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.
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