noodsletter #.0062

Nice rice (is nice); pho at Mắm; smash burger rice cakes

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The beef pho at Mắm

All the recipes ever published in noodsletter have been archived in the very first noodsletter, which you can find here.

Going to be talking about the cookbook-year-that-was, and second stocks and “waste.”

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Book Bit

When the flames reached him at last, he laughed out loud, louder than he had ever laughed in all his life.

-From Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti

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Stuff I Buy (and You Can, Too): Rice

After receiving some very positive feedback in response to a gift of estratto to an internet friend, I have resolved to be less tortured about recommending products to buy. (I don’t get anything for recommending these, and future, and past, things.)

Because there is such a thing as great rice, and you can order it from The Rice Factory. (I thought I’d written about this before on noodsletter, but a quick search suggests…I haven’t?) It costs more money than a staple should, but, you know, it’s not a staple; this kind of rice is a luxury—a luxury that I have now successfully converted back into being a staple, because it’s the only rice I eat regularly. (I sometimes eat basmati, but just in biryani; I have some fancy Italian rice but my kid isn’t a big fan of risotto. I do miss Jasmine rice sometimes, and I should look into getting some.)

Why I’m bringing it up now is that it’s new crop rice season. This means two things: New crop strains are intermittently available, and old crop strains are available at a discount. It’s (almost) the best time to buy rice!

(If you have never consciously eaten or purchased new crop rice, you’re missing out. It’s really good. There is no good way to describe why it is good—there are explanations, like water content and sweetness and aroma blah blah blah, but it won’t make sense until you put it in your mouth. It is just like the rice you always buy—in fact, it often is exactly the rice you always buy—but better¹.)

Unfortunately, it’s not the best time, because my preferred variety, the Niigata koshihikari, is out of stock. (The rice grains are super big and satisfying, hard to convey what they’re really like since they’re still small grains of rice—you just gotta try ‘em!) So I’ve been ordering other varieties, and I even picked up the boxed sample set of six different varieties. Does it make me sound incredibly boring if I say I have been having a lot of fun with eating these varieties of rice? Well, I have! Each portion is 3 cups (“cups” as measured by a Japanese rice cooker), so a perfect amount for my small family, and the differences between varieties are quite clear. And, yet, somehow, they’re all just great rice.

Note that the variety pack comes in one polishing—they’re all pure white rice—whereas if you buy single varieties you can specify how polished you want the rice. We typically order a 10 lb bag of 70% milled rice and a 5 lb bag of 30% milled rice at a time…both are concessions to “health,” but the 70% milled rice doesn’t taste “healthy” at all. (However, if you treat yourself to 100% milled rice, it’s like manna from heaven—white rice is so nice!)

There is one issue with the sale prices they’ve got going right now: if you don’t hit $60, you have to pay for shipping. When Niigata koshihikari is on sale, we order 15-lb bags, so shipping is never an issue—this is actually why I picked up the variety pack, just to get over the free shipping amount threshold.

Next noodsletter I’ll talk about fish you should buy in the freezer section of a Japanese grocery store to eat with your amazing rice. Buy it! (Any variety is good!)

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What I’ve Been Eating

Firm tendon, very good, not not good

Well, I’ve been eating noodles, of course.

I swung by to try the months-long pho special at Mắm, which may just be one of my favorite restaurants in the city. I’ve been twice in the past 4 months, and it is out-of-this-world good…everything I’ve ordered has immediately shot up to the top of my mental list of top [whatever that thing is] in the city.

It’s fried knee cartilage, so they’re hefty bites. Maybe the best thing to eat in the whole city.

Fried chicken cartilage, whole fried shrimp, all the stuff on the Mam plate, which consists of blood sausage, braised pork belly, and wonderful deep fried tofu (actually, the deep fried tofu at 886 is better, but we’re talking a battle of the greats here), a sheaf of herbs, and rice noodles…everything is incredible.

They only do pho in the winter months, and I’d never managed to swing by to try their previous iterations (one of which was a lamb pho that I have on good authority was amazing). This beef pho…well, superlatives fail me. Great, amazing, incredible, wonderful, best I’ve ever had…just line ‘em up. I want to hedge a little on best I’ve ever had; that still belongs to a now-defunct place in Hong Kong, Yin Ping Vietnamese Restaurant, and I had a couple bowls on the streets of Ho Chih Minh a decade (or more?) ago that were pretty aces. That said, this was the richest bowl of pho I’ve ever had—the stock was palpably gelatin-rich, and super beefy, but not in the way that some other places (like the sort of muddy beefiness of the pho at Pho Bac in Seattle) make it super beefy. A spare hand with spices and sugar situates this one as Northern-style, and I think it gives the one at La Dong a hefty bit of competition, even if the La Dong number is closer in my mind to an ‘ideal’ sort of pho, which is that it’s a little more watery.

The thing that’s so great about Mắm is the execution is flawless on everything, like the tendons I added as a side car: softened, but not so soft they dissolve in your mouth…they still have just a little bit more than the slightest bit of chew—one might say firm if “firm tendon” did not connote carelessness in the kitchen. And that extends to stuff that might seem otherwise off, like the stir-fried sirloin that topped my bowl, which had some bits of chewy connective tissue that (I feel) most places in America might trim away for fear of offending their patrons’ more delicate sensibilities—a loss for everyone involved. And the noodles are quite different—fresh, who knows where they’re getting them from, seems doubtful they’re making them—wide and slightly more brittle than the reconstituted-from-dried noodles.

I’ve also been making my own noodles of course; here’s a pork-and-chicken chintan with a ton of chopped nira, topped with a torched mix of chunked chashu and sliced negi along with some wontons. The benefit of having written the cookbook is now I don’t need to write out any of what I did for the bowl; just go check out the book, if you’re interested. (Dumping an excess of sliced nira into a bowl of ramen, raw, is, by the way, amazing.)

Finally, I made some cookies. We just put up a big update to our Ultimate Average Chocolate Chip Cookie and related materials, like our parametric and guide to chocolate chip cookies. (Please check them out; please subscribe. Thank you!)

I am a partisan for Stella Parks’s chocolate chip cookies, and I even made the gluten-free variation on those at the same time I made the ChefSteps super cookie, but I have to say the CS one is everything it’s advertised to be—chewy, crisp, crunchy, soft, all at the same time. My one critique of it is that 100 grams is a truly insane portion size for a chocolate chip cookie. (And don’t tell me to just cut the cookie in half—eating half a cookie is ridiculous!) The problem, of course, is reducing the portion size would mess with the cook times and yield (probably) a cookie with a less distinct differentiation in texture that would be, while still a perfectly good chocolate chip cookie, less impressive.

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Smash Burger Rice Cakes

I posted this on video advertisement platform known as Instagram the other day and, despite the fact it wasn’t a video and didn’t have some music attached to it, a few people “liked” it. Incredible!

That said, it is just a very basic iteration on rice cakes—just like the ones I wrote about here, just with a smash burger thrown in the mix. I’d originally wanted to do a smash cheese burger, turning the rice cakes into a kind of chopped cheese rice cake fusion FAFO, but my wife wasn’t sold on American cheese + doubanjiang + Szechuan peppercorns. (It would obviously, obviously be good.)

I’ve made it a couple times, and the key I think is to smash that beef in the bottom of the wok so it’s crispy on both sides, then remove it and set it aside. The beef fat that renders and the browning stuck to the pan all helps with cooking the rest of the stuff (I charred green cabbage after the patty in this one). When it comes time to reincorporate the beef, I just tear it into chunks with my hands, tossing it right at the end with the rice cakes and sauce so it’s still a tad “crispy” and the pieces aren’t turned into tiny bits of mush.

Here’s the order of operations I used:

Smash patty in wok, cook until deeply browned. Flip to cook through, remove and set aside.

Char cabbage. Set aside.

Fry aromatics—garlic, ginger, nira, fresh green chilies.

Bloom doubanjiang in aromatics.

Bloom spices—whole cumin seed, ground Szechuan peppercorns, ground white pepper—in doubangjiang and aromatics.

Add a little water (and Totole chicken powder) or a little stock (and Totole chicken powder).

Add rice cakes along with some of their boiling water.

Boil hard, tossing, until sauce thickens.

Season with soy and fish sauce. Throw in the cabbage.

Top with garnishes (scallions, cilantro, negi) and ripped smash burger. Toss to distribute and give the burger bits a gloss.

Hey, if you make this and want to do the American cheese, melt the cheese onto the patty (or patties) before setting it aside. You want it annealed to the patties even in the final toss, so don’t just throw American cheese slices into the rice cakes. (Although, I bet that would be pretty good, too, provided you toss and stir vigorously.) And let me know how it goes!

1. This does not apply to basmati, which is more prized when aged.