Cooks vs Cons Round 2: Korean Beef with Toasted Quinoa, Quick Pickles & Miso Egg Emulsion

Round 2...candy! Oh boy. I don't know about you, but I've never cooked with candy before. As Bruno and Geoffrey Zakarian pointed out, it's hard to know how candy will cook. Will it melt? Hold its shape? Curdle? 

I once tried to brûlé gummy bears and it was a disaster. The heat seems to toughen the gelatin, making an impossibly tacky bite. 

So instead of opting for licorice, gumdrops, or  jelly beans, which contain mysterious ingredients with unknown properties, I used clean and simple lollipops. Sugar, flavoring and coloring. Not ideal, but not horrifying either. 

We weren't allowed to make desserts (too easy), so my mind immediately went to Korean food. Korean food is actually pretty sweet, but it's tempered by salt, spice and funk. No one-note sweetness here. I called on my go-to flavors: miso, soy, ginger, garlic and sesame (the same flavors that are in one my most popular recipes of all time). I chose pink lemonade and lemon lollipops, thinking that citrus flavors were better than, say, cherry or grape (gag). 

Once I knew how I'd feature the surprise ingredient, I worked from there. What works best with sweet and spicy marinated beef? 

Bibimbap! Concepting the rest was easy. I'd adapt the classic Korean rice-and-veggies dish with my own spin. A quick pickle added some brightness and crunch, toasted quinoa with nori contributed an earthy, umami base (and mimicked the delicious burnt rice in the bottom of a stone bibimbap bowl). I also made a miso-egg emulsion, a hollandaise-like sauce that nods to the raw egg that is traditionally stirred into bibimbop. 

The recipe below is sequenced for a tight 30-minute cook. There's no wasted time waiting for things to cook. But if you want a saner experience, then you can always make each component one by one.

RECIPE:

Beef: 
1/2 cup of sugar -- ground-up citrus candy or actual sugar
1 small onion
8 cloves of garlic
1 ping-pong-ball-sized knob of ginger
1/3 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 Scotch Bonnet chili 

1 lb thinly sliced top sirloin 

Toasted Quinoa: 
1 cup red quinoa
10 sheets of roasted seaweed

Quick Pickles:
4 radishes
3 baby cucumbers
1 tablespoon salt 

Miso Egg Emulsion:
4 egg yolks
1 heaping teaspoon miso paste
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
½ teaspoon chili powder
1 tablespoon butter 

2 tablespoons black sesame seed
¼ cup chopped chives

Rinse quinoa and place in pot with two cups of water. Bring to a boil on high, then cover and simmer on low until nice and fluffy. The "tails" of the quinoa should be sticking out. (This didn't happen during my episode... perhaps because the stove was so hot the water boiled off too quickly and/or the quinoa was old and took longer than normal to "bloom".) 

For the marinade, blend the onion, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil and chili. Place in saucepan and reduce on medium-high. 

For the miso egg emulsion, blend the egg yolks, miso, rice vinegar, chili powder and butter. 

For the quick pickles, slice the cucumbers and radishes with a mandolin on the thinnest setting. Salt and let rest. 

Slice the beef and place it in the reduced marinade. While the beef is cooking and picking up the glaze, toast half the quinoa in a frying pan with a teaspoon of olive oil. Add the other half of the quinoa, add sliced nori and reserve. 

Assemble your plate. Squeeze out the excess water from the pickles and place. Add the toasted quinoa with nori and Korean candy beef. Pour miso egg emulsion on top, or serve on the side. Add chopped chives and black sesame seeds. 

RELAX because that was an intense 30 minutes of cooking.

Los Angeles Eats: Sqirl in Silverlake

New Yorkers visiting LA, here's a tip. On your first couple days, don't worry about adjusting to the new time zone. Get to Sqirl early -- it opens at 6:30am for drinks and pastries during the week, and the kitchen heats up at 8am. No line, just morning light and the best breakfast in your recent memory. (Or in my case, maybe ever??) 

I like breakfast/brunch as a social event, but as a meal, it's not my thing. Pancakes and waffles knock me out for the rest of the day. I love eggs, but they get boring easily. Benedict, omelette, with a side of bacon (even if it is maple-glazed, submerged in a Bloody Mary, thick cut from a heritage pig...) Meh. I'd rather have an interesting dinner plate. 

But Sqirl! I will fully admit that I'm a sucker for avocado toasts and chicory lattes, handmade almond milks and jams. But even D who is wary of anything hyped and twee loved it. We went twice over four days. 

Here's what Mark Bittman said of Jessica Koslow's cooking in the NY Times: 

Instead, it’s a kind of gentler version of dinner food, with little or no meat, but often with eggs and seasonings from the southern and eastern Mediterranean and much of Asia, and yet somehow, in the end, quite American. Nothing is bland or insipid, and much of the food is laced with a sharpness that comes from lemon juice and hot sauce and garlic and pickled things. For breakfast food, it’s downright revolutionary. 

Yep. We're used to breakfast "notes": cheese, potatoes, hollandaise, bacon, buttery carbs, maple syrup. But what Koslow brings is something else entirely. 

Take the "Green Eggs and Jam", caramelized onions, creamed spinach, wild arugula, and a toad in the hole in Clark Street Bakery bread. It's addictively savory, without crutches of cheese or pork. The bread is key, soft and pillowy, just a whisper of sour. Each bite hits on every register from sharp and peppery to sweet and slow-cooked. 

And then there's the sorrel bowl, with Kokuko Rose brown rice, sorrel pesto, preserved Meyer lemon, lacto-fermented hot sauce, pickled radish, sheep's milk feta and poached egg. I won't go into the hot sauce, pickles and feta, which are riotous players that add heat, brine and funk. But preserved lemon! What? The flavor -- sour, bitter, salty -- makes this breakfast one for the books. The sorrel adds an apologetic weedy note (not marijuana...the other type of weed, jeez). 

The avocado toast (top) presently features JJ's avocados, hot pickled carrots, green garlic creme fraiche, wood sorrel, and house za'atar. This is served all day (as opposed to the breakfast items, which are only available 'til the leisurely hour of 4pm).  I'd venture to say this is the oddest avocado toast I've ever had, and that's a good thing...like I've been listening to flutes and clarinets -- sweet, mellow, easy -- and finally someone plays the oboe -- sharp, strange, memorable.  

Here's the "Famous Damus", soft scrambled egg, Surryano ham, chives, ciabatta. We liked this one, though it's definitely more familiar in flavor than our other dishes. 

Sqirl also serves lovely drinks and pastries. The almond milk is made in-house (so no worrying about weird emulsifiers). 

This has become our dream wedding cake flavor combo: chocolate with blood orange. The best part? The crackled cacao nib crust. 

Sqirl historians will know that it actually started as a jam business. If we went a third time, I'd surely get the burnt brioche with almond hazelnut butter and jam. Instead, I have two jars at home: the rather romantic-sounding Moro Blood Orange and Tonga Vanilla Marmalade and Rhubarb and Meiwa Kumquat Jam. I can't wait to try them in yogurt, on ice cream, or let's be real, by the spoonful. 

Word to the wise -- jams are considered liquid and cannot be taken in carry-on luggage! I learned this the hard way. The TSA woman at the Long Beach airport saw me go from okay to grief-stricken in record time. Don't do that. 

Book Club Bites: Dacquoise Drops

Even if you’re not particularly food-obsessed, you probably have one. A bite, a dish, a sip that changes your life somehow. Perhaps an oyster started a lifetime of risk-taking. A restaurant meal introduced you to your soulmate. A family dish opened generations of stories.

For Tia, her dish was a plate of cookies. Dacquoise drops connect her with her family, give her national recognition, and finally put her face-to-face with Michael Saltz.

The cookie is light but sturdy -- a stiff meringue made even more hardy with four types of nuts. I love them with a nutty, milky coffee. Pro tip: save a packet of silica gel from some kale chips or freeze-dried fruit. They’ll help keep your cookies crisp.

RECIPE:

Bring 4 egg whites to room temperature. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In an electric mixer, whisk egg whites on high until foamy, about 1 minute. Add 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar and mix until fluffy, about another minute. Mix ⅔ cup of powdered sugar with ⅔ cup of granulated sugar. Add to egg mixture one tablespoon at a time while on medium-high speed. Continue to whisk until shiny and stiff (a peak stands up straight and doesn’t fall over). Gently mix 2 ¼ cups of chopped nuts (a mixture of pecans, pecans and cashews) and 1 cup of almond flour.

Cover two baking sheets with parchment paper. Spoon meringues onto tray with two tablespoons, leaving about an inch between drops. Turn off oven and leave in there for at least two hours and up to overnight. Makes 40 cookies.

Book Club Bites: Salade Nicoise

There’s an important scene in Food Whore where Tia is feeling lost. Her personal life and secret life with Michael Saltz are starting to clash and she’s not sure how she'll sort it out.

Her friend asks her to grab a bite and they go to a nice-ish deli near Washington Square Park. You know, one of the ones with a decent salad bar. As she’s thinking, she absent-mindedly adds items to her container: arugula, tuna, mustard, olives… until she makes an accidental Salade Niçoise.

“I mixed and tasted and went back for other ingredients until the tuna salad was near perfect. It was filling and bracing and pickled. It didn’t taste like bodega food at all. The simple act of cooking and tasting calmed me like nothing else.”

Surprise, surprise, I also love Salade Niçoise. The appeal is its remarkable harmony. Every player is assertive: fragrant tuna, briny olives, meaty haricot verts, plush hard-boiled eggs, spicy arugula. And yet together, they harmonize. The salad surely doesn’t need cheese or bacon, both auto-tune for salad, ways to increase tastiness by masking the ingredients. This is hearty and flavorful, with each component keeping its integrity. 

In my mind, the defining characteristics of a Salade Niçoise are: boiled potatoes, blanched haricot verts, Niçoise olives, hard-boiled eggs, and high-quality tuna. Other people may want to put anchovy in there, but to me, olives and tuna add enough saltiness. Once you have those ingredients, you can really play around with the rest. The recipe below doesn’t have precise proportions -- just mix and match, salad-bar-bodega style.

RECIPE:

Dressing: Using a mortar and pestle, grind three cloves of garlic with one tablespoon of salt until pasty. Add to a bowl along with ⅓ cup of olive oil, 1 minced shallot, the juice of 2 lemons, 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and black pepper to taste. Whisk and set aside.

Boiled Components: If you have the time, you might as well cook everything in the same pot of boiling water (as opposed to having three pots at once, which is somewhat wasteful and adds a lot of unnecessary heat to your kitchen -- critical if you’re making this in the summer).

Add water to a large saucepan and heavily salt. Bring to a boil. Add purple potatoes and four eggs. After 7-10 minutes (depending on how you like your eggs), remove the eggs and cool them off in a bowl of ice water. Add trimmed haricot verts and cook for 2 minutes. Remove and add to another bowl of ice water. Check potatoes with a fork -- the cooking time depends on the size. Remove when a fork easily slips in, with no “crunch” sound.

Before you assemble, cut the eggs in halves or quarters. Cut the potatoes into bite-sized pieces.

Classic Components:
Tomatoes - I like Kumato because they’re sweet and not too tart. But any tomato will do. Cut into wedges.
Radishes 
Cucumber - English or mini. You want a compact cucumber that isn’t too watery.
Olives - I used oil-cured black olives because they are one of my favs. But Niçoise olives are the classic.
Herbs - scallions, basil, chervil

Wildcard Components:
Beets
Fiddlehead ferns
Microgreens - here, I used mustard micro greens
Pickled Cipollini Onions

Assembly:
On a large plate, arrange a bed of arugula. Add your other ingredients. Top with high-quality olive oil-packed tuna. My favorite is this yellowfin tuna from Ortiz. You can buy it at Whole Foods or Zingermans. (True, you can’t find imported Spanish tuna at a bodega salad bar. But just go with it.)

Drizzle with dressing and serve.

Poached Egg and Purple Rice in a Collard Green Cup

Do you remember Fatty Crab in its hey day? Now Zak Pelaccio is cooking in Hudson, NY at Fish + Game (been there too, but very different), but back in the day, man that food was good.

nasi lemak at Fatty Crab (photo by travelchictv)

At Fatty Crab he had this insane nasi lemak -- coconut rice, chicken curry, slow poached egg, spicy pickles, deep-fried shallots, dried anchovies, various sambals. It remains one of the best restaurant dishes I've ever tasted. So much texture and funk and heat. Salty, sour, sweet, smooth, spiky. It was all there, a riot of bright, alpha flavors somehow sharing the stage in this dish. 

This is a bit of my homage... a petite chamber orchestra compared to Pelaccio's carnival. The depth comes from caramelized shallots, tucked in the sticky and sweet purple rice. Add a poached egg and a dash of salt, and you have a slippery savory little bite. Could it use some pickles, sambals, dried fish, fried garlic slices, etc? Yes, indeed. This is just a start.

RECIPE: 

Caramelize shallots by sautéing with olive oil and salt on low for 30 minutes (I had them from another recipe so it wasn't so bad). Make sticky purple rice according to instructions (The one I used was about 75% white rice that the purple rice stained. Best to stick with your rice's instructions since rice ratios may change).

Lay collard green leaves in the bottom of a poach pod. Mix shallots with rice and add to the bottom of the pod. Crack an egg into a shallow bowl, then add to top of poach pod. Gently place poach pod into a small pot of boiling water, making sure that water doesn't reach the top of the poach pod. If your poach pod is slanted because of uneven weight distribution, prop it up with a random kitchen utensil. I used a spoon. Cover the pot and cook for 5 minutes. Remove pouch from poach pod, sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve. 

Avocado Toast with Turmeric Eggs and Sumac

Let's talk about texture and the Instagram friend that follows us all: avocado toast. 

Growing up, the only time we ate avocado was for dessert. My Madagascar-born mom made avocado mashed with coarse raw sugar and dark rum. It was pasty yet grainy, like a boozy, moisturizing exfoliant for the tongue. 

You can pretty much put anything on avocado toast: something crunchy, something sweet, something fishy, something herby, something pickled. 

But my favorite is plush-on-plush, smooth-on-smooth. Egg on avocado has an echoing sensation on your teeth. And if you're looking for more avocado (and a different texture), then you know what to make for dessert. 

RECIPE:
Turmeric-Stained Egg: Fill a 1/2-quart saucepan with water and place the egg inside. When the water has reached a boil, turn off heat and let the egg sit for 10 minutes. Remove the egg and peel it. Stir 2 heaping tablespoons of turmeric to the water (be careful --- it will stain your counter, your hands, your cutting board You can get it out, but it's a bit of a pain). Add the egg back to the saucepan and let sit for 3 minutes. 

I won't insult you with the assembly. Mash, slice, place, sprinkle (sumac and salt). Done! 

More of my avocado recipes here.

Squash Blossoms Stuffed with Souffléd Tofu

The other night, I felt conned into a dish. It was the type of service where everything is "amazing". Every order is a "wonderful choice." Words stop meaning anything.

I prefer the truth and I think that's always the best if you want the customer leaving happy. (The salesperson who tells the woman that a skirt looks fabulous when in fact it hits her in all the wrong spots is doing no one any favors.)

So anyway, the dish. It was squash stems. I'm usually into root-to-bud eating. I eat broccoli stalks and kabocha skin and celery leaves. But these stems were stringy and quite tough. And not tough in a hardy green sort of way (I dare to eat kale even when it's not massaged). It was just more a chew toy than actual sustenance.

So the next day I found these squash blossoms at the farmer's market. Exceptionally edible, always tender, perfect capsules for some other delicious filling. This time, I filled them with seasoned tofu, aerated and firmed by whipped egg whites. I am contemplating filling the blossoms with something heartier, like a meat mixture. Or maybe a tautological thing, a zucchini mousse with the stem very very finely chopped so you can actually eat it.

RECIPE: In a blender, whiz up egg whites from 3 eggs for 2 minutes. Add a package of lite tofu, salt, and whip until mixed and you are content with the saltiness. I like the mild taste of tofu, but you could do it up maybe with liquid aminos to get more of a cheese taste. Stuff into cleaned zucchini blossoms. Add 1/4 cup of water to a large wok and bring to a simmer. Add blossoms and steam, covered, for about 7 minutes, until the tofu mixture puffs up and solidifies. Grind pepper to your liking.

Broccoli Eggs Benedict with Tofu Hollandaise

Roasted cruciferous doesn't need much. Perhaps some tahini a la Maoz. Or with bacon a la every restaurant. Anchovies are also welcome.

But after an especially satisfying dinner of roasted cauliflower, I craved a reprise. Here the broccoli gets a breakfast treatment with a soft poached egg, a sourdough English muffin, and a vegan hollandaise.

I roasted the broccoli while I heated the water for the eggs. Then I whizzed up the hollandaise, a mix of silken tofu, turmeric, olive oil, cayenne, and liquid aminos (for the umami oomph). Then the English muffin went into the toaster while I poached the eggs. When it comes to breakfast, I seek a compactness of movement.

The slippery egg and hollandaise slips into the dry and deliciously burnt florets. It's a lascivious way to cook the otherwise staid broccoli. But really, it had it coming.