2nd attempt at rice cakes

I love these things. We ate the rice cake dish as a stater and as the dessert in the same meal at noodle bar. We wanted to be sure that we loved them. Reading how Chang compared a roasted or boiled rice cake to a boiled or grilled hot dog, blew my mind. As disgusting as they might be to some, I love a good grilled hot dog. Anyway, the thought of making and eating the roasted rice cake dish whenever we want fills me with joy. That and cereal milk. But more on that later.

- Jaime


We've made the roasted rice cakes twice already. That's two times in under one week…we love these things. I've lost count how many times we've actually ordered these suckers. This dish will clearly be in heavy rotation and once you have the onions roasted and the sauce made it's a quick dish to throw together. Last night's attempt took about 10-15 mins and they turned out great. The first time around was a tad less successful….

So rice cakes (unless you're in the know) are not what you think of when you hear the words "rice cakes."

We're not talking about these things:

We're talking about these things:

-- rice that's been pounded and molded into sticks or ovals and sold in packages in the refrigerated (or frozen) section of your local asian market. They're very cool. We had no idea what the hell we were ordering when we first saw them on the menu but man they're good.

So first things first, roast the onions. We used a 12 inch stainless steel skillet with some grapeseed oil and about 6 medium to smallish onions, sliced as thin as we could get 'em. We roasted them for about an hour until the whole mound shrunk to about 1/4 of its original size and the onions were glossy and a nice caramelized brown color.

While the onions were roasting we assembled the red dragon sauce. Now the lynchpin to this whole sauce is ssamjang, or korean fermented bean and chili paste. We had no luck at the local chinese grocery store (great wall in flushing) probably because ssamjang isn't chinese, it's korean. We hit pay dirt at h-mart in woodside. In fact the smallish store had an entire wall dedicated to the stuff. We grabbed a container labeled "mild" because while we both like a little spice we've definitely had rice cakes at noodle bar that have been waaay too spicy for us. There is a happy medium and we figured mild bean paste would help us hit that mark.

Before I go any further I should say a few things about the rice cakes we bought. The book recommends rice cakes that are shaped into long sticks but we could only find bags filled with cakes cut into little 1 1/2 - 2 inch segments. We bought two bags at great wall that were frozen and one bag at h-mart that was just refrigerated. We used the h-mart bag and left them in the fridge before cooking. That turned out to be a pretty stupid thing to do actually because when it came time to roast them they were very cold and very hard and we ended up overcooking them waiting for them to brown. The second time 'round we took the bag out of the fridge a good hour before we assembled the dish to much better results.

So we took some mirin and broth (the book recommends the momo ramen broth but we haven't made that yet so we just subbed canned chicken broth, kinda lame I know but I didn't want to wait on the broth) reduced it a bit then mixed in the red dragon, reduced some more, mixed in the roasted onions and kept simmering until the whole thing got nice and sticky/glossy.

Meanwhile we heated our 12 inch skillet (book recommends a cast iron which we'll be picking up shortly but the stainless did the trick) with some grapeseed oil until nice and hot, which I can't stress enough get that thing hot, and then arranged the cakes and roasted until a nice brown crust developed, we then flipped and did the same on the other side.

The first time we did this we tried to brown them on all sides and ended up drying the suckers out. Overcooking created a very thick hard crust on the outside of each cake (which the book warns about). They were very hard to eat and didn't have any of the nice roasted flavor they're supposed to have. This time we took more care to have the pan nice and hot before cooking the cakes. They tasted waaaay better with a nice roasted char on the outside and still gummy/chewy inside.

Toss cakes with sauce in pan, sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Plate. Toss with scallions. Serve!

- Scott.

Cooking Momofuku at Home

Hi, so my wife and I are cooking through the Momofuku cookbook . We're not doing it as some stunt or feat or for any other reason besides that we really, really like the food. In many ways Momofuku is a meaningful part of our lives. I don't want to overdo it here but it's true. For the last three years it's been inseparable from how we think about food. We love it, we use it as a benchmark, and if we had our choice (and enough money) we'd eat at any of the three restaurants every single day. Actually probably multiple times a day...but since we can't exactly do that we're gonna try and cook this stuff ourselves.

So that's what we're gonna do.

If you've never heard of Momofuku just know that it's a kick ass restaurant group in NYC serving some of the most interesting and delicious food in this country at this very minute. They are currently at the top of their game. For more info just google "David Chang Momofuku" or go to http://www.momofuku.com/.

Neither of us have any real professional cooking background whatsoever (well Jaime has a chef (uncle) in the family who is a huge influence on both of us, but it's not like she's out there working the line or anything) and as far as home cookery goes we're ok but nothing special. I'm almost 100% recipe dependent, and while Jaime is a way better cook than I am the gulf between us is nowhere near the gulf between both of us combined and a real chef in a real kitchen, like Momofuku.

If we can make this stuff we're pretty confident anyone can make this stuff.

Here's the plan as it stands now:

- We're going to document all of our attempts to cook every dish in this book.

- We're going to be writing in two "voices." I'll have my entries, and Jaime will have hers (she'll be on here in a bit).

- We're not going to cook things just once because with food this good why would you? We're going to cook as much of it as we can as often as we can. Again this is going to be less of a "look what we can do" sorta thing and more of an attempt to eat and cook the Momofuku way.

- Following that we're going to do our best to follow the ethos of Momofuku which at its heart means cooking with integrity. We're going to use as many of the same purveyors as they do in order to support the type of sustainable food production we believe is sorely underrepresented in this country. As we go we'll list all of the main sources.

- And finally we're not going to post any of the recipes. We're pretty sure that would be copyright infringement but more than that the book is a treasure and we would like people to buy it (even though we have no stake in that whatsoever -- we're just fans).

So ok, let's go.

- Scott.