Spare ribs, mock Korean style

On a bit of a recipe roll from yesterday, I thought I'd post up last night's meal with photos.

In Galicia churrasco (spare ribs) is one of the meaty alternatives to the fine seafood on offer, but I never much liked the way it was cooked - relatively quickly on a hot grill, which leaves it tough and a challenge to rip off the bone. I'm all for interesting textures in food (pure cartilage and extremely fatty cuts where two of the new textures that I grew accustomed to in China), but in the case of ribs I'm definitely in the long, slow cooking camp. I came up with the following recipe for spare ribs a year or so ago and have been trying to perfect the timing and heating ever since. Last night was a pretty good success.

The marinade is made of several parts, the first being the base sauce used to make kimchi and can be found here. I would recommend going the whole hog and making the kimchi while you're at it. I normally do enough of the sauce to fill a couple of big tupperware containers and then add it in generous quantities to most recipes for the following months. It seems to keep, in the fridge for at least three or four months without a problem - it may last longer but by that time it's already been used up in my place!

Take two or three generously heaped tablespoons full of the kimchi paste and to it add honey, soy sauce, gochujang, and I normally throw in another few chunks of garlic which caramelize on the ribs. I'll leave the ratios up to you, depending on how sweet or spicy you like it.

Take the ribs and rub in the sauce with your hands - they need to get a good massage to get the sauace everywhere. Then marinate them for a few hours in the paste (I'm still not sure how much the marinating does, given the time that they have in the oven anyway).

Heat the oven to around 80 degrees, wrap the ribs in silver foil securely so that the moisture can't escape and put them in the oven. I normally give them about 4 hours or so at 80 degrees and then for the last half hour I take them out of the silver foil turn the heat up to around 170 and get them caramelizing on the outside. Slow cooking them leaves them moist and tender, so you have to be careful not to dry them out in the last stage. By this time they should be falling off the bone. In fact, it may be better to do them for longer, at closer to 65 degrees, but this would probably bump the time up to more like six or seven hours which I can't usually spare.

This time I did them with garlic roast potatoes - I would normally add some rosemary and thyme to the potatoes but didn't have any fresh. The potatoes are boiled for around ten minutes, then bashed around violently in a pan to get the outside floury. Then coat them in a pan with a little butter and olive oil with salt, onions and garlic. The ideal is then to cook them on a high heat for about an hour and a half, but with the ribs cooking slowly I had to adapt a little and gave them a good 15 minutes extra at the end on around 200. The aubergine was stirfried, after salting, in a mixture of garlic, ginger, one red Birdseye chilli, a dash of soy sauce and fish sauce, an inch of lemongrass and a squeeze of lemon, all having been crushed in a pestle and mortar.

Slightly unfocused, but here was the final result.

In the mix

...and that makes it the longest blog absence in four years. For those who haven't been being worried by my facebook jargon-based ditties (it seems that a reasonable number of people think I've truly lost it), I've been attempting to condense my thoughts over the last couple of weeks into just a few lines of semi-nonesense poetry which end up as facebook updates.  Work has been busier than ever with a project which so far has taken many many late nights and several thousand lines of mathematica code to get going. We're getting some interesting results and hope to have something out in the next few weeks. This will be a slight change of direction for me, and one that I'm enjoying a lot. It's a real pleasure to be doing something analytic, rather than struggling with numerical instabilities for once!

On top of work I've been getting back into the swing of cooking for reasonable numbers of people, with a a hotpot meal on Tuesday and a Korean/Chinese combo on Thursday for a group of Shock-household initiates. I tried a new dish on Thursday which worked pretty well, though sadly no photos were taken.

I made a huge batch of kimchi a couple of weeks back, though that is now fast disappearing, and, as usual some of the paste was left over, after having liberally coated the cabbage. The paste doesn't take too long to make, consisting of rice flour, korean chilli flakes, fish sauce, garlic, onion, ginger and a little sugar and I've found that the combination of heat and umami compounds (of which fish sauce is high) add hugely to just about any dish you may want to add it to.

Combining the previously made kimchi paste with gochujiang (a fermented, sweet, extremely firey Korean chili paste with quite a different heat to the kimchi mix), salt, a touch of brown sugar and cumin I marinated a rack of spare ribs for an afternoon before cooking them at 150C for 3 hours and finally giving them a ten minute browning at the end. The results were pretty decent and I'll definitely be experimenting with this some more. The mix of cumin and spiciness is reminiscent of the Beijing take on Xinjiang cooking and the huge quantities of garlic are well worth the pain of peeling the cloves en masse for the kimchi paste. On top of this my mapo dofu is being to resemble the versions I tried in Sichuan, thanks mostly to the aquisition of a tub of fermented soy bean paste. Walking round for a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon I discovered that it's almost impossible to get tofu in Santiago and so will continue to make my own when I get hold of some more of the solidifying agent.


Anyway, for now I have a week's worth of Chinese vocab to catch up with and some Young Tableux to ponder....

Kimchi blues

Spending a few weeks in Korea this summer gave me enough times to get completely addicted to kimchi, Korea's highly spiced pickled cabbage dish. Here in Santiago it's virtually impossible to find anything with a hint of heat, so I scouted around on the web and found a few recipes, the most explicit was in video form here. So, I bought the ingredients this week and spent a couple of hours this afternoon transforming this:

into this:

Now I just have to wait for 24 hours until it begins to ferment, and then fit the whole thing in the fridge. I'll be making kimchi mandu ASAP!

Takoyaki with Galician pulpo, a first?

Yesterday we had a seminar from a Japanese researcher who is currently doing a postdoc in Chile. After the seminar a few of us headed for dinner to a local restaurant and had the usual, very tasty selection of Galician delights, Pimientos de Padron, Pulpo a la feira, xoubas and much besides. I chatted with the speaker and his wife, also from Japan and when I mentioned that I'd inherited a Takoyaki pan from a Japanese friend who had left Santiago a couple of months back, their eyes lit up and they told me that it had been many moons since they'd had takoyaki. So, I invited them for lunch today for a hands-on takoyaki fest. This was the first time I'd made it, but in fact it turned out rather well and I'm sure to do it again soon. So, this is my/our recipe for takoyaki.

Start off by making a dashi, a Japanese stock, which traditionally isn't as strong as a western stock. Before my guests turned up I made a shiitake stock by steeping a handfull of dried shiitake mushrooms in boiled water. This takes just 20 minutes or so.

When they arrived, the stock was ready and to the dashi (around 275 ml) we added 200 grams of flour, one egg, a pinch of salt, a quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder, a finely chopped spring onion, and a couple of finely chopped shiitakes, previously well soaked.

Take your takoyaki pan, should you be lucky enough to have one (see below), or equivalent and heat it directly over a flame until it becomes very hot. A good takoyaki pan should be as heavy as possible in order to distribute the heat slowly and evenly. Coat the pits in a little oil and spoon in the batter. This should sizzle straight away and start to rise a little. Immediately add a small piece of cooked octopus to each batter section. After a minute or so, take your takoyaki pick and turn the batter and octopus upside down. The bottom of each one should now be spherical.

Cook for another minute or so and then put straight on a plate.

For the sauce, mix a few teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce to a few tablespoons of mayonnaise and a dash of soy sauce (really one should get hold of an okonomiyaki sauce, but this is rather hard to come by in my neck of the woods) and spoon it over the takoyaki. Sprinkle the top with dried tuna flakes and enjoy, piping hot!

Though my guests admitted that they weren't exactly as in Japan, they said this was mostly due to the sauce not being quite the same, but they seemed to enjoy them as much as I did, and I'll be sure to make them again.

I'm sure that you could do the same thing with any normal cup cake tin, though you'd have to be careful with the quantity of mix and the temperature distribution, but it's worth giving it a go.