Momo At Home: 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.