Tag: Asian Food

This is shichimi togarashi, a Japanese spice blend you may not have heard of. Typically it'll have nori seaweed, bitter orange peel, sesame seeds and dried chili. I think other 3-4 ingredients are changeable. Due to my supply being a bit old, I omitted the nori in mine and went for red/black/Sichuan pepper and dried ginger. Normally the sesame seeds are a bit less ground up, but my hand blend was a bit more effective than I thought.

First outdoor dinner of the year. Chicken stock with simple chasu/tare seasoning. Dried wheat noodles (commercial), thawed pork belly chasu pan fried, micro-poached egg, grilled leek and tenderstem broccoli, chili oil and black garlic oil. Looks like a lot but almost everything was prepped beforehand.

Dumpling weekend. Pork shoulder chasu filled yeast/baking powder leavened dumplings on Saturday night. Lazy Sunday and gyoza with pork and veg fillings: minced shoulder, ginger, soy, garlic, chives, chard. Wrappers were all done from scratch through an Imperia Restaurant pasta machine with the help of my lovely assistant. I don't have all-purpose flour (my usual caputo rosso), so I'm blending low protein Italian 00 and some strong bread to get the same effect.

Bit of a broth blitz the other day. Beef and chicken. Ramen results. Made a base stock of roughly one part each of homemade (frozen) dashi, chicken and beef broth. Tare (seasoning) was soy, salt, water and msg, I went at about 3/4 usual strength.

Tantanmen ramen. Pork broth from the freezer, Chinese wheat noodles, sesame tare (flavour), beef soboro, spinach, boiled egg and some mayu (black garlic oil). Bit simpler prep than the classic tonkotsu this one, but super rich and delicious! Made this from scratch tonight (not the broth) in about 45 min. Enough for a few more portions later in the week as well.

Tonkotsu ramen last night. Didn't go the whole 9 yards but some 6 or 7 of them. 5 hr pressure cooker pork shoulder and hock bone broth. About 4kgs of bones with 4 litres of water the final result, so 1:1 dilution was fine, it was quite concentrated. Reheated, added to some chicken stock I had, and blended to make emulsion (white colour).