877 recipes. Page 31 of 37
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Shrimp, sweet potato, eggplant, and shishito peppers share the same oil but not the same timing, and each piece comes out as soon as it is done. The batter is cold water and egg with cake flour, stirred only a few times with chopsticks and used while small lumps remain.
With 180 g of king oyster and shiitake mushrooms to 200 g of beef, there is nearly as much mushroom as meat in every bite. The mushrooms are wiped clean rather than washed, added to beef already browned in butter, and stir-fried hard until they wilt before soy sauce goes in around the edge of the pan.
In this Peruvian beef stir-fry, French fries get tossed right into the pan and rice sits on the side of the plate. Soy sauce and red wine vinegar bring salt and sourness together, and only half a teaspoon of ají amarillo, a yellow chili paste, goes in. Plate it as soon as the fries have taken on a little sauce, before they go limp.
After an hour and a half of slow braising in soy sauce, pork trotters develop glossy, sticky skin over meat soft enough for a chopstick to slide through. Onion, garlic, ginger and whole peppercorns in the braising liquid carry the soy flavor into the layers between skin and meat. The braising liquid is not wasted: strained and reduced, it becomes the glaze spooned over the slices. Jokbal is eaten wrapped in lettuce with salted shrimp sauce or ssamjang, often late at night with drinks.
Dipping cold-rinsed thick noodles a mouthful at a time into a hot, reduced pork bone broth keeps the chewy bite and the warmth of the soup separate until the end. The dipping broth simmers for about 15 minutes until it tastes far stronger than ordinary ramen soup, strong enough to season cold noodles in a quick dip. The miso has to dissolve completely, since lumps leave the broth uneven and cloudy. The noodles boil a little under the package time, and the cold rinse firms them so they hold their spring. Rubbing off the surface starch and shaking the noodles dry keeps them from watering down the concentrated broth. Chashu, bamboo shoots and a soft-boiled egg sit with the noodles, not in the broth.
Chicken thighs are pressed skin side down with a spatula until the skin turns deep gold, then glazed over low heat with soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar, plus garlic and ginger, spooned over until it clings.
Browned ground beef gives this fried rice its savory base, with onion, carrot and zucchini diced just a little larger than the rice so they keep some bite. The beef is left alone in a hot pan before breaking it up, and the browned bits stuck to the bottom carry much of the flavor.
Take the garlic scapes off the heat while they are still bright green and they stay crisp to the core; longer than that, the color dulls and they turn tough. For anyone who eats less heat, hold back some of the gochujang sauce and add it bit by bit, tasting as you go.
Perilla leaves, brushed thinly with soy and chili seasoning and stacked, braise gently into soft, dark green sheets that still peel apart one at a time. Draped over a spoonful of rice, each leaf brings its strong herbal aroma and the salty sauce together in one bite. Leftover rinsing water is what usually goes wrong, since it dilutes the seasoning and leaves the stack bland. Alternating the stem direction as the leaves are stacked evens out the thickness on both sides. Spooning the liquid from the bottom over the top midway lets every layer take on salt, and a day in the fridge evens it out further.
Tteokbokki sauce, made from gochujang, sugar and soy sauce, coats both chewy rice cakes and thick udon for a bowl that alternates between two kinds of chew. The rice cakes need longer to soften, which gives them and the fish cakes a head start while the udon cooks only briefly. The moment the sauce clings thickly, the udon is plated, before a longer simmer can swell and break it.
Five kinds of chicken offal share one pan: liver, gizzard, heart, kinkan (unlaid egg yolks), and himo (oviduct). They go into boiling sugar-soy sauce together and are tossed over strong heat until the small amount of sauce reduces to a glossy coat. The dish comes from Kofu in Yamanashi, where a soba shop is said to have created it to use parts that were being thrown away. Kinkan and himo rarely turn up in standard offal packs, so a specialist butcher is the usual source.
The filling is just four things: beef marinated in soy and sugar and stir-fried, spinach, carrot and strips of thin omelet. The beef is sliced thin against the grain and cooked until the marinade clings with no liquid left, which keeps the rice dry and the cut slices clean.
Garlic scapes taste of garlic without the sharp bite of the cloves, more sweet than pungent, and even people who shy away from garlic tend to keep reaching for them. Their season runs from spring into early summer, when the stalks are at their most tender.
Oily Pacific saury can braise for a good twenty minutes in a spicy soy broth and still come out moist. Laying the fish in a single layer over thick radish slices, and pouring water in around the edge rather than over the top, keeps the soft flesh in whole pieces. Skimming the foam when it first boils keeps the sauce clean, and spooning the liquid over the fish midway seasons the exposed top. The liquid is cooked down until only a shallow layer remains, which coats both the fish and the radish. Whatever sauce is left gets spooned onto rice.
Shrimp and pork wontons, thin Hong Kong egg noodles and bok choy each keep their own texture in a clear pork bone broth. Stopping the mix as soon as the filling turns tacky, before the shrimp are fully crushed, keeps springy pieces in each bite.
Ground chicken is pressed and broken up in the pan, joined by fine shreds of ginger, then cooked down in soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. Turn off the heat while a thin film of liquid still coats the pan, and every crumb carries a dark glaze while the meat stays moist. Spread over rice, it becomes a soboro bowl.
The Spam does most of the seasoning. There is only a splash of soy sauce, and cubes of Spam browned at the edges give salty, crisp bites all through the rice.
Garlic scapes are crisp with a slight chew, which gives lean chicken breast something to bite against. Oyster sauce and soy leave everything glossy.
Canned saury comes with bones already softened, so draining and rinsing it cuts the cooking time roughly in half, while fresh saury takes longer to cook through. Either way the oily flesh holds its own against a sauce of gochujang and gochugaru, and the radish underneath turns into a sweet, sauce-soaked braise of its own.
Without any meat, japchae leans entirely on its vegetables: spinach, carrot, shiitake, bell pepper, and onion each keep their own color and sweetness because they are stir-fried one at a time. The spinach only needs to wilt over high heat and is spread out to cool at once, or it dulls in color and turns tough. The glass noodles soak up soy sauce, sugar, and sesame oil before anything else joins them and come out glossy, chewy, and seasoned through. Tossing them with vegetables straight from a hot pan makes the noodles slump and clump, the usual way this dish goes wrong. It works as an everyday side dish or on a holiday table.
A Shanghai soup dumpling holds both a pork filling and a mouthful of hot broth inside its thin wrapper. The broth begins as pork stock jelly, chopped and folded into the filling, which melts as the dumplings steam. Set one on a spoon, nick the skin, and drink the broth before dipping the rest in black vinegar with slivered ginger.
Spam with a thin soy-and-sugar glaze and big, soft curds of egg go over rice, finished with mayonnaise and shredded roasted seaweed. The cubes brown best spread out and left untouched, and those crisp edges are what set them apart from the soft egg.
Clam meat is mixed among crisp, oyster-sauce-glazed garlic scapes, and since the clams are barely more than warmed through, they stay plump and tender.
Well-fermented kimchi, sour and soft, meets the oil from canned Pacific saury and cooks down into a tangy, concentrated sauce. With no fish to clean, the work is mostly waiting: about twenty minutes of simmering, partly uncovered, until the kimchi turns tender and the liquid thickens. Sliced cheongyang chili goes in near the end to keep its sharp heat. The fish only needs heating through and stays in large pieces as long as nobody stirs it.