Category Archives: Food - Page 14

Pho (Vietnamese Noodle Soup)

Posted by on February 27, 2011 33 comments

Pho is probably the most popular dish of Vietnam. Noodle soups are extremely popular throughout the Far East, but Vietnam is known for its distinctive flavors.

Beef Broth

To start, make a beef broth. You might want to refer back to this post: Ox Feet Broth, Miso Soup, and Other Soups. It’s not necessary to start from ox feet, any beef bones will do. It’s nice to choose bones that have a lot of collagen and fat, that makes a richer broth.

Beef bones are available at a wide range of stores these days. To make our broth, we picked up $3 of beef bones at BJ’s Wholesale Club yesterday and cooked them in water for 3 hours. Today, before dinner, we warmed up a portion. Here’s what it looks like:

Rice Noodles

You’ll also need some rice noodles. We discussed rice noodles in this post: Cranky Grouch’s Spaghetti. The chief difference from that recipe is that we used thinner noodles, so it took less than 3 minutes to cook the noodles. As before, it’s important to have the water reach a boil before adding the noodles, cook briefly, and then drain the water and cool the noodles in cold water to stop them from cooking further. Another difference is that we didn’t add olive oil at the end.

Here’s a picture of today’s rice noodles cooking:

Other Ingredients

The essential ingredients are thin-sliced beef, fish sauce, a lime, and basil leaves. (You can substitute cooked shredded chicken or shrimp for beef.)

Other standard ingredients are bean sprouts (which are legumes, but low in toxicity and more like a vegetable) and cilantro. We think red onions complement the other flavors.

Some spices may also be desired, but are not necessary. Chili sauce for those who like it hot, plum sauce for those who like it sweet. Black bean sauce, garlic, ginger, salt, and pepper are also commonly used.

Thin-sliced beef is readily available at Asian markets. It’s often labeled as beef for shabu-shabu, the Japanese version of hot pot:

Here is the fish sauce and chili sauce we used. We prefer lighter fish sauces, which are translucent in the bottle; stronger fish sauces are opaque.

Here are the ingredients we used:

The lime is cut into eighths, the beef thawed; that is fish sauce on the lower left.

Making Your Pho

You can arrange the ingredients to your taste in your own soup bowl. Paul starts with some noodles, onions, and thin-sliced beef:

The broth is added hot from the pot, and the thin beef slices change color to brown within seconds. Top with sprouts and basil, and it looks like this:

Add lime, fish sauce, and spices to taste, and you’re ready to go. Here Paul has lifted out a piece of collagen and fat from the broth – this adds great richness to the soup:

It was delicious! The lime and fish sauce flavor is unique to Vietnamese cuisine and makes a great change of pace from our regular cooking.

If Chef Anthony Bourdain had come to dinner with us tonight, he might have been even more delighted than he was in this video:

Ice Cream

Posted by on February 20, 2011 58 comments

I thought I’d show how we make ice cream these days. It’s an easy dessert to make, and great for kids. They may even help in the cleanup by licking the utensils!

We’ve adopted rice syrup as a sweetener lately. The nice thing about “safe starch” syrup is that the dessert can be made as sweet as one likes, without the health concerns of fructose. With sucrose, I felt obliged to minimize the sweetness.

We’ve also begun to use lemon juice in a lot of our cooking, since the citrate offers a number of health benefits. We’ve come to like the citrus flavor and fragrance in our ice cream too.

With these innovations, our basic formula for ice cream is:

  • 2 cups (1 pint) heavy cream. Ideally, the cream should be free of carrageenan, skim milk, or other additives, as discussed in this thread.
  • 6 egg yolks
  • 2 tablespoons rice syrup (more can be drizzled on when it’s done to accommodate those with a sweet tooth)
  • 1 lemon (juice and some meat)
  • berries, nuts, and other flavorings to taste

Today we made blueberry ice cream.

Some ingredients:

In the blender, before and after:

The ice cream maker:

This has a neat design: the pot that holds the ice cream is frozen beforehand (which requires 48 hours), and it mounts on a motor and turns. The rest of the ice cream maker is stationary; a stationary paddle churns the mixture as the pot turns.

Here we are pouring in the mixture:

And 15 minutes later it’s done:

And served:

Shou-Ching is the one with the sweet tooth!

UPDATE: Calorie Counts

For those concerned with such things, here’s the calorie breakdown of the ice cream:

Ingredient Carbs Fat Protein
Rice syrup, 2 tbsp 150
Blueberries, 2 cups 170
Egg yolks, 6 246 12
Cream, 1 pint 24 780 16
TOTAL: 344 (25%) 1026 (73%) 28 (2%)

Fructose from the berries represents about a quarter of the carb calories or 7% of total calories.

Dong Po’s Pork

Posted by on February 13, 2011 13 comments

Su Dong Po is one of the two or three most beloved poets in Chinese history. So famous was he that the dish he loved most was given his name: Dong Po’s Pork.

It’s quite a treat: you’ll be unsure whether you’re eating the entrée or the dessert. Strangely this dish, one of the most popular in Chinese cuisine, rarely appears on the menu of Chinese restaurants in the U.S.

Preparing the Pork Bellies

Dong Po’s Pork is basically a high-class way of cooking pork bellies – the uncured precursor to bacon.

Buy the pork bellies in thick slices – at least a half-inch thick. Cut them into cubes about 1 inch on a side. You’ll also need a few slices from a ginger root and scallions:

The first step is to boil a pot of water. Add the cubed pork bellies, ginger, and scallion to the boiling water.

Boil for 30 minutes, it will look like this:

Drain the liquid, keeping the solids.

This boiling process removes unpleasant pork flavors, and leaves the pork with a very mild fatty flavor.

Preparing the Sauce

While the pork is being boiled, prepare the cooking sauce. Mix in a small bowl about 2 tbsp soy sauce – we use Kikkoman Teriyaki Marinade and Soy Sauce, but any naturally brewed soy sauce can be used – and a half cup of wine – we used Riesling since we frequently drink that, but any wine will do. Also, cut more ginger and scallions. The traditional Chinese recipe calls for star anise as well:

If whole star anise is unavailable, you can find ground anise or Chinese “5-star” spice in your supermarket spice aisle. However, it would also come out fine if you dispense with the anise; the pork, soy sauce, wine, and caramelized sugar provide most of the taste.

Traditionally, the remainder of the cooking would be done in a Dutch oven or similar pot that retains heat and can be tightly sealed to keep in steam. However, we’ll use a wok.

In the wok, warm some cooking fat. You can use any oil you like – olive oil or coconut oil are fine. We have been using beef tallow lately – here we are melting some fat from a block of beef fat:

Once the oil is warm, add about 2 tbsp rice syrup. Stir as the sugar caramelizes. It’s ready as soon as bubbles appear — about 30 seconds:

We have adopted rice syrup as our sweetener of choice. It is a zero-fructose sweetener, and we like that it provides glucose calories along with its sweet taste: it seems the body evolved to expect sweet tastes to be followed by an infusion of sugar, since zero-calorie sweeteners trigger insulin release. We like our food to fit the body’s evolved expectations. (The traditional sweetener is smaller amount of brown sugar.)

Caramelizing sugar will create some advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs), so this dish is not perfectly healthy – but it is healthy enough for us.

Completing the Dish

Immediately after the rice syrup begins to caramelize, and before it burns, add the cooked pork to the pan and stir to coat the pork evenly.

Then immediately add all the other ingredients.

Cover, briefly raise the heat to bring the wine and soy sauce mixture to a simmer, then lower the heat and let it simmer covered for 30 to 60 minutes.

The object here is to steam the pork and let the sauce flavors combine with the pork. The longer you steam it, the softer the fat becomes and the more it melts in your mouth.

Every 10 to 15 minutes, uncover and stir. If your soy sauce was not salty enough for you, you can add a bit of salt while it is cooking.

By the time you’re done, there will be only a little liquid left. Transfer to a serving bowl.

Dong Po Pork is fantastic with rice. Here’s how we ate it:

Enjoy!

Cranky Grouch’s Spaghetti

Posted by on February 6, 2011 58 comments

We have a food emergency among our Italian fans.

erp’s husband, the “Cranky Grouch,” has been doing well on our diet but retains a “crazing” for pasta:

He’s lost 30 lbs without trying very hard and gives in to the crazing (not a typo) for pasta, but he’s cut down drastically on bread and desserts, so he gets full credit. He’s of Italian background and can’t be expected to never again eat his beloved macaroni.

Unfortunately, rice noodles haven’t pleased him:

Paul, My husband doesn’t like rice noodles. We’ve tried several varieties and I have to admit, I don’t like them much either, but then, I’m not a pasta fanatic.

I’d rather have tomato sauce, known around here as gravy, over plain white rice — to him, it goes against the nature of all things holy.

Mamma mia! Tomato sauce over rice – we can do better than that.

Franco also misses his pasta:

Man, I miss carbonara, you can’t believe how difficult it is to not eat pasta as an italian! And nobody tell me rice noodles is a substitute!

We sympathize with these complaints because it took us a while to figure out how to make rice noodle dishes.

At first we struggled:  some brands just didn’t taste good, and it was so easy to overcook the delicate noodles into a soft and mal-textured goo. But now that we know what we’re doing, we much prefer rice noodles to wheat. Now when we taste wheat noodles, they seem tough — we don’t miss them a bit.

I know it will be hard to persuade our Italian readers that rice noodles are better than wheat … but maybe we can help them enjoy their purgatory a bit better.

So, here it is: Cranky Grouch’s Spaghetti. Our best shot at winning over a skeptical Italian. (Franco, sorry, this one is Bolognese. Perhaps we’ll do a carbonara later.)

Rice Noodles

First, there are many different brands and different sizes of rice noodles. It took some searching, but we now have a favorite. It is a Thai brand:

We especially like this thickness: it cooks evenly but not too quickly. We use about one-third of a bag each time in order to serve four people.

There are a few tricks to cooking rice noodles. First, they cook very rapidly – much faster than wheat. And you want them al dente, a little chewy, not soft. So you have to be fast.

Bring a pot of water to a boil. When it is actively boiling, add the rice noodles. Cover briefly, until it returns to a boil. Then immediately take the lid off and use chopsticks or some other implement to stir and separate the noodles from each other.

Taste the noodles to judge when they are done. They should be chewy, neither soft nor crunchy. Cooking time varies with the thickness of the noodles, but for these it is about seven minutes.

As soon as they reach this al dente state, immediately empty the pot through a strainer, return the noodles to the pot, and cover them with cold water momentarily to cool the noodles and stop them from cooking further. Pour them through the strainer again.

Now transfer the noodles to a container – we use a wok – and add some olive oil. Coating the noodles in oil will prevent them from sticking together. Mix the oil and noodles thoroughly.

These oiled and cooked noodles are ready to eat, but can be stored in the refrigerator if you wish, and re-heated in a microwave for eating.

Bologenese Sauce

You can prepare the sauce simultaneously with the noodles. I’m sure everyone is familiar with how to make this sauce, so I’ll just share what we do.

We start by browning some ground beef. We find the natural fat from 80% ground beef provides just the right amount of oil, so we neither add extra cooking oil nor drain away the fats after cooking the beef.

We’ll also include some sweet Italian sausage, to vary the taste a little. We’ll be slicing the sausage into bite-sized chunks but we find that can be done just as easily after the sausage has cooked a little, so to speed things along we’re throwing the whole sausages into the beef along with some onion. We like to stir-fry the onion about 2 minutes before adding the sauce.

We use store-bought spaghetti sauce – in this case, a Trader Joe’s marinara sauce – which saves some time. At the same time we add the sauce, we start pulling out sausages and slicing them:

The partially cooked sausage slices are then returned to the pot to finish cooking. We also add salt and pepper at this point, and usually (but not tonight) spinach.

When the sauce ingredients are well cooked, we add some frozen pre-cooked peas.

We stop cooking about 2 minutes after adding the peas.

Now just put some of the rice noodles in a bowl and ladle sauce on top. The hot sauce will warm the rice noodles.

There you are! An easy spaghetti dinner that, we hope, will please even the Cranky Grouch.