What I Ate For Dinner

Well, the pork buns were a delight, but what to do with the leftover pork belly? Fortunately, David Chang has another simple recipe in his Momofuku cookbook that features the fatty slabs---this time, fresh off the grill. It's called ssäm, and it's sort of like a Korean burrito. Sort of. Not really, I guess. But I'm told its origins are Korean, and insofar as it's wrapped, it could just as well have burrito-ian cousins. I guess what's most important is that the idea is to wrap fresh lettuce around grilled pork, along with perhaps some veggies, then slather with pickled mustard seed sauce and devour.

The lettuce is easy: Chang recommends bibb, but I couldn't find any so I went with butter. Basically, you just want something leafy and supple, which I guess rules out spiny varieties like romaine. The pork's easy, too (we cooked it before in our previous post on Steamed Pork Buns). Once you've roasted it, cut it into half-inch wide strips about two inches long, and throw it on a hot grill until it starts to color a bit. Then yank it off and serve. So, we're already most of the way there.

The pickled mustard seed sauce is a bit more involved, but still manageable, especially given the simplicity of the rest of the dish. I cut Chang's recipe for a cup yield in half, so I'll give those measurements. If you want more or less that the half-cup I'm settin' you up for, do the math.

Start by pickling yellow mustard seeds. Combine one half-cup of yellow mustard seeds in a medium saucepan with ¾ cup water, ¾ cup white wine or rice wine vinegar, ¼ cup sugar and salt to taste. Bring it up to a very gentle simmer on low or medium-low heat and allow the seeds to pickle, plump and cook while you stir frequently. This could take as long as 45 minutes, but be sure to taste regularly so that you have a sense of where the seeds are. I went for a soft outer shell on the seeds and some crunch in the interior. If the pan starts to dry out, just add more water.

Once you've got your pickled mustard seeds, things get easier. For about a half-cup of sauce, Chang's recipe would call for 3 tablespoons of the seeds, 1½ tablespoons Dijon mustard, a half-tablespoon of Chinese hot mustard (which I replaced with siracha), 1½ tablespoons mayonnaise, some sliced scallions and chopped quick-pickled cucumbers (which we did for the pork buns), as well as salt to taste. Just mix 'er on up and you're ready to roll.

Now, a word about the sauce. These aren't flavors I'm altogether familiar with (by which I mean I've never pickled mustard seeds before), so I probably should have followed the recipe more closely. But I hate store-bought mayo, so I made my own, which meant that I had more yield on the mayo than I needed for the sauce. Not wanting to waste too much, I threw a bit of extra mayo in. This made my sauce thinner than what Chang's recipe would give you. Still delicious, mind you, but more of a sauce than a paste. So if you want to play around with the consistency by adding more or less mayo, I think this ingredient line-up can work in different ways. Obviously, the less mayo you add, the chunkier and more paste-like your sauce will be; but a thinner (but of course not too thin), sauce-lookin' sauce worked great, too, and still hit a lot of robust notes. I also like some heat in the sauce, so I think that wasabi or siracha go well in this one. As for the photo: I ran out of pork belly and substituted pork tenderloin, although make no mistake, pork belly is way better in ssäm. Oh, and I forgot to mention it in the video, but the quick-pickled cucumbers and carrots that I used on the pork buns go great on this, too.

Anyway, once you've got the pork, lettuce and mustard seed sauce together, the assembly should be obvious. I love this dish for its simplicity as much as I do for its complexity: the grilled pork goes great with the spicy, smooth and tangy mustard-seed sauce, and the dynamic textures of the lettuce, grilled pork and seed studded sauce put ssäm light-years ahead of many of the burritos I've come across.

These steamed pork buns are the least work for the most reward of damn near anything I can remember cooking. Yeah, the pork takes two hours; but the slab I bagged today cost less than 4 bucks at 1.79/# and once you've got 'er in the oven, you only have to flip it once before yankin' it out. And from there, the assembly requires but the cognitive capacities of a poorly trained chimp, and the end product costs only a fraction of what that chimp could make hawkin' these things on any street corner in the world. They're that good, that easy and that cheap. Big ups to the inimitable stud David Chang for including this recipe in his Momofuku (pg. 80).

Start with skinless pork belly--I went with a two-pounder today, but if you've got friends coming over, you might want to bump that up. Pork belly, as you may have guessed, is fatty, greasy and heavy (stereotypical adjective most often used to describe it: "unctuous"), so you won't need a hell of a lot of it per bun. Unless you wanna Double Down. Give it a good rubbin' with a mix of equal parts brown sugar and kosher salt. Chang says to let it rest at this point in the 'fridge for six to twenty-four hours, but I always skip that step. But then again, he's the one with all the James Beard Awards.

Throw it in a 400 degree oven, fatty side up, and roast for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on which end of the two-to-three-pound spectrum your slab falls on. Fat will be rollin' out of the guy, which if you reserve, you could use. Or if pork fat scares you, you can throw it out. Yer call.

Flip it on over to the other side after 45-60 minutes, and kill the heat to only around 250. You could baste the beast at this point, if you're industrious. Give it another hour.

While the pork is finishing up, give yourself fifteen minutes to knock out what Chang calls "quick pickled" vegetables. I'm not sure what sense of pickling this is, but the product is super good. Start with some chopped veggies--carrots, cucumbers, daicon, jicama, you name it--and add one part salt to three parts sugar. Coat the veggies up real good. Optionally, you could also add a bit of lime juice. Let 'em hang out in the 'fridge for ten or twenty minutes. Taste them. If they suck, wash off the spices and try again, keeping in mind why they sucked the first time.

Now the buns. You can make 'em yourself. If you have a lot of space and time. Chang has the recipe on page 81. If you have a life, though, you might just want to get some either fresh from a Chinese bakery (best option), or frozen from whatever grocer has 'em in your postal code (still quite a good option). The buns you're lookin' for are like soft, Michelin-man taco shells.

If you have a steamer, steam 'em. If you don't, boil water in a big pot and put a colander on top to hold the buns over the steam. Fresh ones will take moments; frozen ones will take two or three minutes.

Now delicious assembly: start with a bun, slather hoisin sauce on one side, plunk down a few pseudo-pickled veggies, a slice or two of the pork belly (cut 'em about a half inch thick and two inches long), garnish with chopped scallion and siracha.

One of my favorite stops on the J-land circuit is Kanazawa. Located due west of Tokyo on the Sea of Japan, Kanazawa always offers calm and repose to one wearied by the throngs and choreographed stampedes of Tokyo. The town of just over 450,000 inhabitants boasts one of Japan's finest gardens (Kenrokuen), a new museum of modern art, and the famous Higashiyama area, known for teahouses, folk crafts and high-end gifts made of gold from the area.

As I wound up my stay in Japan recently, I headed to the Sabô Isshô teahouse 茶房一笑, one of my favorite spots in Kanazawa's Higashiyama Chayagai (Highashiyama District Tea Avenue). Named for local poet Kosugi Isshô (1653-88), Sabô has become a favorite of mine for its tranquility, as well as for its Bocha, a specialty of the area. Tea in Japan is usually served with something mildly sweet, like the green adzuki bean confection pictured on the lower left of the tray below. The sweets are actually more appealing to me than the tea--although it's easy to see why the sometimes-bitter teas would be served with something soft and slightly sweet, so they make a good combo.

To be honest, I don't really know (or care) enough to discuss the subtleties of tea, nor am I likely to ever learn much about it. The thing is, the tea's great and all, but the ambiance of these places is what's really worth the price. The aged wood ceiling beams, unassuming garden courtyards, and peace of Highashiyama tea shops are a nice change of pace from the fluorescent lights, ubiquitous power lines and scurrying crowds that typify some public spaces around here. Unlike Kyoto and other tourist Meccas, Higashiyama is rarely crowed. I had thought this trip might be different, what with a popular festival taking place in the area, but nope. As you can tell from the picture, the streets were mostly empty.

I've been in Japan for the past few weeks, and on a recent morning, I decided to check out Tokyo's famed Tsukiji Fish Market. The largest seafood wholesale market in the world, and one of the globe's largest markets of any sort, Tsukiji traffics thousands of metric tons of seafood each day, and more than 60,000 people work here. The market's early morning auctions have recently attracted huge numbers of tourists, prompting market managers to sometimes limit access, citing hygiene and safety concerns. In other cases, they have closed the auctions to all but licensed bidders. Japan is often criticized for overfishing, but whether that has anything to do with restricting access to Tsukiji--where much of the controversial catch is sold--is unknown (at least to me).

I showed up around 9am, which means that I missed most of the action. Fish roll in from all corners of the globe from late evening of the previous day through the early morning hours. Between 4am and 5am, the auctions begin and licensed bidders representing wholesalers, retailers and restaurants make their best offers. By 7 or 8, the auctions are finished, and the winners make off with their purchase. Many of the fish won in the early morning auctions wind up in the inner market wholesale stalls that I visited. By 1pm, the day is done, and the market closes for cleaning.

The scene of the wholesale stalls is sort of like a choreographed stampede. In each stall, coolers, freezers and ice chests cradle the day's catch as vendors slice huge steaks into more manageable--and saleable--morsels. In between these sellers' cells, small alleyways organize the web of fishy commerce into an orderly, if cozy, grid. The black bricks atop which this all sits slicken with water, ice and (probably) some fish guts, but there really isn't a "fishy" smell exactly. Sure, you wouldn't mistake the joint for a florist, but for the quantity of highly perishable stock available, it all seemed pretty well taken care of. That's the choreographed part.

The stampede comes with the throngs of people: wholesalers, retailers, butchers, restaurateurs, slack-jawed tourists, forklift operators, market managers, guys pulling some sort of conveyance that sort of looks like a rickshaw (really--apparently they're good for local fish transport), et al. flood the market. Barreling down the alleyways come small buggies with flatbeds and a standing operator, shuttling about the day's sale. Blue cigarette smoke wafts out of the stalls as rubber-booted vendors try to entice buyers. Band saws chop up man-size frozen fish. Ice, ice, more ice. The place is buzzing. And everywhere. Once you're in the market, you never stop moving--you just try to keep up with the rest of the surge. You feel like you're in a school of fish moving in the same direction without ever really communicating. Really, it's almost like the fish have us in their net, and the net is called Tsukiji. That's the stampede part.

Outside the market you'll find all sorts of kitchen supply stores, restaurants, dishware vendors and the like. Not surprisingly, sushi is the specialty in these parts.