Filed under: Naturalism, golf culture, golf food, golf news | Tags: bread, homemade bread, no knead bread
In my quest to master the basics of post-industrial cooking, bread has been a bit of a mystery. I grew up with rice and can tell the basic qualities and provenances of rice with ease, but bread I just like to eat. I think the difference is that I never saw my mother bake bread, and therefore, it is mysterious.
I used a simple no-knead recipe from the NY Times(link here). This is my second try -my first was a gooey mess. The results above are my second effort, and it looks really edible. The crust cracks fiercely and there is wonderful topography to this bread. It took very little effort, and I think this is how we’ll make our bread from here on.
The crust is wonderfuly crisp and the center is fluffy and chewy. It is bread heaven.
Filed under: Golfist Wintertime Diversions, golf culture, golf food, golf philosophy | Tags: barbecue pork, char siu, chinese barbecue, inflation, instant noodles, italian pasta maker, macy's, making ramen, pasta maker, Ramen
. The graphics are very funny -straight out of disco era Italy. Food has always been central in our home, and I learned how to crank out fettucini which we used in kal guksu at age 8. I was very proud of the ability to make especially long noodles. I decided to try to make a large batch to freeze some noodles for later.
Making the dough is again so basic and simple that it is meditative. Flour, egg, baking soda (homage to the alkaline salts of Central Asia’s deserts), and water, mixed to a tough ball, this time the size of one of those Vietnamese grapefruits. I remember thinking I should add another egg to get the yellowish hue, but am too lazy. The noodles come easily after an hour of kneading, an hour of rest, and an hour of pressing.
Char Siu
The pork from the hocks was pulled and set aside, flavored with salt and pepper -it’s delicious and I’ll be eating this separately with rice. I added some to the final ramen dish. One of the recipes calls for purchasing char siu from a Chinese restaurant. Char siu is commonly seen as the reddish pork barbecue hanging from hooks in Chinese restaurants in NYC, but you just can’t get it around here.
Today, I released Ramen 1.1. The ramen noodles area easy to make with the Atlas pasta press. In 1976, my folks purchased this from Macy’s for $45, which was quite a sum back then. Using an inflation calculator (link), this comes out to 167.72 today. The quality of this machine is astounding -I could stand on it and it wouldn’t break. The graphics are very funny -straight out of disco era Italy. Food has always been central in our home, and I learned how to crank out fettucini which we used in kal guksu at age 8. I was very proud of the ability to make especially long noodles. I decided to try to make a large batch to freeze some noodles for later. Making the dough is again so basic and simple that it is meditative. Flour, egg, baking soda (homage to the alkaline salts of Central Asia’s deserts), and water, mixed to a tough ball, this time the size of one of those Vietnamese grapefruits. I remember thinking I should add another egg to get the yellowish hue, but am too lazy. The noodles come easily after an hour of kneading, an hour of rest, and an hour of pressing. The soup was another issue. I have come across what seems to be a reasonable donkotsu recipe. The only problem was I bought only 2 ham hocks -no long bones were available at the local butchers. I boiled these with some ginger, garlic, leek, and onions, for 8 hours yesterday and got a pot of nearly pure protein. The flavor was okay, but not quite the full donkotsu taste. I experimented with flavoring with salt, soy, miso, miso+bonito, and found the last to give the best flavor. The pork from the hocks was pulled and set aside, flavored with salt and pepper -it’s delicious and I’ll be eating this separately with rice. I added some to the final ramen dish. One of the recipes calls for purchasing char siu from a Chinese restaurant. Char siu is commonly seen as the reddish pork barbecue hanging from hooks in Chinese restaurants in NYC, but you just can’t get it around here. I called my friend who recommended using some off the shelf sauce and making it at home. I purchased a pork rib roast (with tenderloin on) for the purpose of cutting off the tenderloin for use with the ramen and eating the ribs for dinner. The char siu sauce (Hawaiian brand) was easily found at our local Asian grocery, and cooking was very easy in our convection oven. Our secondary convection oven is essentially an upright rotisserie, and roasts come out perfectly. The tenderloin provided a nice cut, but was not the same as the flavored Japanese-style roast pork. The soup, now flavored as a miso soup, provided a mellow base for the ramen noodles which came out nice and springy, but definitely bland without the extra egg -it’s a lesson I’ll take to the next batch. The soup was garnished with char siu tenderloin slices, blanched spinach and flavored eggs. The marinaded eggs are soft boiled eggs left to sit in a marinade of Memmi sauce (a light sweet soy sauce that is used for creating a soup base), dash of sake, and chili peppers (my touch). These eggs were kept in a plastic bag overnight and cut in half with a string -creates a more elegant cut than a knife. It was okay but not great. The soup has to be saltier and stronger prior to adding the noodles which dilutes the soup with some water. I am going to back off the donkotsu for a while and just get regular Yakibuta style ramen soup right. As a second effort, it is clearly an incremental improvement, and I learned how to make char siu. The ramen is not just noodles in a salty soup, but rather a kind of perfect kingdom of noodles, soup, and fixings. You want to get balance -the texture of chewing noodles and the intense flavor of the soup, the surprising pleasures of the fixings.
Filed under: Golfist Wintertime Diversions, golf culture, golf food, golf news | Tags: comfort food, foodie, home cooking, instant noodles, Ramen
Homemade hand milled ramen noodles
After a few years of mental preparation, I have decided to go for it.My life goal for the next 10 years is among other things, to create a perfect bowl of ramen from scratch. Not the instant stuff that college students eat dry. No, not even the fast-food stuff that people slurp down in train stations in Tokyo. This is the real deal -stuff made from the heart and soul. I am Ramen Man -and this is my first try.
The noodles have been a riddle for a while because reports on the internet are that the package ramen noodles are fried before they are cooked. I created a basic egg noodle dough ball of flour, eggs, and water with the addition of an ingredient taken from the KBS documentary Noodle Road. Turns out, the Central Asian heartland from when ramen (lo-mein, laghman) came had very alkaline water. This and the arrival of wheat cultivation created the noodle over five millenia ago.
Though the water here in Iowa is already pretty hard, I added some baking soda to raise the pH. This causes the gluten proteins to bond into long, tenacious strands.
The noodles were pressed out using an old Atlas pasta maker from Italy. I had grown up making kal-guk-soo from the age of 10, so getting the noodles out on the finer setting was no big deal. The picture above shows the work -a softball sized dough ball makes enough for 4 people.
The noodles are boiled then quickly rinsed in cold water, and over this the broth is added.
Ahh -the broth. This is where the journey begins. My first effort is with a basic da-shi-ma (seaweed and dried anchovy broth) added 2:1 to pork/ginger broth. Some pork cutlet was added, as was thin cut green onions, but for this effort, I wanted just naked noodles and broth.
The noodles were in fact perfect. The baking soda -a reflection of the hard desert spring water of Central Asia, allowed the noodles to have a perfect springiness.
Naked ramen
The broth itself was without distinction and this is where all the hard work will go -it was clear and clean, but better suited for a mushroom soup or a fish soup than for ramen. And the ramen I am stalking is hakata ramen -the clear white broth the result of days of boiling pork (could it be the head?).
I did get a thumbs up from my critics.
Filed under: My Bidness, Naturalism, golf culture, golf food, golf photography, golfist libation | Tags: amaretto, grand marnier, iced tea, NFL playoff, spearmint, spiked ice tea
Football playoffs and lazy Sundays mix wonderfully in this iced tea creation. I make a typical Southern sweet tea using double density of P&G Tips tea bags, steeped extra long for that extra bite of tannins. I add a tablespoon of sugar for every two cups (may add more for more traditionally sweet tea) and if I have them, I crush and muddle in spearmint leaves. At this point, this drink is fine for drinking after mowing lawns, but if you want a super smooth Nice Tea -you add a shot of Amaretto and a half shot of Grand Marnier along with a dash of Angostura Bitters. The result is a very smooth concoction that makes you think about spring -sunny, cool, and stirring to the spirit.
I won’t talk about the Vikings because it may curse them. I will root for the Jets in the same way I would root for the drunk Irish guy on St. Patrick’s Day who picks a fight with a bunch of yobby out of town college kids from an SEC school. He may go down, but he’ll be defending the honor of New York in his own special way.
Filed under: Golfist Cinema, Naturalism, golf food | Tags: Top Ten, The Road, Cormac McCarthy, Weinstein, The Road Movie, top ten recipes from the road, cannibal, zombie
The Road is an important book, a big book, an Oprah book. It is now a Weinstein production, and soon we’ll be inundated with The Road publicity. As much as I like the book, I dread the movie. All reports are that it takes a book so hard to read into a movie that is miserably difficult to watch. Then again, it could be a great big fail and turn out to be just another zombie movie.
Thinking about this, I twittered my top ten recipes from The Road:
- Lady Fingers
- Hush Babies
- Mock Roast Turkey
- Nice Piece of Ass
- Babyback Ribs
- UnMystery Meat
- Chewy Tubes Cormac n Cheese
- Really Sloppy Joe
- Meat and No Potatoes
- Roadkill Haggis
The garden is crammed full of tomatoes, sweet corn, giant pumpkins, beans, peas, cantaloupe, watermelon, and zucchini squash. The vine plants I am allowing to escape the cage. Iowa has perfect growing conditions during the summer for vegetables.
Filed under: golf food, my golf | Tags: Bukharan Jews, comfort food, instant noodles, lagman, lo mein, midnight snack, Ramen, Shin Ramyun
I have always loved ramen, pronounced ramyun in Korean. It is a corruption of the original Chinese lo-mein. Other cultures, including the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia, enjoy noodles in soups (they call it lagman). I have seen people eat these dry -I confess as a kid I used to do that too. Back in the day, my favorite was Sapporo Ichiban Ramen from Japan. It was basic -ur Ramen. Though the Chinese created these noodle soup dishes, and the Japanese made it a snack food by frying and drying the noodles for packaging, it is the Koreans who have created the perfect flavor -hot and spicy.
As a kid -the way to pep up the relatively bland Sapporo Ichiban was to add some kimchi into the boiling water. But kimchi is sometimes not available, but the food scientists at Shin Ramyun have recreated the perfect salty/spicy blend. It is the best Ramyun on the market. A close second is Neoguri (pronounced nuh-goo-ri).
The way I prepare it is boiling it the usual way, but I add two eggs which become poached in the soup. One egg i will break up to create kind of an egg drop effect, but the other I will leave to make a perfect poached egg within the spices. It is the real center of this dish. To this, I will add chopped green onions cut long (about two to three inches). Maybe some spinach leaves from the giant Costco packages.
If you’re really hungry, adding some cold rice to it is an easy way to increase the deliciousness. It is incredibly satisfying in a way that soul food satisfies. Water boiling now -must go.
Filed under: Golf and Religion, golf culture, golf food, golf mysticism, golf proverbs | Tags: 25 things about me, chain letter, confession, exhibitionism, facebook, narcissism
This is a chain letter circulating around Facebook -this is my contribution. My soul has been bared.
Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.
(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)
25 things about me
1.Imagination -my imagination tends to run amok. Ally MacBeal was a bit jarring to watch because on some levels, my brain works in a similar fashion.
2.Navel gazing -I am a chronic self examiner. Combined with number 3, blogging and Facebook suits me like swamp water does for a frog.
3.Exhibitionism -Yes. I am a bit of an exhibitionist,. Not in the trenchcoat with no pants way, but more in the need for getting everyone’s attention. But I have a purpose!
4.Food -Food, good food, obsesses me to the point that I have to force myself to view food as a bodily function and not the center of my day. Spam is the pearl of American food, by the way. I can be seduced with food. I prefer savory over sweet.
5.Bloody mindedness -I have a masochistic streak. My personal motto was set at four, when I declared to my whiny cousin Eugene, “Namja neun ch’ah muh ya deh.” which loosely translates to “a man must persevere.” Stoicism appeals to me, even though I may unstoically complain of its absence. Once, out of boredom, I pulled out 5 of my remaining baby teeth at age 10.
6.I can’t talk about number 6. It involves the Plaza Hotel, the Harvard Club of Boston, Locke-Ober, The University Club, the Four Seasons of New York…There I said too much. They might be reading this.
7.Doing things from scratch -I enjoy creating things from elemental items. For a cucumber and tomato salad, I grew these items along with the chives and then became flustered over not being able to make the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and coarse pickling salt. I then contemplated making the bowl out of the clay from the deeper soil of the garden. The longer the process and the shorter the reward, the greater the appeal. I like to fish with flies that I’ve tied myself, and dream of catching fish in Central Park with just the items from a sewing kit from one of the hotels.
8.Narcissism -I tend to personalize everything. You are me, and he is me, and we are me, and we are all together -isn’t how that song goes?
9.Golf -I play golf in my mind when I’m not thinking about myself or what I’m going to eat next. I’m a big baby.
10.Rules -I like structure insofar as it draws lines for me to cross, if I can.
11.Impatient -I am not terribly patient.
12.Grand Gestures -I am a bit of a primitive or a throwback in my love and appreciation of grand gestures. Think Taj Mahal or the Defenestration of Prague -actually scratch that last one.
13.Mongols -Yes, I love anything Mongolian. I would love to live in a yurt with forty horses and my clan in tow going from pasture to pasture.
14.Chimpanzees -I can sit and watch them all day for weeks on end if given the opportunity. Their inner workings are so mysterious.
15.Women -I can sit and watch them all day for weeks on end if given the opportunity. Their inner workings are so mysterious.
16.Minorities -The Yakuts, the Kipchaks, the Tai Dam, the Hmong, the Hottentots, Parsis, everyone Stalin moved around, the Piraha, remnant hunter gatherers of the world, Central Asian Jews, the Celts, the list goes on and on. Fascinating stuff.
17.The Encyclopaedia Brittanica -I used to read it obsessively.
18.Scouting -I was an avid cub scout, but made the mistake of not going beyond Webelos. The ethos of scouting has always been a part of my worldview.
19.Fishing -I can usually catch fish. A good skill to have.
20.The Next Thing -My To-Do list is a branchy, multiply bifurcating clade of the next shiny, neat thing to figure out or do. I enjoy constantly remaking my environment.
21.School -If I hit Powerball, I’m going back to school forever.
22.Anchovies -I really enjoy the salty, super fishy flavor of anchovies on the side with a freshly made Caesar’s salad.
23.Writing -If I had to do it all over, I would have put more effort into writing and storytelling.
24.Love -I am a believer in true, romantic love. The kind that gives you strength, perspective, and a clear vision.
25.Purgatory -If the Old Testament, hellfire Christians are correct, then the best I can expect is to be in a line with quadrillions of people ahead of me, a line that includes Gandhi, Socrates, the Buddha, the entire pre-Columbian Aztec nation, most everyone who has ever lived in Marin County, aborted fetuses (each wearing an original sin pin on a simple gray smock), spilled semen (reconstituted as hopping demi-beings with whiplike tails, wearing half a black tee shirt with Onan in globby white letters), and a couple of my high school teachers. We’re all waiting to get processed and sent down a large hole in the clouds. We entertain each other with stories about our lives. I’m surrounded by a couple of billion demi-people who claim some relationship to me…
Filed under: golf food, golf philosophy | Tags: avoiding work, evil turkey, hard labor, thanksgiving meal, turkey dinner
Thanks
When we stopped making the turkey last year, we had the best thanksgiving ever. We had it catered from Wakonda from the inimitibable Chef George. In fact, when you take in the food costs and time, it pretty much is a draw. We were having our front door neighbors over. It was our first Thanksgiving without blood relations. At around 5 in the evening, I drove over and picked up 6 neatly packaged bags in cardboard boxes. Driving home, the smells were otherworldly. We unpacked, put out our good (and only) china, and popped a bottle of wine. The neighbors came, and we had the best Thanksgiving meal that I have ever had (except for a visit to my college roommate’s family in Philadelphia in 1987, where I ate enough for three, and then lounged around for five hours alternately watching football and a Star Trek marathon, before eating AGAIN).
There was no Star Trek last year, but there was homemade cranberry sauce with perfectly tart fresh cranberries in a jammy gel that had never had the shape of a cylinder. The stuffing could have been a main course by itself. I could have lifted the gravy boat and guzzled the brown ambrosia. The mashed potatoes were really smashed with the evidence quite clear from the non-uniform pearls of pure earthy flavor. Washed down with a Gewürztraminer, followed by pumpkin pie a la mode and serious fresh ground coffee. Oh, the turkey was perfect.
The clean up involved putting away the leftovers in the packages they came in. No hours of back breaking labor for a 5-15% chance of a turkey mishap (observation from about 25 Thanksgivings as an adult). That bad luck turkey is a mofurkey which in its many manifestations is alternately unevenly cooked, over-done (usually due to relying on the popup signal designed by lawyers), or generally associated with some misfortune (this year, a nephew with second degree burns, have heard stories of houses burning down). No, we completely avoided the mofurkey last year by outsourcing. It wasn’t just the meal we outsourced -it was the stress and the work on a day that no one should work. We could concentrate on the giving of thanks and enjoying each other’s company. What did we do for Thanksgiving this year? We ate jja-jjang myun at a seriously great place in Bayside, Queens. No mofurkey!
Shown is a can of SPAM, which took a big hit during the nineties after junk e-mail (about p3n1s 3nlarg3m3nt, p0rn, and millions of dollars stuck in an account in Nigeria) was named after it. Fact is, for Koreans of a certain age, it meant not just sustenance, but luxury. During the Korean War, when hunger struck the fleeing and bombed out Korean population, SPAM in the form of government issue C-rations, was a treasure more dear than chocolate. I remember that it was very expensive, much more so per pound than fresh meat, and to give a case of it was the kind of thing you gave at weddings of very important relatives. That or the cans of pineapple rings, but I digress.
I suspect it had to do with the fact that it goes so well with cold rice. Sliced thin and fried in its own juices (and fat) on a grill to a crispiness on both sides, a slice of SPAM gives instant flavor to a bowl of leftover cold rice in ways that cannot be described. It is comfort food that is existential, bringing rush of memories of childhood when as a child of privilege in Korea, I was fed not only the finest fruits and vegetables, but meat, and the best meat in the form of SPAM.
I googled its shelf life, and most reports come back that as long as it has kept its vacuum, its probably still good to eat (link). Meaning as long as you keep it in a cool dry place, you can keep it for years, possibly decades.
Bachelor mock-fried rice:
cold rice from Chinese takeout, butter, soy sauce, sesame seeds (optional), black pepper, two fried eggs, spam. Melt butter into the cold rice in a skillet. Drizzle soy sauce. Separate pan, fry two eggs over easy and enough slices of spam for your man appetite. Put done eggs on rice and mix with spoon until eggs are fragmented. Put spam on side in bowl. Season with sesame seeds and black pepper. Go to TV and enjoy.
