noodsletter #.0004
PUMPKIN SPICE RAMEN, green tomatoes, spigarello muchim
Hello!
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The recipe this week is:
Spigarello Muchim*
As ever, I welcome your feedback! Leave a comment, send an email, whatever; you don’t have to be positive, you don’t even have to be nice, just be humane for god’s sake.
News
Ramen Shack has opened in San Juan Capistrano. Spread the word.
Best of luck to Keizo and the crew. If I could get on a flight, I would, and I’d order a shoyu and a dirty shoyu then have a ganja tsukemen for dessert.
No other links today, even though I have a truly absurd amount saved up. Maybe next time?
No book break, either, but my wife and I were talking about this Marie Howe poem the other day, “What the Living Do,” and it’s quite good.
Let’s Get This Pumpkin Spice Business Out of the Way
I have to admit up front that I don’t have the required context for reviewing whatever this thing is trying to be. I don’t usually eat pumpkin spice products.
So.
I ate the pumpkin spice noodles. I did not like them. They were very sweet. We shall speak no more of them here.
Instead, I want to talk about a bowl of ramen I had almost three years ago.
I had agreed to moderate a panel about ramen cooks at an anime convention held in Javits Center. To promote the event, the organizer had set up a pop-up at the now-defunct Ramen Lab in Lower Manhattan, and each of the three amateur cooks who would appear on the panel were responsible for preparing one bowl of ramen on the menu. If you make ramen at home, you likely know the cooks: Mike Satinover (a.k.a. Ramen_Lord), David Chan (a.k.a. nichijou.ramen), and Josh Reisner.
As part of my moderation duties, I was expected to go to Ramen Lab and try these bowls of ramen, which I was more than happy to do. However, that same week there was a kind of ramen residency going on at the now-defunct Ramen Shack in Queensbridge. Takeshi Koitani, ramen chef and mentor to Ramen Shack’s Keizo Shimamoto, was giving a weeklong class, and every night the students would do operation training, where they basically staffed the restaurant until close, serving up whatever bowl of ramen they’d been taught that day. As it happened, the only night I could make it out to Ramen Shack that week was the same night I had to go try three bowls of ramen at Ramen Lab.
I bring all this up not just to underscore the fact that I ate four bowls of ramen that night. I bring it up because I ate four bowls of good ramen that night. Satinover had chosen to do a mushroom shoyu, Chan did a lemon shio, Reisner did a fall tantanmen, and Koitani’s students were serving a chicken paitan with shrimp oil. While I’d happily eat any of those bowls of ramen any day of the week, the most memorable of them all was the fall tantanmen.
Now, no matter what you call it, a fall dish with squash and warm spices in it is a pumpkin spice thing. You can’t escape the comparison. So this bowl was memorable because it was a risky bet that paid off, in part because of his technical ability—he did a backflip over the cliche. But it was also memorable because of the other part of why this was a successful bowl of ramen, namely that Reisner seemed to have a grasp on that ineffable quality of balance a great bowl of ramen should have.
He was also 14 years old at the time.
In lieu of a review of packaged noodles, I decided to call Reisner up and ask him what, exactly, was in this memorable bowl of pumpkin spice ramen.
Bottom of the bowl: roasted sesame paste, soy tare, soy milk, lard, butternut squash puree, warm spice mixture.
Broth: chicken and pork.
Top of the bowl: salt-baked butternut, soboro, blanched bok choy, spicy oil, onion/garlic oil, lard, thin green onion, warm spice mixture.
The warm spice mixture contained togarashi and sichuan peppercorns, and was used to season the soboro (which is a seasoned, cooked ground meat; in this case, pork). For the butternut squash puree, the squash was salt/sugar cured, rinsed, roasted/steamed, and passed through a tamis. The tahini he made himself, and he noted that the soy milk was there to “bridge the gap,” between the puree and the paste, which makes sense to me. The soy tare…I don’t feel comfortable asking people what they put in their tare anymore, so I didn’t ask. (Tares are very personal.)
Reisner’s been busy the last three years, working in some high-end professional kitchens even as he completed high school, and he’s still slinging ramen. He just wrapped up a pop-up where he was serving a crab/lobster ramen, which used some of the same elements as the fall tantanmen he served three years ago. While I haven’t eaten his ramen recently, given the high quality of his ingredients—he’s somehow convinced Keizo Shimamoto to ship him Shimamoto noodles from California—and his technical abilities, I can’t imagine it’s anything but excellent.
He publicizes all his events on his Instagram.
Green Tomatoes!!!!
Look at these beauties! Green cherry tomatoes!
I picked up a few of these green tomatoes at the farmers market a couple of weeks back, mostly because they looked stunning. I don’t know what I expected. Probably that they’d taste like cherry tomatoes. They don’t not taste like cherry tomatoes, but they also have a distinctly different flavor from your run-of-the-mill cherries, and not just in that “a good farmer grew these” way. They have a kind of sweet, “green” taste, as if chlorophyll had a sugary flavor, and they have a really nice acidity. Usually, I’ll sprinkle a little vinegar of some kind on raw tomatoes; with these, I ended up just dressing them with good olive oil and salt—they needed nothing else.
The stand I bought them from should be familiar to anyone of you who’ve visited the Grand Army Plaza Market: Evolutionary Organics, which is based in New Palz, NY. Evolutionary is a stalwart of the market; they’ve been there since I started going 15 years ago, and the quality of their produce is excellent. It’s the kind of stuff that reorders your understanding of what a good vegetable can be. Everything they offer is worth buying, but I go nuts for their cucumbers.
The farm is run by Kira Kinney, who is at the market every weekend, and who is the author of the many notes appended to each crate of vegetables. These notes often offer cooking advice and helpful descriptions, but they also sometimes offer valuable life advice, like this note:
I emailed Kinney to ask for a bit more information about the green tomatoes, which are called “Sungreens,” and for a little advice on how to pick tomatoes at a farmers market stand.
What are these green cherry tomatoes? Green cherry tomatoes, like they are ripe and ready to eat while still a green color
How are they distinct from other cherry tomatoes? Most obviously distinctly different in that they are green, beyond that they are upfront sweet, and really surprisingly sweet, followed by just a little acid so the flavor lingers in a really pleasant way. People so often want the sweetest of whatever we grow and my own preference is always towards the things that have layers and more complexity in the as is state. I am not much in the kitchen, like if something needs to be cooked, I am not dressing it up and down with spices and herbs and any seven step processes. I am hungry, here is food, I shall get on to eating it as quickly as possible, so for me the thing has to already be the show if that makes sense—Sungreens give me the show.
How long have you been growing them for? Just two years. Last year they were only in our mixed pints but every time we went to harvest those I and the person harvesting on the opposite side of the trellis ate more of them than we packed and both said we needed to grow more of these.
How would you compare them to the other tomatoes you grow? I don't do too much comparing when it comes to the tomatoes, if I grow a new variety and it has enough flavor to please me, it can stay on the farm and as I continue trialing new varieties if I like something better, I will boot something else to make room for the better thing.
How...do you tell when they're ripe? They get a bit of a golden green color at the blossom end. It takes some practice to learn to see them. I have people on the farm pick, then look, then taste so that they can figure out what they should be harvesting
How popular are they with customers? Not at all, very few people are willing to try new things. It drives me bonkers as a farmer who is aware of just how many varieties exist and me who wants to try them all, and customers are like Sungold, I only like Sungold—should we tell them my little orange cherry tomatoes are not Sungolds because I have found something better so that is what I grow?
How do you like to eat them? Honestly, I only eat cherry tomatoes when harvesting, so raw in a field is the answer I guess. Cherry tomatoes never come into my house.
Finally, do you have any advice for people shopping for tomatoes at your stand? Anything they shouldn't do? Anything you think they don't know but should? Stop smelling them, pandemic aside, putting food up to your face like that, then deciding it is not the one for you and putting it back is disgusting. Put that on repeat in your mind and what would you really want to buy at market and take home to eat? Squeezing tomatoes is not how you tell if they are ripe, there is a gravity to them that can be felt simply by lifting them up. If you do not want a tomato that you have lifted up, set it down gently. I should never hear the tomato land, I should never see a tomato bounce or roll, but I do, all day long, and it makes me wonder how you all were raised—surely not in barns.
Recipe* - Spigarello Muchim
This is a niche recipe since spigarello is a little hard to find. Spigarello, often called broccoli spigarello, is an heirloom Italian variety of broccoli; the leaf is the main edible part. It tastes a lot like broccoli leaves, but the leaves are larger more robust, and tastier. More sweet than bitter, they’re kind of like a softer, sweeter lacinato kale. (Spigarello is much, much better.)
Spigarello is excellent when blanched and sauted with olive oil, garlic, chili flakes, and salt, but I was looking for something else to do with it and my colleague Sasha suggested muchim. I don’t know that I need to say this, but this is obviously not a traditional recipe. But muchim apparently means “toss or coat in sauce” in Korean, and the method constitutes its own class of banchan; I tend to further associate muchim with “squishing things” since the few muchim I’ve made generally call for squishing.
If you live in New York City and can get to the Willow Wisp Organic Farm stand at Grand Army Plazas on Saturday, you can find spigarello. I’m not sure where else it’s sold, but if something like this sounds good to you, and you’d like to do some squishing, Sunny Lee has a couple muchim recipes on Serious Eats. This one, with charred Brussels sprouts and raw leek, is crazy good, and is rapidly becoming seasonally appropriate.
For the dressing:
1 clove garlic, smashed and minced
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon roasted hulled sesame seeds
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon honey
For the spigarello:
190g spigarello leaves (from one bunch), washed and spun
salt
Directions:
Bring a 3-quart pot of salted water to boil. Prepare an ice bath.
Put dressing ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and whisk to combine.
Add the spigarello leaves to boiling water and cook for two minutes. Remove spigarello leaves to ice bath. Once cool, gather up spigarello leaves in a bunch and squeeze to remove as much water as possible, forming a kind of log of squished spigarello leaves. Place log on a cutting board and, using a chef’s knife, cut crosswise at 3/4-inch intervals.
Add chopped spigarello to mixing bowl with dressing. Using clean hands, mix spigarello with dressing, separating individual leaves and squishing the dressing into the them so each leaf is thoroughly dressed. Let sit for at least 15 minutes before serving (with rice).
This dish keeps well in the fridge but honestly it’s really easy to eat and this doesn’t make much.