noodsletter #.0052
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Book Bit
Because everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation. Everything. Wars,
earthquakes, and the self-contained individual disasters of men. Courage as well
as cowardice. Generous acts out of left field and the conviction that one is put
upon. Everything. Man’s fallen condition and birth defect too, those San
Andreas, Altyn Taugh, and great Glen Faults of the heart, of the ova and genes.
They’re working on it, working on all of it; theologians in their gloomy studies
where the muted light falls distantly on their antique, closely printed texts, as
distant as God (which, God’s exorbitant aphelion, outpost, and mileage – the
boondocks of god – also has a perfectly reasonable explanation); scientists in
their bright laboratories where the light seems a kind of white and stunning
grease.
—From The Magic Kingdom, by Stanley Elkin.
Every time I see a (clean) professional kitchen, that image of grease-like laboratory light comes to mind.
Work Stuff
I looking over the reasons people have been submitting for unsubscribing from this newsletter (an exercise in masochism), and I noticed a couple people pointing out that a lot of links I include are for paywalled sites. I get it! Paywalls are everywhere and, if you aren’t a subscriber to those sites, they are super annoying.
I get that posting links to the stuff I help to produce at my day job may be very annoying for many of you. However, I think this stuff is edifying, amazing, etc.; also, one of the odd parts of ChefSteps is the videos (when recipes are accompanied by videos) are free to everyone and are not obscured by a paywall. So I shall continue to include links to the delicious things we’ve been making.
(Also, if you’ve clicked on these links and been frustrated by the ChefSteps paywall several times, that might just be a sign that…you want a Studio Pass subscription!?!?!)
Since the last noodsletter, here’s what we’ve put up:
Crispy Cantonese Roast Pork Belly
Ultra-Tender Lion’s Head Meatballs
(All of these are from Tim Chin, who’s really been cookin’—they’re amazing.)
Pozole Rojo (which includes the above carnitas!)
(These two are from Jonathan Zaragoza.)
(These last two are the first bits of a massive roast chicken package that’s being released piecemeal in the next couple of weeks. The roast chicken recipe is in fact an update on an older recipe—we did a battery of tests to make it more doable for people who do not have a Rational oven.)
I made the crispy pork belly, along with our sous vide porchetta recipe (from Nicholas Gavin) for a couple friends recently, since I’d picked up a 7-pound skin-on pork belly at Costco for cheap. Both were incredible…and very easy? Butterflying the belly for the porchetta was a little challenging, but (in my opinion, optional), and air drying the cooked slab of belly for 5 days in the fridge is a little inconvenient, but hands-off.
Shikaku Semolina Ramen
Made some ramen using semolina with Elvin Yung’s stepping method. As I’d speculated previously, the method is very easy to use and effective for higher hydration dough formulas, since they’re softer and more dough-like; you can really knead the heck out of them quickly with the multiple folds.
I used the semolina noodle formula from my book (which will be publishing in October 2025, I’ve just learned), which is one of my favorites, even if it can get a little tricky when it comes time to cut the dough into noodles. It’s got about 45% water by weight of semolina, which is quite wet! It’s all fun and games until you cut the noodle bundles; if you don’t dust them immediately after cutting with starch they’ll stick to one another.
This trial, I subbed 10% of the weight of semolina with tapioca. Since starch doesn’t really hydrate at room temperature, that meant that the dough seemed even wetter than usual—more water available to hydrate the gluten—so these noodles really stuck together. I had anticipated this but, because I squeeze noodle making into my schedule even when I clearly don’t have enough time to do it, I was a little distracted because I did the sheeting and cutting in the 20 minutes of free time I had while dinner was bubbling away on the stove. (It ended up taking 30 minutes to cut, dust with starch, and portion the noodles, so dinner was a bit of a mess.)
One appealing aspect of using semolina for ramen is the alkaline salts react with the greater amount of carotene in semolina to produce beautifully yellow noodles without having to resort to coloring agents like riboflavin (vitamin B12) or turmeric. Highly recommend playing around with semolina for ramen!
(The soup here was a nice chicken chintan with dried scallops and kombu and the book miso tare, which I found in the back of my fridge.)
The Costco Chronicles: Leg of Lamb
I love going to Costco. I’m not sure why—our membership is sort of useless because there are three people in my household, and none of us have very large appetites. Add in some dietary restrictions and preferences, and it’s mostly an exercise in thwarted desire. We buy butter, milk, the bags of wild frozen salmon fillets, sometimes the whole wild salmon fillets, bags of frozen blueberries, bags of chia seeds, and school snack-type stuff with regularity, but everything else is a waste.
The part that’s particularly troubling for me is my wife and daughter aren’t fans of red meat; I will spend about 15 minutes of every visit staring longingly at the whole beef tenderloins and slabs of pork belly and ribs and pretend I have freezer space to accommodate the 95% I’d have to store for future use, and then walk away, cursing my chest freezer-less life, and then go to war with the other harried shoppers in the milk and berry refrigerated sections.
However, that doesn’t mean I don’t indulge in my fantasies every once in a while. The seven-pound slab of skin-on pork belly mentioned above? Yeah, it was 35 bucks! Too good to pass up, but I then had to force myself to eat (admittedly delicious) pork belly preparations for weeks. (I still have a three-pound slab of belly taking up space in a freezer stacked with Costco Melona bars.)(They come 24 to a box!)
The most reasonably sized wholesale meat purchase you can make at Costco (aside from the duo of whole chickens of weirdly terrible quality) is the lamb. Racks of lamb go for about $20-$30 a pop; the loin lamb chops are slightly cheaper, although they’re sold in chops rather than as a whole loin; and the leg of lamb is about $7/pound. Pick out one of the smaller specimens, and a single red meat-loving person could reasonably net good savings and several good meals, without experiencing (too much) lamb preparation fatigue.
The other day I picked up one of those little boneless lamb legs, and here’s what I did with it. I used to grind up a lot of the trim and muscle to make lamb burgers and kebabs, but that was when my wife and kid actually enjoyed lamb; for whatever reason, they’re not into it anymore, so I didn’t do that with this leg (even if it is, probably, the best application for the rather bland New Zealand lamb that Costco sources—why people like non-gamey lamb is one of those mysteries that deserves a lengthier investigation).
The basic idea was to create two relatively evenly sized “roasts,” and then figure out what to do with the rest. One roast, which had fewer muscle groupings, I cooked sous vide for a more typical leg of lamb preparation—for cutting into thick or thin medium-rare slices. The other one, the one with more connective tissue and odder muscle groupings, I threw into a Mexican-inspired braise, for use in tacos. (The braising liquid was a paste of spices—cumin, achiote, coriander, cinnamon, oregano—and a mix of dried, reconstituted chiles—morita, guajillo—along with chicken stock powder and some roasted onion and garlic.)
With the rest, I made a little “steak” and seared it off as a snack, and I made some skewers with the leaner bits of trim—cutting the meat into 1/2-inch strips and folding them over before skewering, grilled on my tiny electric grill.
Given the blandness of the meat, if you do pick up some lamb from Costco, I recommend seasoning it heavily. The skewers got an Italianate marinade in olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, and tons of rosemary (and a lot of salt while the skewers grilled); the braise was obviously highly seasoned. The sous vide roast and the “steak” were unfortunately underwhelming. Even if I think sous vide is the best way to cook a lamb leg as a roast (all the disparate muscle groups can become tender without going above medium-rare), there’s not much you can do with lamb that’s bland to start with.
“News”
Japanese rice researchers are scrambling to save koshihikari from climate change. (Somehow the NYT made that rice bowl image bleed over the background on my phone? Amazing design element.)
Got a nice head nod to my paitan ramen recipe on Serious Eats in Maggie Hoffman’s dinner newsletter.
This is how I feel the vast faceless audience for a book about making homemade ramen truly feels:
(Can’t express how much admiration I have for the tone of this newsletter. Just right.)
A Dolly Parton meal kit service? Why the hell not.
Tupperware filed for bankruptcy. This is like Kleenex filing for bankruptcy, although the only time I’ve seen Tupperware in the last 15 years has been at my mother-in-law’s house.
NYC does not have enough restaurant health inspectors.
All that stuff about “Blue Zones” in which diets are linked to longevity…is fiction! Knew it. (Ok, I just suspected it, but whatever.)
No idea what the deal is with Chowhound, but the secret to Ree Drummond’s chicken pot pie is turmeric? Come on. (If you can describe convincingly what turmeric tastes like in the comments, I will send you, idk, some Mariscos Sazon.)
Guess I gotta go try the pho at this Union Square spot.
Strega Nona-core. (Good opportunity to link to my deranged, mid-pandemic anti-Strega Nona piece.) (I laugh at the photos every time; the pandemic was wild.)
If vertical farming can reduce my insane berry bill, I’m in.
Sea robins taste with their legs, like butterflies.
Amazing photo essay about dai pai tongs and wok hei in the NYT Magazine. Next time I visit my dad in HK I’m gonna go!
If you have black plastic cooking utensils, throw ‘em out!
I’m sure there’s all you can eat sushi in Japan, but it just sounds so grossly Costco American to me. It’s not even the fish that sounds gross; imagine eating just a ton of sweetened vinegary rice.
Very odd quote:
Al Roker’s Sweet Potato Poon. That’s it. That’s the pitch.
Indeed, the best ramen noodles I've ever made have semolina.
I am very happy to know your book is coming out in a years time! Looking forward for buying a copy.
Love the Costco chronicles
Informative and irreverent. Perfection.