91 recipes. Page 2 of 4
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Part of the kabocha melts into the porridge, so it thickens and turns gently sweet without any added starch. With shrimp and squid in every spoonful, it is closer to a meal than the snack-like pumpkin porridge most people know.
Perilla seeds are blended with water and strained before joining the pot, which gives the porridge a smooth, nutty body with no gritty hulls.
A heavy stone pot holds heat evenly, so the rice cooks glossy and plump while a toasted crust forms on the bottom. After the rice is gone, hot water poured over the crust makes sungnyung, a toasty rice-crust tea.
Dureup, the spring shoots of the Korean angelica tree, are around only briefly each spring. They get no more than 30 seconds in salted boiling water before going on top of the rice to cook under the lid; any longer and the bitter, woody scent fades and the green turns dull. The rice cooks in kelp stock.
The freshwater fish disappears entirely, its flesh dissolved into a spicy gochujang and doenjang broth thick with both rice and thin somyeon noodles. Perilla seed powder and perilla leaves are strong enough that the muddy taste river fish can have barely registers. Fine bones can survive even several strainings, so eat slowly.
Eggplant and ground pork are stir-fried in green onion oil, then piled, oil and all, on top of the soaked rice, so the eggplant cooks with the rice while soaking up the pork fat and onion aroma. Cut it thick, about 1.5 cm, and pull it off the heat before it goes limp, or it collapses once the rice is done. Soy sauce splashed onto the hot edge of the pan adds a slightly smoky note.
Chunks of cutlassfish (galchi), seasoned for ten minutes with soy sauce and ginger, sit on the very top of the pot as the rice cooks. After resting, the flesh falls apart at the touch of a paddle. The scallions are scattered over and everything is folded together with a light hand.
The pollock roe never goes over a flame. When the rice is done, the heat is turned off, the lid comes up just long enough to add the roe and a knob of butter, and the residual heat of an 8-minute rest warms them through. That keeps the eggs from tightening, and they still pop. The gamtae seaweed is crumbled over with the scallions once the rice has finished resting.
Gondre, a mild wild thistle green from the mountains of Gangwon Province, cooks right on top of the rice, so the rice itself stays plain with a soft, grassy aroma. The seasoning comes at the table: soy sauce mixed with green onion, garlic, chili flakes, and sesame oil brings salt and heat against the gentle greens. Fresh gondre is most fragrant in spring, but properly soaked dried gondre gives nearly the same result year round.
Black soybeans cooked soft and blended with their cooking water turn the rice porridge a deep purple-black, with a toasty, nutty bean aroma throughout. The beans and rice each need at least 4 hours of soaking before cooking begins.
Which sweet potato you use changes the pot. Chestnut-type bam goguma cooks up dry and mild, while the moist hobak goguma comes out softer and sweeter. Either way, it is cut into 2 cm cubes and spread in a single layer over the rice, with only a pinch of salt.
Open the lid and pieces of mackerel sit on a bed of gondre (Korean thistle greens), its oil and the greens' earthy aroma having soaked into the rice as it rested. The crust at the bottom gets a splash of water and is eaten as sungnyung, a toasted rice drink.
These rice balls were handed out to mikoshi carriers at the autumn Yawatanmachi festival in Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture, which is why they are big and shaped to hold in one hand. Inside is pork belly and fried tofu simmered sweet and salty with bonito flakes. The simmering liquid is cooked down until little remains, since it gets mixed into the rice too. One batch makes twenty.
The oysters go on only after the rice has absorbed nearly all its water, and they cook in the five-minute rest and nothing more. Added at the start, they would shrink and lose their sweetness. The rice itself is unseasoned; everyone stirs in their own soy, chili flake, scallion and sesame oil sauce.
Oysters go into the pot last, after the rice has broken down and the radish is soft, and they need only a few minutes to stay tender. Most of the work is the long simmer before that: rice and minced radish, first toasted in sesame oil, cook for over 30 minutes and like to stick to the bottom, so stir from the base often.
One pot does double duty: the water that poaches the chicken thighs becomes the cooking liquid for the rice. The heat stays low enough that only small bubbles rise at the edge, because a rolling boil splits and dries the meat.
Toasted black sesame blended into a smooth liquid turns this rice porridge a deep charcoal gray and gives it a strong nutty aroma. The seeds are ground until completely smooth, since any remaining bits make the porridge feel sandy. Half a teaspoon of salt plus a teaspoon of sugar leaves it lightly sweet behind the sesame.
The mussels are boiled first, the meat set aside, and the strained cooking liquid becomes the water for the rice. That is why the grains themselves taste of mussel. The meat goes back on top of the finished rice, along with some minari, a Korean water dropwort.
The water the mussels cook in becomes the broth for this porridge, strained through a fine sieve or cloth to catch sand and bits of shell, so the whole pot tastes of the sea without a separate stock. Mussels are sorted twice for safety: discard any with cracked shells or that stay open when tapped before cooking, and any that stay shut after cooking.
Unlike inari-zushi, which fills tofu pouches with rice that is already cooked, itadaki packs them with raw rice, burdock, carrot, and shiitake and lets the rice cook inside in shiitake soaking liquid seasoned with soy sauce, sugar, and sake. Small holes spread across each pouch let that liquid reach the center, and leaving headroom matters because raw rice expands enough to burst a packed pouch.
The browned bits left in the pot after searing chicken and andouille sausage end up soaked into every grain of rice. This Louisiana one-pot rice is not a stir-fry: tomatoes, Cajun seasoning, and stock go in, the lid goes on, and the rice absorbs the liquid over low heat.
Mung beans soaked for 30 minutes alongside the rice break down with it in kelp stock, making this abalone porridge far thicker and creamier than the rice-only kind.
Thin slices of abalone go onto the rice only when the surface water has nearly gone, then cook in nothing but the heat of a 5-minute rest, lid on and burner off, and stay tender. The finished rice is mixed with a dressing of soy sauce, scallion, minced garlic, and sesame seeds.
As a whole butterfish simmers with rice for about 25 minutes, its lean white flesh breaks apart on its own and disperses through the porridge, lending a mild sweetness without heaviness. Salt and a teaspoon of sesame oil are the only seasoning, so the freshness of the fish decides almost everything. If the porridge thickens before the rice has softened, turn the heat lower and stir along the bottom more often.