So I ran into a few contradictions when reading various receipies and wanted to hear opinions:
•When looking at a popular miso broth, it says to combine miso paste at the start when adding the oil, garlic, ground pork and such when sautéing.
•while I also read that you want to add miso paste LAST because it is very sensitive and high temps will destroy the flavor entirely? So add it in after as the last step when simmering the broth
Which is it?
•I also have Hondashi powder, I want to try using it but am not quite sure how. The miso paste I’m using will be half & half white and red miso (without dashi)
So, if I’m using 12 cups of broth, how much would you recommend adding?
From the Chuka Soba soup base I made, I wanna make salt-based ramen from it too. So here’s how I go.
Clam dashi 500 g Asari Clam 1 liter of water A dash of cooking sake
Shio tare Kombu Dried scallop Dried shrimp Shitake mushroom Mirin and sake Salt Water 10x of the weight
Soak over night then low heat about 30 minutes. Strain and the scallops. Add mirin and sake, then boil till alcohol evaporates. Add salt, aim for 10% of the weight. Done
Scallop oil. Mush scallop from making the tare then cook in canola oil until crispy.
200 ml chuka soba soup base 100 ml clam dashi 10 ml scallop oil 30 ml shio tare 120 g ramen noodles. Menma Spinach Chashu pork White negi-thinly sliced Green onion-finely chopped Naruto maki Nori Lemon peel
Here we are in August already. The July 19 banh xeo sizzling crepe class sold out (hard to believe!!!) and the fun 2-hour session flew by. There was clean up afterwards (of course) and exhaustion but I had dinner made already!
The next day, we packed for a week-long trip to Kauai. It’s our second time there this year to hang out with our dear friend, the fashion and jewelry designer Chan Luu. Where I eat while I’m on the island? At Chan’s home. Her property is loaded with fresh tropical fruit, produce, and now hen-laying chickens. We do market runs to Foodland, Safeway, or Costco for anything else we need!
Some notes on the photos:
The pineapple crowns I saw in January now have fruits! Chan grows many kinds and the pink one looks cool but has little flavor, Chan says. The white Sugarloaf is a bit too sweet for me. The yellow one (above) had a balanced sweet-tanginess. We clean up the pineapple crown so it will root and then Chan’s staff replants them. About 1 1/2 years later, there’s fruit to eat! You can grow from store-bought pineapples but success all depends on growing conditions. She has well draining soil and very good sun on a slope.
The spiky fruit in the basket is soursop, which has a tart-sweet flavor. We had lots of tasty bananas, too.
We also harvested and processed a jackfruit! The tree isn’t big but it produces fruits weighing 12 to 15 pounds. That felt like a giant bowling ball. You don’t want one to fall on your head. If you have to cut jackfruit apart, oil your knives, wear gloves and work on a tarp to minimize its latex mess.
And, next time you’re near a fresh coconut, remember this tool:
Construction workers on her property gift her food they catch (fish!, crab!), hunt (wild pigs!), or forage. One of them, a generous young man named Kaiola, took us into the rain forest on Native Hawaiian land where we picked edible pohole fern tips. Loaded with nutrition, they’re snappy and have flavors similar to asparagus and green beans but with a slightly mucilaginous quality.
Absolutely delicious for stir-fries, salad, and soup. They need to be washed well and then quickly cooked to preserve their texture and color. We wrapped them in banana leaf to keep for about 3 days in the fridge. The fern is available in Thailand, where it’s called pak kood, and is made into salads, stir-fries and even dessert.
Island life is good in Hawaii — the most Asian of all States in the nation.
Thanks for reading Pass the Fish Sauce! This post is public so feel free to share it.
When you wish a vacation would continue, it means it was a good vacation. The day after we got home, I opened Alana Kysar’s new cookbook, Aloha Veggies. Alana has a knack for capturing the spirit of her native Hawaii in recipe form while making the dishes doable for mainlanders like me.
Mushrooms in my fridge and ripe cucumber, green onions, cherry tomatoes from my garden led me to Alana’s Kale and Shoyu Mushroom Salad. All I had to buy was trimmed lacinato (dino) kale leaves from Trader Joe’s. While I roasted the mushrooms and made the sesame soy dressing, Rory cut the greens. Our restorative lunch came together in about 30 minutes!
The vegan salad is simple to make yet layered with the cultures and foodways that make Hawaii inviting and interesting. It was deliciously energizing (dark leafy greens with plenty of fiber!) but moreover, it allowed me to savor island life a little longer. For Alana’s Kale and Shoyu Mushroom Salad recipe, head to my website, where it’s available for free.
Summer in 30+ recipes and oodles of kitchen pointers
Looking ahead at the rest of the year for PTFS, I had to look back. When I did, I realized that we’ve covered a hella lot of territory in since mid May, when I posted the last recap.
There have been so many delicious recipes and a bunch of focused deep dives. Anything marked 🆓 is available to all. The others are for PTFS paid subscribers.
For full access to all paywalled recipes (not just ones listed here!), become a paid subscriber. You’ll also get class discounts and seed new content, too! ⚡️⚡️ Try PTFS for a year at a discount, or save for life! Your support matters.
Cooking Thai releases on August 25 but Pim and I are going to do a fun chat about the book for (International Association of Culinary Professionals). If you want to check out the book before (or after) you pre-order it, sign up here for the virtual session. All are welcome to the free IACP event.
I’ll share info on SF and Santa Cruz book events soon!
Hope summer is treating you well — that you’re not overheating somewhere. Stay cool and well fed.
Add this Zucchini with Garlic Sauce to your rotation when you have more zucchini or yellow squash than you know what to do with! Ground pork, plenty of garlic and scallions, and just a little heat from dried red chilies makes this a new summertime favorite at our house. For Anyone Who Loves Eggplant with […]
Sharing my first Yokohama ramen, we have queued almost 2 hrs on weekend for this ramen. The texture of the noodles really good! The broth was rich and flavourful. May I know ramen folks, what is the green vegetables in this ramen? Thank you in advance.
Is shape thickness more important to al dente-ness than dough hydration?
I've made kansui ramen noodles with as little as 32% hydration. It would make sense for them to be drier and firmer, as they have to withstand hot broth over the course of a meal (even if the Japanese are renowned for eating fast). I cook these thin noodles for 2 minutes, yet they don't have much of a bite to them.
Yesterday I made bigoli at 57% hydration. I cooked a batch for 10 minutes, and they were still so al dente I could have gone for 12. Granted, the pasta wasn't hydrated with water, but with whole eggs, so some fat/water conversion is in order. Either way, unlike my ramen noodles (which are so stiff they have to be kneaded by stomping on a plastic bag), this bigoli dough was supple and nowhere near breaking my pasta machine.
I have a ramen broth , homemade, and a pack of drumstcisk that I wanted to use for ramen, how would you suggest I cook the drumsticks to add protein to the ramen? I was thinking maybe marinate them and then cook in oven then add tej
Hello! I’m new here and I have a question for this subreddit. I bought this pot a long while ago and used it for the first time in a while recently. I then proceeded to put it into the dishwasher without thinking. I check on Amazon where I bought it and it says to hand wash it as the dishwasher may damage it. My question is, is this still safe to use? And can it be fixed if not?
Went to Salmon Noodle in Sangenjaya for a French-style ramen experience. Delicate chashu, salmon, caviar, and burdock root, all topped with an airy espuma foam instead of a traditional broth surface. Not something I go for every day, but every once in a while I crave this kind of refined, experimental bowl.
As a big ramen fan I just had to try it at one point.
The recipe is a mix of many videos on YouTube. It was really delicious.. just like a ramen at a restaurant, I was blown away. Very happy about the result
on a rainy night and hungry after watch shopping, I looked for noodles with soup near Nakano station
Nakano Kunichan serves chan-style ramen, a soy sauce ramen with lots of chashu. Copied what the regulars in front of me did, and took a green plastic token at the vending machine to get free rice.
I ate in front of the simmering tare sauce. Their spicy paste (the one in the photos with the label HOT) is mouth-numbing, in a good way.
Hello to all, new to this group, but not new in ramen world. I scratch the surface a lil bit.
Few days ago I found here the Ramen Lord cookbook - what a book! and I studied it for few days and decided to make this tokyo style chintan. I also made mushroom shoyu tare - did not have all ingredients and I added lime leave and fresh chilli into tare. Also made fried scallion and fresh chilli aroma oil.
Topped with udon noodles,ajitama egg, terikayi mushrooms, grilled corn, zucchini, crispy chicken thigh, some fresh scallions and more chilli.
I had wonderful time makin it, and my family enjoyed every second of it.
Even tho we're in the middle of heatwave, I can't wait to test some more. 🫶
I used to wonder why, in cities like New York and Paris, everyone claimed that they could never, ever live anywhere else. Then, when summer rolled around, everyone would say they can’t wait to get out of town.
I’m a city person and I like Paris best in the summer. A majority of people have left, so it’s a lot quieter. You can get into all those restaurants that you normally needed to book weeks in advance. And while the markets are more sparse, shops selling produce from small producers have been doing their best to keep their stores stocked, in spite of a lot of fields and farms and vineyards being decimated by successive heatwaves, and now, wildfires. One of our neighbors has been dropping cigarette butts in our backyard, which is as dry as a haystack, so we’re praying our building doesn’t go up in flames, too. But for the time being, Paris has been spared.
We have friends, a couple who live part-time in Ardèche, and when they invited me to come for a few days, I erased everything I had scheduled in my calendar and took a two-hour train ride to stay with them. That region is called the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, especially known for sausages, wine, and its famous chestnuts, les châtaignes d’Ardèche, which have protected AOP status in France.
It wasn’t quite chestnut season, and people are worried about the effects of the heatwaves on the chestnut trees, but I picked up a jar of chestnut paste at one of the farm tables at the market. Sometimes the chestnut spread is made with candied chestnuts, but generally at the markets, the varieties are less sweetened, and looser, like the one in the jar, above, that I bought.
Chestnut spread is delicious served with plain yogurt or fromage blanc, or if you buy the ones made with candied chestnuts sold in a tube, like toothpaste, when no one is looking, people squeeze it directly into their mouths.
I often joke with Romain that when we stay with friends in the summer, invariably they have a bowl of apples and pears, regardless of the season. It’s a bit perplexing to me because when apricots, plums, peaches, nectarines, and cherries are in season, I buy far more than I need because I’ve been waiting all year for them, and it’s a treat to have them so readily available, and so delicious.
One stand at the market in Lamastre had so many apricots that I thought I would faint. They had three or four varieties, and if I wasn’t taking the train home, I would have bought a few cases, especially those marked down for jam-making.
Fresh apricots sold for a song, for jam-making.
My friends who live there were scandalized about one vendor selling his tomatoes for €4,50 (~$5) per kilo (#2.2), when all the others were selling theirs for €3,50 ($4) per kilo. As a city dweller, both were a bargain to me. It made me reconsider the urban lifestyle that I’ve chosen.
The flavor of the tomatoes was also worlds away from any tomatoes we get in Paris. I see why people are so eager to get out of town!
I’ve had (non-French) people tell me, “Oh, no…no one in France would ever drink wine out of a box!” Well, now I’ve got photo proof that they do.
(Someone once insisted to me that no one in Italy would ever dream of buying jarred tomato sauce. The jars sold in grocery stores, they told me, were for tourists. If you’ve ever seen the tomato sauce aisle in an Italian supermarket, you’ll wonder how so many tourists manage to bring all those jars of sauce home with them.)
Wine in a box isn’t a bad thing. It’s wine that’s meant to be drunk daily, not saved for ten years in a cellar. The box keeps the wine fresh; the bag inside the box compresses as the wine is poured, so the wine isn’t in contact with air. Plus the boxes are arguably more ecological (and easier to ship and store) than bottles. Also, you can see the savings on the price: €16 ($18) for the equivalent of 4 bottles of organic wine. Not bad!
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Eggs from our friends’ chickens
Another delice were the fresh eggs from our friends’ henhouse. They were so beautiful, and it was wonderful having a fresh egg for breakfast every morning.
Thankfully, I wasn’t worried about taking a half-dozen eggs home with me, although I carried them carefully on the train. And my friends promised to bring me some medlars from their tree when they’re ready to pick…
…which I use to make rose-colored medlar jelly. With all the jams and jellies that I make, maybe I am a country boy after all?
For those following the food processor drama (and for those who aren’t: My KitchenAid food processor bowl broke and was collecting gunk in the handle, and no replacement is available. And yes, I checked everywhere.) I’ve finally resolved it.
When I worked in restaurants, we always used a Robot-Coupe, the original food processor, which could handle anything. The problem in Paris is that the cost for them is pretty steep: Prices for new models are north of a thousand bucks, and I didn’t know if my occasional use of one justified the price. So I did what everyone in France does: I checked out Le Bon Coin, which is the 9th most-visited website in France, right after Google.
You can pretty much find anything in France on Le Bon Coin, from medlar trees to an apartment in Paris, or your dream house in the countryside.
Using the search term “robot culinaire,” I landed on a vintage one (above), just like the ones I used in restaurants. It was a mere €80 ($91) but they didn’t want to ship it, so I had to pass. I set up an alert and a couple of days later, one turned up in Paris.
I’ve honed my bargaining skills in France — as Romain once said to me, “No one is ever going to offer you a deal. You have to ask.” So I did, offering what I thought was a bit low, figuring the seller would come back with a counteroffer in the middle. She came down a bit, and in the few hours that I ruminated whether to just buy it, a notification showed up — Offre acceptée.
While it wasn’t in the excellent condition she mentioned, it was a solid “very good,” and heavy as a motherf**ker. I placed the machine in the basket of my bike and with every turn, the weight of it threatened to pull me down to the curb, so I rode extra carefully, and slowly, much to the ire of other cyclists. In the U.S., it’s cars that are aggressive to bicyclists but in Paris, it’s the other cyclists who pose the hazards.
I, and the machine, made it home in one piece, and it’s now sitting on my countertop. It weighs a ton so it’s not convenient to store in a cabinet. Romain asked me, “Is that where you’re going to keep it?” when he saw it on the counter. He’d already banished my stand mixer to a distant shelf, which makes it harder to bake (I guess I should use as a counterargument all those cookies and cakes he’s missing out on?), but if he wants the Robot-Coupe to go into a cabinet, he’s going to have to put it in there himself and take it out when I need it.
As we enter August, I took advantage of waning cherry season to pick up a load of fresh cherries and turn them into compote, to freeze. It’s nice to pull out a packet of cherries in the winter to serve with ice cream, tangerine sorbet, or frozen zabaglione, which is a great recipe that doesn’t require an ice cream freezer to make.
I pitted and sautéed them until they were cooked through. If you let them sit overnight, the juices will thicken further and the cherries will turn a deeper red color. If you want to freeze them, just put the cherries in a freezer-safe storage container and save them for a rainy, or snowy, day. Mine are now in my freezer, ready for winter. (Which I’m not.)
When I was in San Francisco on tour with The Great Book of Chocolate, I was invited to the Williams-Sonoma testkitchen to bake bouchons with test kitchen directorBelle English. We hadSO MUCH FUN! (Paid subscribers: You’ll find the recipe at the end of the newsletter.)
When I lived in San Francisco, I was one of those weirdos, or cool people, who had a Saab. Yes, I was crazy enough to drive a stick shift there and I pitied the people in their fancy BMWs who’d ride my tail on those steep hills, unaware that you had to have lightning-fast reflexes to shift into gear when a red light turns green, to avoid your car backing up an inch or two. Unless you got the timing precisely right, down to a nanosecond, my bumper might tap their front fender.
Fortunately I was pretty adept at shifting on the hills, but the few times I missed and tapped someone’s bumper, I never got out to see if I caused any damage. I just chalked it up to their fault, paving my way for a move to France, where things are inevitably pas ma faute.
Considering how expensive that car was to maintain, the knob on the gearshift was made of cheap plastic. They offered a wood option to replace it for $70, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. I ruminated over it for a few weeks (unlike my Robot-Coupe) until a friend said to me, “David, how many times are you going to touch that knob? Isn’t it worth getting a nice one?” So I caved and bought one, and she was right.
My friend Sarah caused a bit of an online kerfuffle when she poked fun at a hairbrush store in Paris beloved by influencers, and there’s always a line (yes, for hairbrushes) to get in. I don’t fight with people online but I beg to differ about brushes; I love the kitchen brushes at La Trésorerie that are handmade of wood and with natural bristles. And since there’s no line, the shops are free of influencers.
I saw one while shopping for a bottle brush at La Trésorerie and made the mistake of posting a picture of it on social media. It wasn’t cheap, so I had to ruminate over that too…and people wonder what I do all day… When I went back to the store to buy one, they were out of stock.
Search results turned up copies online but I found the website for the family-owned company that makes them, which was so engaging, and their brushes were so beautiful, I decided to spring for a handmade one. (The company’s website, Bürstenhaus Redecker, has every type of brush you can imagine.) When I was in Denmark, we happened upon a great kitchenware shop and I hesitated for about four seconds before picking one up.
Besides that it’s handmade by a family-owned business, there’s a lot to like about this brush. It stands vertically on the counter so takes up less space, and has a reassuringly strong magnet that snaps the brush into place, and it stays there.
I’m not sure where to get them outside of Europe. I noticed they have them on Amazon, and companies like Boston General Store and Flotsam & Fork carry the brand, but you may need to do some digging to find this one. Maison Empereur carries them in France, but they can no longer ship to the U.S. In the UK, they sell them here and here. If you can’t find one and resort to buying a copy, I won’t judge you…since I got carpal tunnel unearthing those links.
And being me, I am saving all the crumbs, which I hope quash any online kerfuffles about the price. I hope you collect enough of them to pay for the brush.
As promised, below is the recipe for the dark chocolate Bouchons from The Great Book of Chocolate that I made in the Williams-Sonoma test kitchen. As you can see in the video farther above, we loved eating them, as did the crew who were filming us 😊…
New to ramen and my kids love it. However, I find the soy based ones to be very salty and they are not my thing really. Is this mostly a Japanese ramen thing? Would Korean ramens be better? I love the prepackaged spicy Buldak noodles but what should I look for in a restaurant? The spicier the better but trying to avoid the one note salty taste. TIA!
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