release mechanism for creativity and rebellion.

Ramen is unambiguously Chinese and hence "foreign" however the Japanese have adapted it, refined it, and taken it to great heights. In the spirit of experimentation, it's not unusual to find "Thai Ramen" and "Indian Ramen" and "Italian Seafood Ramen", etc. in Tokyo. Any number of tricks from other cuisines are amenable as long as they ultimately get integrated into the ramen format.

The CC first ate the dish at a restaurant near his former workplace. It's a riff on a riff on a riff.

The owner of the restaurant is Burmese who ran away to Japan, lived there for a decade, and in spite of marrying Japanese, was unable to get a permanent visa. The couple opted for "life, liberty and happiness" and Japan's loss is New York's gain.

Tan-tan men is a variation on the classic Sichuanese dan-dan mian (担担面) — the spicy-tingly noodles with ground pork, pickled vegetables, and chili oil.

The Japanese version sticks to the idea broadly. It somehow got caught up with the very Sichuanese doubanjiang (辣豆瓣酱) possibly because its umami is very similar to miso.

So the ground pork is stir-fried with ginger, garlic, scallions and toban jan (as it's called in Japanese) until you have a loose dry mixture.

The ramen noodles are topped with an intense pork broth, the spicy ground pork mixture, slivered scallions, etc. This is a broad idea. The specifics depend on the creativity of each chef. You'd probably find slivered cucumbers or bean sprouts. It may be topped with rayu (chili oil.) It all depends.

Ramen, being served piping hot is cold weather food. Japan has blistering summers and a history of a lack of air-conditioning. The very hot weather dish, hiyashi chūka, featured here often is a response to that.

Hiyashi tan-tan is the bastard love child of hiyashi chūka and tan-tan men as conceived by a Burmese entrepreneur trained in Japan to satiate the ramen-crazy Yankees in a blistering New York summer.

What could be cooler than that?

There are some elegant subtle melodies inside it that make it sing.

Traditional ramen is frequently made with stock made from pork bones. It has a milky-white color.

The stock here is much lighter as befits a summer dish. Seafood-based or chicken-based which has been hit with a solid amount of sesame paste. Traditional Japanese sesame powder (gomashio) is made with roasted sesame seeds and has a brownish color. This one is clearly made with unroasted ones which gives the broth the same intense milky-white color. The CC strongly suspects that the restauranteur is just using tahini thus introducing a Middle-Eastern ingredient. It's New York, after all. Why not?

The advantage of cold-ingredients pre-prepared to a restaurant should be obvious but one of the complete non-negotiables is that the ramen has to be made fresh. You can dunk it in ice-water to cool it down but it must be freshly made.

Since the recipe clearly has diverged so far from its roots, such as they are, the CC feels absolutely no shame in diverging further. It would almost be regretful to stick to the format. The pork has been subbed by ground seafood (non-traditional) and bamboo shoots (absolutely traditional.) The cucumbers and scallions are retained in the summer heat.

It's the beauty of ramen. Within the broad tradition, as Cole Porter might have put it, "Anything goes".


Ingredients

(serves 2)

Dashi

2 pieces kombu
4 cups water
1/2 cup dried shrimp (or bonito flakes or both)

1/3 cup sesame seeds

Ground Pork

1/2" ginger
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp toban jan
1 tbsp soy sauce
sugar (to balance)
peanut oil

1/2 cup ground pork (or ground seafood or ground chicken)
1/2 cup bamboo shoots

2 packages ramen

cucumber
carrots
scallions

sesame oil

Recipe

Note 1: Once the sesame paste is stirred into the cool broth, you cannot reheat it again. The broth and paste will separate which will destroy the texture. It must have its ice-cold white texture.

Note 2: Mound the pile of the ground pork mixture in the center. The toppings should be to the side. Yes, this is "only" aesthetics but it really goes a long way to emphasizing the cold-hot nature of the dish. The spicy pork with the ice-cold ingredients. It will all turn red-gold once you start slurping.

Note 3: If you have time, soak the sesame seeds in water. Don't worry too much about this step. You can always loosen the sesame paste with the dashi you make.

Note 4: The whole recipe is eminently scalable and can be made ahead of time. Except the ramen. They must be made fresh. You'll probably learn the hard way the science behind this step.

Note 5: It takes a while to chill all the ingredients especially the broth. Maybe the CC's fridge is crappy but it took more than 6 hours to get it down to the right temperature.

First, make the dashi. Heat up the kombu with the water. Just before the water boils, fish the kombu out and discard. If you don't do it, the broth will turn bitter. Add the dried shrimp/dried anchovies/bonito flakes and bring to a loose boil. Let it steep for at least 15 minutes. Pass the broth through a double layer of paper towels. You should be left with a clear golden broth.

Meanwhile, take the soaked sesame seeds and grind them to a fine paste in a mortar and pestle. Add some of the above dashi if you need to loosen the paste. Add the paste to the dashi and add salt. Set aside and let it chill.

Cut up the cucumber, carrots, scallions into long very thin batons of the same size and set aside to chill.

Make the ground pork mixture. Smash up the ginger and garlic in a mortar and pestle to a paste. Heat up some peanut oil in a skillet. When shimmering, add the ginger-garlic paste. Fry for a bit. Add the toban jan and fry for a little bit. Add the ground pork, soy sauce and sugar and let it cook until it is dry. You will probably need to add 2-3 tbsp of water to make sure it doesn't burn. Add the bamboo shoots towards the end. Take off the heat and cool. You can store this for a few days. Chill it.

When ready to serve, make the ramen. The ones the CC has require 2.5 minutes. Immediately dunk in an ice bath.

Top the ramen with the chilled dashi. Put the ground pork mixture in the center. The cut up scallions, carrots and cucumbers to the side.

(You can add sesame oil but that's gilding the lily.)

Slurp the intense icy awesomeness.

Steamed Fish with Fermented Black Beans, Ginger & Scallions

Many moons ago, when the CC was in school, the CC learnt this simple dish from his friend. We'd get together to make this because we needed to pool our money to afford the fish and this is not a dish that reheats at all. Make it, eat it, be done with it.

When described it has the barest of ingredients but it is simply bursting with flavor.

The salted preserved black beans (豆豉) are actually fermented and salted soy beans. They are intensely flavored with a salty umami taste (much more intense than soy sauce, say.)

Traditionally, this would be made with a whole fish which is stuffed with the ingredients and steamed. Additional slivered ginger, black beans and scallions would be scattered over the top while serving. A few drops of intense sesame oil completes the dish.

When the CC saw black sea bass at the farmer's market, he knew right away that he needed to make this dish again.

You need to use fish with the skin on. The skin has all the flavor. The CC never understood the idea behind removing the most flavorful part. As the much older Japanese mother of a friend once said, "Why do they remove the best part?"

Why indeed?

Ingredients

fillet of white fish (with skin)
1 tbsp preserved black beans
slivered ginger
slivered scallions

sesame oil

Recipe

Note 1: The recipe below has been adapted to fillets but you can always make it the traditional way. Stuff half the stuff inside the cavity and sprinkle half on top.

Note 2: Don't add salt. There's plenty already in the preserved black beans.

Note 3: You will need a skillet which has a cover.

Heat up some oil in a pan. When hot but not shimmering, place the fillet skin side down on it, Toss the ginger, scallions and black beans over it. Add four tbsp of water and cover the pan. Let the fish steam at medium-low heat until done.

Serve over rice with the other ingredients from the pan. Add a few drops of sesame oil to the fish, and more ginger and scallions if desired.

Ginger x 2

Ginger is a unique substance. It's origin is clearly in South Asia from where it has spread far and wide. Its use in everything from the Japanese gari to ginger ale to gingerbread and ginger snaps means that it's about as ancient as spices come.

The CC would like to talk about a very specific thing. Dried ginger.

The flavors are completely different from the fresh variety and they are not substitutes for each other. You will see the dried version most often in the context of Moroccan, Tunisian, or Indian cooking.

Fresh ginger has a pungent edge. Dried ginger has an edge but it's a lot more mellow. It has a positively fragrant disposition.

The CC has seen dried ginger in two forms. One is the whole root. You cut off as much as you need and grind it as needed. (A coffee grinder rocks out just fine.)

The second is pre-ground which is fine too but you need to store it in the fridge. It has a tendency to absorb moisture and will spoil.

There's also a half-way house which is dried ginger slices that you can then grind.

One of the classic uses of dried ginger in the pan-North-African-made-its-way-to-India context is its use as a sprinkling over pulped fruit. Specifically fruit that is very sweet. Specifically mangoes.

The dried ginger acts as a tonic cutting through the absurd sweetness of the fruit. Salt is another way of doing the same and you frequently see dried ginger in this context.

Of course, its also used in innumerable spice mixtures but that's not very surprising.

Many cookie recipes from Europe also call for dried ginger not the least because it doesn't have any moisture which would change the ratios of the ingredients needed although these days the hipsters are sneaking back in fresh ginger.

However, as the CC has already stated. They are not substitutes. They are fully equals and just different things even though the derive from the same source.