Momofuku: chapter 1

The Benton’s bacon arrived so we’ve started our Momofuku phase while continuing with the Sweet desserts. 

If you didn’t already know, Momofuku is a famous, fashionable New York City restaurant group that includes Ssam Bar, Noodle Bar, and the painfully expensive Ko. Founder David Chang, 36, is the original Korean-American bad boy chef and one of the people we can thank for adding “fuck” to the cookbook lexicon.

That’s Momofuku. Momofuku is Chang’s 2009 book (written with Peter Meehan) about founding and building Momofuku. It’s a real, readable book with roughly equal quantities of text and recipes. As of page 123, here’s what I’ve learned: Chang excelled at football and golf as a kid, majored in religion at Trinity College, and daydreamed about writing “a screenplay that told the story of the Bhagavad Gita through the lens of the Civil War with Robert E. Lee in the hero’s role.”  (Joke? I can't tell.)

He also daydreamed a lot about noodles and ran off to Japan to apprentice in a ramen shop. After working in various restaurants in Japan and New York City, he eventually decided to pursue his ramen dream and in 2004 opened Momofuku, a tiny noodle shop in the East Village. Where I left off reading, he’s just opened his second restaurant, Ssam Bar, and while things are going badly for hot-tempered, foul-mouthed David Chang, I sense a big turnaround is afoot. It has to be, or this book wouldn't exist. 

Sprinkled throughout the text are recipes and a lot of them are daunting. In order to do the book justice I will have to tackle Chang’s ramen recipe, which involves seven component recipes. Eight, if I decide to make the noodles from scratch, which I won’t. 

But there are some easier recipes I’m using to warm up.

The first recipe I tried was Chang’s Napa cabbage kimchi. I made this last month and let it ferment in the refrigerator until a few days ago. I’m not a kimchi connoisseur and suspect this version contains more sugar than is strictly proper, but I love it. The sugar is probably why I love it.  Be warned that it is very, very sweet and will not work on the Paleo or Atkins diet. The recipe is here. 

On Monday, I used the kimchi to make one of Chang’s brussels sprouts recipes. You roast some sprouts, toss with chopped bacon (Benton’s, of course -- Chang is hung up on Benton's), and then serve on a bed of pureed kimchi. It was really tasty. Not life-changing and not as streamlined as Roy Choi’s brussels sprouts/kimchi dish, but really tasty. 

The next night: asparagus with miso butter and poached eggs. You beat together white miso and butter, warm this with a little sherry vinegar, and serve with sauteed asparagus and a poached egg. My family would be aghast if I put this in front of them, so I made cole slaw and bratwurst for them. I alone ate the asparagus. And it was a very lonely meal indeed.

Not to mince words, but I hated this dish. You’ll find the recipe here followed by many glowing reviews, so don’t let me deter you from trying it.  Chang writes that the miso butter-egg combo resembles hollandaise sauce -- “in a similar appealing fat-on-fat sort of way.”

I found it unctuous, overpowering, cloying, and totally unappealing. Hollandaise has a nice, lemony bite that cuts through the “fat-on-fat." While the vinegar was probably supposed to do this for the miso butter, it didn’t, or not enough to suit my particular palate. The egg yolk mingled with the miso butter and pale yellow liquid ran all over the plate. Jokes were made. At the end of dinner, Isabel stood up to clear the table, looked at her father, and said, “Do I have to clear her plate?”

You get the idea.

For dessert: tangerine cake from Sweet. We all ate the same dessert and all agreed it was delicious. What Momofuku put asunder, Sweet joined together again, if only for about 7 minutes.

Salty?!

The galley isn't a thing of beauty, but the hardcover book is a knockout.

Some facts about Suzanne Goin, author of The A.O.C. Cookbook: She was born in Los Angeles, graduated from Brown, worked at Al Forno and Chez Panisse, and opened the restaurant Lucques in West Hollywood in 1998. The Lucques bar was so lively and popular that in 2002 she opened A.O.C. to “recreate that energy." This second restaurant serves wines by the glass and a menu of Mediterranean small plates. Her business partner, Caroline Styne, writes that  A.O.C. is all about “noncommittal” eating.

In a 2013 review of A.O.C., here's how Jonathan Gold describes Goin's cooking style: 

strong flavors, puddles of broth and extremely seasonal produce; slivers of lemon peel where other chefs tend to use zest; lots of olives, fennel, thyme, chiles and other hints of the Provencal palette even when the dish in question comes from elsewhere. 

Goin, who is in her forties, is married to a man whom she describes as “salty” and they have three children. I think she's a dead ringer for the actress Genevieve Bujold.

That's Goin. Now to the cookbook.

Of The A.O.C. Cookbook Goin writes, “This is not the easiest cookbook you will ever use.” Spend a few minutes flipping through its pages, and you'll agree. Almost every recipe is for a compound dish, as in: black bass with fennel puree, winter citrus, and green olives in green harissa. 

Or consider her recipe for s’mores: 

1 recipe graham crackers (recipe follows) 

1 recipe bittersweet chocolate ganache (recipe follows)

1 recipe marshmallows (recipe follows)

1 recipe caramel popcorn (recipe follows)

1 recipe  chocolate sorbet (recipe follows)

But you can’t fault her for any of this when she’s been so clear from the outset. A.O.C. is a sophisticated restaurant and she’s giving us recipes for sophisticated restaurant dishes that take time and effort to recreate and if that’s not what you’re up for, well, you’ve been warned. 

I’m up for it, but as usual, I went straight for the lowest hanging fruit: balsamic glazed brussels sprouts. You cook whole sprouts in oil and butter, add chopped pancetta, cook some more, add garlic and shallots, cook some more, add balsamic and veal stock, cook some more. Serve. 

Veal stock. I don’t do it. I substituted vegetable stock and it worked fine.

Not so fine was the balsamic vinegar. Goin doesn’t specify what type to use and I only had a fancy, superthick California balsamic, the kind you’re supposed to apply by the droplet to strawberries and aged ribeye steak. Heavy, rich, and sweet, it threatened to overwhelm the poor little sprouts. Did I choose the wrong vinegar? Possibly. Did I fail to reduce the glaze sufficiently? Possibly. Was the dish tasty nonetheless? Yes. Mark ate one sprout and Owen ate none, so it appears that Isabel and I ate almost the entire pound.