Momofuku Vinegar Pickles

So, I've been posting about my Momofuku journey for most of August now. What I haven't told you is that all of the posts came from one crazy weekend of Momofuku obsessive cooking. When I said way back at the beginning of the month that I couldn't spare my oven for six to eight hours of pork shoulder cooking, it was because it was in serious demand.

The last recipe from that mammoth weekend of Momofuku was two of the twenty-five pickle recipes in the Noodle Bar chapter. There are salt pickles, vinegar pickles, soy sauce pickles, fermented pickles...

Hee. Pickles is a funny word.

Anyway, most of the pickle recipes are very easy. I chose to pickle my cucumber and daikon using the vinegar pickle method, where the vegetables are brined in a water/rice wine vinegar/ sugar/salt mix.

Chang says that the pickles are at their peak optimum flavour after a week. I discovered I very much liked the cucumber pickles and promptly ate the first cucumber I prepared this way. I had more restraint with the second cucumber, only eating half. I prepared a third cucumber and managed to get this lot in the fridge without any further incidents.

I used Lebanese cucumbers for my cucumber pickles.

Momofuku Roasted Corn with Miso Butter, Bacon and Roasted Onions

I am going to make a very very shocking statement. I think this recipe may just be my favourite in the entire Momofuku cookbook. It is incredible. Smoky, salty, sweet - amazing.

I used tinned corn kernals and I am unashamed. I love corn in all its forms, including in a can. In fact, using canned corn means that there's no excuse for having this dish all year round. Except, of course, for the butter and bacon but that's only if you listen to my arteries.

Diced bacon is cooked until it's just-before-crispy. Then the bacon must be protected at all times from D, as bacon cooked this way is his favourite, while you cook the corn. Add the bacon, some of the Momofuku roasted onions, Momofuku miso butter, salt and pepper and some Momofuku ramen broth until everything emulsifies and you have a saucepan of something akin to corn nirvana.

I hadn't made the ramen broth when I first made this dish, so I substituted bacon dashi. The flavour packed into the rest of the ingredients more than makes up for the lack of flavour in my dashi.

Chang vows that this particular dish will never again reappear on the menu at Momofuku Noodle Bar because the last time they ran it, he claims "[they] were a corn restaurant that just happened to sling some noodles on the side". Since you can't get the dish at Momofuku, you will just have to try it at home: Gourmet has posted the recipe here.

Momofuku Chicken and Egg

I love the combination of chicken and egg. I love that the Japanese have a chicken and egg dish called oyakodon (parent and child donburi). I love that Wylie Dufresne calls the combination "whimsical". I love the breakfast chicken and egg burger at Oporto.

I still have to make a proper oyakodon. I must do that soon.

This post, however, is about Momofuku's chicken and egg. There are many many articles on the internet about this recipe (that's just from the first page of a google search). Chang wanted to incorporate the smokiness of a yakitori chicken and rice dish into an homage to the oyakodon. Momofuku uses a cold smoker to get the smokiness into the chicken, but as a nod to us home cooks Chang also says you can try and emulate this flavour by cooking your chicken with bacon.

The chicken is supposed to be cooked in a confit of pork fat. At this stage of my Momofuku journey, I didn't even have a quarter cup of pork fat, much less the 5 cups required by the recipe. You can substitute a neutral oil but I didn't have that much oil hanging around either.

In the end, I used the very small amount of pork fat left from my pork belly. I covered the (brined) chicken in bacon and cooked it in the oven.


The chicken was very tasty. I have since made the chicken as it was supposed to be made (post coming soon) but this chicken was still moist and had a much more subtle smokiness.

The chicken is served atop rice (I used leftover sushi rice) with a slow poached egg, cucumber pickles and some ginger scallion sauce. I finished with a drizzle of soy sauce and sesame oil.

It is good. Very very good. So good I may have to make it again very soon.

Ginger Scallion Sauce

Chang says that Ginger Scallion Sauce is one of the greatest sauces or condiments ever. He says that you can serve it with almost anything and that you need it in your life.

He is so effusive about this sauce that it made me feel guilty that I didn't like it.

I first made this sauce before I bought the cookbook after Ellie made it on Almost Bourdain. It was way too acrid for my tastes. I like spring onions, but this was just too much. I have to say I was disappointed. I wanted this sauce to change my life. And I wanted the sauce so I could use up the spring onions I always seem to be wasting.

Then Steph made the sauce on Momofuku for 2. Steph had issues with the taste of the sauce too. She did say that when she had tried the sauce previously it tasted distinctly different, so maybe there is something off about the recipe. As I first made the sauce before I bought the cookbook, I didn't know that Chang has said that you can add hoisin sauce if you like - maybe that would make a difference.

I haven't tried the hoisin sauce addition yet, because Steph came to my rescue like a food blogging superhero with her own Green Onion Oil/Ginger Scallion Sauce. In this recipe the spring onions are cooked and the flavours meld together really well, instead of just being a giant mouthfull of onion. I loved this sauce. This sauce could be one that could possibly change my life. Well, maybe not my life, but definitely my noodles.

Momofuku Miso Butter

According to Chang, the inspiration for miso butter was the knob of butter that was used to finish a bowl of miso ramen he used to eat when he lived in Japan. My inspiration to try the miso butter came from the part of the book when Chang said that it tasted like carbonara when you mixed it with egg and that it had the fat on fat appeal of hollandaise. I love carbonara and I love hollandaise. I also like miso. And butter. And I had plenty of both in the fridge. It was clearly meant to be.

The miso butter recipe is actually a part of the recipe for pan-roasted asparagus with pached egg and miso butter, which you can find here along with Chang's introduction from the book.

All it is is some rooom temperature butter mixed with white miso until well mixed and creamy. It is, as Chang suggests, finger licking good as is, but even better when used to make Roasted Sweet Summer Corn with Miso Butter, Bacon and Roasted Onions.

Veggie Belly has a useful list in case you aren't sure what you can do with your miso butter. See it here. I can't wait to try it tossed with popcorn or pasta.

Napa Cabbage Kimchi

I have never had kimchi before. I'm a big baby when it comes to chilli and I'm very fussy with strong smelling foods. Despite this, I've always wanted to try it.

Steph from Momofuku for 2 (I like this blog, can you tell?) mentions in one of the comments that the Momofuku kimchi isn't super spicy and it doesn't have the "super-funk" that other kimchi usually has. Great. I'm in.


The cabbage is first tossed with a sugar and salt mix and left to sit. The sugar and salt 1:1 mix is used so often in the cookbook that I made a big batch of it and now have it in with my spices.

I couldn't find kochukaru in the three Asian supermarkets I visited, so I ended up substituting cayenne pepper. I also couldn't find jarred salted shrimp which is supposed to help kickstart the fermentation. I left it out and kept my fingers crossed.


After mixing everything together it tasted pretty good. It was still nice and fresh tasting and I'd be happy to eat it as it was but it wouldn't be kimchi. I put the whole thing in a glass jar and put it in the fridge. This kimchi is supposed to reach its prime in two weeks.


Unfortunately, I forgot about it. Chang says that the kimchi will stay good for about four weeks but it will get stronger and funkier as time goes on. Now I'm afraid to taste it. I'll let you know if I manage to summon up the courage.

Roasted onions and bad photos

D loves onions. Loves loves loves onions. According to D, onions make everything better. Unless they are spring onions. Or leeks. D is an onion purist, you see.

The roasted onions recipe in the Momofuku cookbook is very straighforward. Slice onions thinly, season gently and then cook them over a medium high heat until they reduce in volume. Drop the heat to medium low and cook until the onions are soft and caramelised.

There is nothing bad about these onions. They are pretty awesome.

Momofuku's Slow Poached Eggs

I know these eggs look a little strange but I promise they don't look like they are supposed to. See this post at Momofuku for 2 instead. Chang says that his customers love it when they "crack a cooked egg out of what looks like an uncooked intact eggshell". I love it too and I haven't even seen it.

The idea behind it is that you cook eggs in a water bath at a very low temperature for a very long time. Well, the book says 40-45 minutes. I didn't get a successful egg until my eggs had been poaching for five hours. It was also after 4 test eggs (see below).


The successful egg looked quite good. It wasn't quite what it was supposed to be, but it was the closest I came in two days and over a dozen eggs. Then I forgot to take a photo of it.


So the next day I pulled out my pot, steamer and thermometer and started again. I still haven't quite got the hang of it but I did end up with a majority of edible eggs. The eggs are very tasty too. They seem to be more oozy than your regular poached eggs and Chang says this is because they have been "slowly coaxed into cookedness".

Since my egg experiment I have found my small roasting rack and invested in an instant read thermometer so I think I might have to have another go. It's all in the equipment, you see.

If you want to have a go, kottke.org has the recipe here.

Momofuku Pork Belly and Pork Shoulder

There are lots of pork recipes in the Momofuku cookbook. If you count the ones with bacon, there's heaps. I've mentioned before that D doesn't like pork. He will eat bacon and ham, but anything else pig related is not for him. Luckily for my Momofuku journey, I do like pork. I was also looking forward to trying new cooking methods and new cuts of meat.

I have never tasted or cooked with pork belly before. I've read lots about it - this cut of pork has become increasingly popular in food blogs as bloggers explore or share Chinese or Korean recipes. In the beginning of my Momofuku journey, I didn't think I'd even seen it sold anywhere, but now I know more about what I'm looking for and I'm quite surprised at how common it is.

I procured my pork belly and pork shoulder from a butcher in Sunnybank along with a pantry full of necessities from the Asian grocer. I had lists and screenshots in my iPhone and D and I spent quite a while roaming the aisles. We must have looked pretty silly to the other shoppers, but we did have fun.


To make the Momofuku pork belly and the pork shoulder for the ramen, you either rub the pork with a sugar and salt mix and leave it to sit in the fridge for at least six hours per the original recipe or you can brine it in a sugar, salt and water mix per the recipe for pork buns. I went for the sugar/salt rub option and left the pork in the fridge overnight, before firing up my oven the next morning.


The pork belly goes into a hot oven with the fat side up for about an hour before the temperature is turned right down and cooked for another hour and 15 minutes. Unless you are cooking in my oven, where it took closer to three hours all up. Steph at Momofuku for Two suggests reversing the cooking method and cooking the belly on low first before using the high heat to colour at the end. I did both, starting and finishing with the high heat.

The pork belly was amazing. It was soft and fatty and meaty. I loved it and I was immediately a pork belly covert. We had to buy more pork belly the next weekend, so look out for more pork belly recipes coming up.


I didn't have as much success with the pork shoulder. The pork shoulder needs to cook at a very low heat for six hours. This means it would need closer to eight in my oven and I wanted to use the oven for other things that day, so I tried putting the pork shoulder into the slow cooker in a water bath. This didn't work. The slow cooker doesn't have the right kind of heat to render the fat in the pork and it ended up a little dry. It's still tasty, but it wasn't what it was supposed to be.

I'll have to buy another pork shoulder and give it another try before spring comes along and it gets too hot to have the oven on all day. I'd better hurry, less than a month to go. Boo. I do not like hot weather.

Momofuku Bacon Dashi

Mmmm, tasty looking photo, isn't it?

Firstly, my apologies for the lack of posts over the last week and a bit. Life seems to have gotten away from me. To make up for it, I cordially invite you to join me on my journey into the world of Momofuku.

I first took notice of David Chang and Momofuku over at Almost Bourdain, when Ellie made the crack pie from Momofuku Milk Bar. In her post, Ellie links to a number of articles discussing the (many) merits of the crack pie. One of these was a video of Martha Stewart visiting Momofuku Milk Bar and talking with David Chang and Christina Tosi. Apart from making me want to take the next flight to New York so I could spend mass amounts of money at Milk Bar, the video also made me realise I had seen David Chang on the Martha Stewart Show before, making his steamed pork buns and I'd bookmarked them to try later.

All of these things came together and I realised that I wanted to know more about Chang and his fabulous fusion. I read through the archives of Momofuku for Two, where Steph and her gorgeous kitchen beakers are cooking their way through the Momofuku cookbook. I googled. Extensively. I found gems such as this list from Grub Street New York of the 10 Things Anthony Bourdain and David Chang Hate. It all just increased my curiousity and I decided I had to buy the cookbook.

Plus, one of my favourite characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender is Momo. And Appa. What, not relevant? Okay then.

Of course, the cookbook took ages to arrive but that did just sweeten the anticipation. It's a fantastic read. I love cookbooks that can be read like a story, or include stories. It gives a real insight into the chef and makes the book all the more enjoyable. I carried the book around with me everywhere like a little kid with a favourite toy for an embarrassingly long time. I made lists, which admittedly were only the poor man's version of the ultimate of Momofuku lists made by Steph at Momofuku for Two.

It took me a little while to move from voraciously reading everything Momofuku-related that I could find to actually trying some of the recipes for myself. D doesn't like pork, which means that a number of Chang's recipes would not be well received by him. He is also a little picky with his flavours, so I wasn't sure how some of the more Asian influenced ingredients would go down with him. In the end, I decided to start slow and simple with the Momofuku bacon dashi.

Chang created bacon dashi when he couldn't find any katsuo-bushi he was happy with. He thought that using a good bacon would give a similar smoky flavour as if you were using the katsuo-bushi without the fishiness. It is one of the simplest recipes in the book with only three ingredients but it does require you to hunt down some really good quality smoky bacon. I had and still have absolutely no idea where to get good quality smoky bacon from around here and I think that my choice to use supermarket bacon was the main reason that I didn't find the bacon dashi to be the wonder Chang says it is.

My bacon dashi was quite bland and needed an awful lot of seasoning. Even then, it didn't really work for me.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I can get some nice smoky bacon in Brisbane? I'd really like to make this again.