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Asian Food
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Sea's Gift Korean Seaweed Snack (Kim Nori), Roasted & Sea Salted, 0.2-Ounce Bags (Pack of 24)
Roasted & sea salted snack pack. No MSG. No sugar. A gift from the ancient sea. Eat traditional style with rice ball and spice. Or snack on like potato chips! Use in salads. Add to soup. Try as a pizza topping! Product of Korea.Price: $23.76
How to cook perfect rice - in a frying pan
Rice is central to Japanese cuisine, so like most Japanese people, I have owned a rice cooker for as long as I can remember. Therefore, I usually cook rice in it. Sometimes I resort to another appliance, such as a pressure cooker for cooking brown rice. But truth be told I am not that good at making rice in a pot, mainly because I rarely have to do it. My rice cooker is always there for me. (My basic rice cooking method is here.)
But, recently I’ve been in several situations where I haven’t had a rice cooker, but really needed to make some rice, either for eating or to make demo bentos during my book tour. That’s when I decided to try making the rice in a frying pan. I’d seen this method on an NHK TV show called Necchuu Sutajiamu (Passion Stadium…yep I know, Japanese program show names can be a bit odd, especially in translation) back in October, and had been very intrigued at how easy it looked. I looked it up the program’s website (Japanese page) as well as a how-to on Cookpad (also Japanese), the Japanese mega-cooking site, and gave it a try.
And you know what…it’s so easy, and the results are really fantastic! I had perfectly cooked rice in less than 30 minute from measuring out to serving. Amazing!
I’ve tried commonly available methods of cooking rice before, such as adding rice to boiling water or vice versa, letting rice come to a boil in water in a pan and putting a lid on and letting it rest, and so on. None of those methods really worked to my satisfaction, especially for Japanese style rice — you know, the kind that goes with Japanese meals, that gets turned into sushi rice, and so on. I am extremely picky about how my rice turns out. So this method was quite a revelation for me, in terms of how easy and foolproof it is.
I did have to make some small adjustments to the basic method to accommodate the quirks of an electric stovetop (as I explained in my my fried rice in a frying pain article, electric ranges are common in Europe, not so in Japan or the U.S., and I’m constantly adjusting my methods accordingly). Otherwise though, it’s such a quick and easy method of making rice that I have been doing it this way quite often.
Note that the recipe/method here is for Japanese-style white rice. It should work with other white rice types too, but you may need to adjust the water amounts. Brown rice will need to be soaked in water for several hours if you’re going to try cooking it in a frying pan. (I’ve seen brown rice that has been pre-treated to cook in the same amount of time as white rice in Japan and some Japanese grocery stores elsewhere, so you could try looking for that.)
You need:
Japanese style medium-grain white rice (see Looking at different types of rice) A frying pan with a non-stick surface. I used a 28 cm / 11 inch diameter model. I recommend a similar size for making 1 to 2 cups of rice. A tight fitting lid for the frying pan. The lid does need to fit well so that excess steam gets trapped. A glass one is nice since it lets you see your rice’s progress without opening the lid.Following the method described in my basic rice how-to, rinse the rice and drain it well. (Rinsing does make a difference in taste! You just need to do it a few times.) Put the drained rice plus 1.1 times the amount of water by volume in the frying pan. So, if you have 1 cup of rice, use 1 cup and a bit of water. For 2 cups of rice, use 2.2 cups (about 2 and 1/4) water. I don’t recommend doing more than 2 cups at a time in this size frying pan.
At this point, ideally you’ll let the rice soak a bit (about half an hour) for plumper grains, but you can skip the soaking if you’re in a big hurry.
Put the frying pan on the stovetop over high heat with the lid on. Bring to a boil - the water will bubble aggressively, like so.
Give the rice a good stir up from the bottom with a spoon or spatula.
Replace the lid tightly. Lower the heat immediately to low.
If you’re using an electric range, the heat will not respond instantly so you’ll have high heat for a couple of minutes. Take the frying pan off the hot burner for a couple of minutes until the burner has had a chance to cool down to the low level.
Let the rice cook on the low setting. You’ll see the water get absorbed rapidly and big, starchy bubbles on the surface. This only takes about 5 minutes so be sure you’re hovering near the pan with an eye on it! (I do other dinner-prep stuff while the rice is steaming.)
Once the bubbles have subsided, you’ll see the surface of the rice with nice, even steam holes all over it. As soon this happens, turn the heat up to high for a minute or two, then turn the heat off. If you’re using an electric range, take the pan off the hot burner and put it somewhere else (like on top of an unused burner).
Let the pan rest with the lid on for a minimum of 10 minutes. This is very important, otherwise you may end up with a little hard center in your rice grains. Al dente is good for pasta, not for rice! (At least, it’s not good for Japanese style rice. Other rices, I don’t think so either.)
And…here’s the cooked rice. Looks beautiful, doesn’t it?
Here’s the rice fluffed up. Perfectly cooked and ready to eat as-is or turn into onigiri, sushi rice, or whatever your heart desires.
And…there are no burned bits stuck to the pan - I love easy cleanup! (Note: if you use a regular frying pan withint a non-stick surface, you may get some stuck-on bits. Also, if the final burst of high heat is too long, the bottom of the rice may get a bit brown.)
I had some of this batch as tamago kake gohan, raw egg and soy sauce on hot rice - one of my favorite breakfasts or snacks. (Not recommended unless you have really fresh, safe eggs.)
Why does this work? According to that Passion Stadium broadcast it’s because in a frying pan, the rice is spread out thinly on a large cooking surface, so it cooks fast and evenly. (That’s why you shouldn’t cook more than 2 cups (US cup measure, where 1 cup is about 240ml) of rice at a time in a 10-12 inch (26-30 cm) frying pan. If you’re doing a large amount of rice, I’d recommend two frying pans going at once!
The tight fitting lid is very important, otherwise too much steam will escape during the cooking process. The one I use is a model that fits pans of various sizes, and is really handy.
I think this method is preferable to cooking rice in the oven. It’s just as foolproof, much faster (you can have the rice all cooked in the time it takes to heat up a big oven) and far more energy efficient. And I like it better than microwave-cooking rice too, because I find having open take the bowl out of the microwave and stirring, etc. to be too cumbersome. To avoid all that taking out and stirring you need a special microwave-rice-cooking bowl, and this is all about not having to get special equipment to cook rice.
My rice cooker is still my everyday rice cooking device, since you can’t beat its hands-off reliability and delayed-cooking-with-timer capability, not to mention the keep-warm feature. But if you don’t have a rice cooker, and don’t want to get one for whatever reason, or you’re in a hurry to get some rice cooked in the shortest amount of time, I hope you’ll give this a try!
(ETA: Yes, I do know what paella and risotto are. The texture of the rice in either dish is completely different from what I want Japanese style rice to turn out to be.)
Talk Now! Learn Mongolian - Beginning Level
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* Compare your pronunciation. Compare yourself with native speakers using the record facility. Microphone required.
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Price: $29.99
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Longevity Peach Bun for Birthday
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I'm Writing a Cookbook!
When I first started this blog 3 and a half years ago, I had an inkling that maybe I would someday write a book. I had just arrived in Beijing, after a couple years in New York attending culinary school, working in a pastry kitchen, and writing freelance food and travel articles. I had a lot of interests, mostly centered around food. But where would I start?
The road from blog to book always seemed to be a fuzzy path. There were a lot of blogs in the news whose writers found agents and publishers seemingly overnight, and others I enjoy reading whose writers segued into other media opportunities, which led to the books. But at that time I didn't know where to begin. So I just concentrated on eating.
Getting acquainted with Beijing was a really eye-opening experience, and I just started photographing and sampling street food and restaurant meals wherever I went. I experimented with making Sichuan dishes from favorite restaurants at home, and when I wanted a break from spicy food, started cooking Cantonese dishes that my parents had taught me. Pretty soon the comments started coming, and questions about how to use this spice or that vegetable. That was encouragement enough to continue, despite the long hours.
Soon I started teaching Chinese cooking at a nice little school located in one of Beijing's disappearing hutongs. And continued blogging, throughout my stay in Beijing, living in Shanghai, traveling through Southeast Asia, working in San Francisco, and finally after moving back to New York. At first I thought that having a blog primarily focused on Chinese food might be a little limiting, that I would run out of topics after a while. Luckily, so far that hasn't been the case.
What I want to continue writing about could fill a whole book, at least. So I decided last June that this would be the summer I devoted to drafting a really good book proposal, even if the work meant losing sleep and quality time with the sun. It would be a cookbook, I decided, but it also had to incorporate a ton of history and stories behind the food. Fortunately, after months of writing and rewriting, I was able to find an amazing agent and publisher as excited about the idea as I was.
So I'm happy to share with all of you my current big project, my first cookbook, for Random House/Ballantine that is due out Fall 2012, if all goes well. It's a collection of Chinese take-out favorites and classic Chinatown dishes to make in your own kitchen. And because I'm so obsessed with culinary culture, the book will also explore the history and influence of Chinese food in the US. The cookbook will be, in short, a celebration of the Chinese comfort food favorites that America has helped shape.
So I want to ask all of you who have been such loyal visitors, both long-time readers and anyone who has just stumbled upon the site (I hope you'll stay for a while!): What are some of your favorite Chinese take-out dishes, ones that you want to learn and see in the cookbook? Or what are some Chinese dishes you fondly remember eating as a kid, or dishes your parents or grandparents still reminisce about, from the times when Chinese food was considered "exotic"?
Book Review: Kawaii Bento Boxes
As I was leafing through it, though, something started to seem oddly familiar. A quick browse through my kitchen bookshelf revealed why I was experiencing deja vu: it’s a straight translation of the same publisher’s Japanese-language cookbook Ichinenju Yakudatsu Tsuen Obento: Daisukina Kondate ga Ippai: (“Children’s Bentos that are Helpful Year-round: Lots of Favorite Menus”), with identical photos, layout, and text.
Now, there are both good and bad aspects to a straight translation of a bento cookbook written for the Japanese market. It’s extremely well suited for bento enthusiasts or Japanophiles already familiar with Japanese food, but may miss the mark for others…
Like Hawaii’s Bento Box Cookbook (see my full review here), Kawaii Bento Boxes is aimed at parents of young children who want to add playfulness to packed lunches, with simple recipes for very Japanese bentos that can be prepared in 20 minutes or less. You can browse the inside of the book at Amazon, and view the full table of contents and sample pages. The US$18.95 book (currently $12.89 on Amazon) is 82 pages long and in soft-cover magazine-book (”mook”) format.
1. The Book Structure
Kawaii Bento Boxes opens with some brief but solid introductory material about bento basics, including an overview of bento gear and how to pack a bento (browsable in full on Amazon).
Most of the book consists of photos of cute sample lunches with short recipes and a time estimate of how long it will take to prepare the bento (usually 15-20 minutes, assuming you’ve got staples like cooked rice already made, fresh or frozen). Every other page has an abbreviated step-by-step tutorial with photos, like the section on how to make rolled pancakes below (very helpful). These lunches are further divided into types, such as rice, sushi, bread, pasta, warm-weather, cold-weather, favorites, and picnic bentos. Here’s the pancake page:
Throughout the book are a number of sections showing variations on a theme, that may inspire readers to think outside the box with their own creations. Here’s a page with differently decorated onigiri rice balls (see below) and a sample lunch.
Here’s the same page in the Japanese original, so you can see they’re identical.
And a few pages of food art accents made with eggs, sausages, fruits and vegetables.
Note the classic apple rabbits! (See my apple rabbit tutorial for detailed directions.)
At the end of the book is a visual, color-coded index of additional recipes, organized by the main color of the dish: brown/black, white, yellow, red, or green. This makes sense when you think of the five-color rule of thumb for bento composition. You know how a colorful meal is a healthy meal? Including a variety of different colored foods in a bento helps ensure a balance of nutrients, so it’s handy to have a glanceable index of recipes sorted by color. Staring into the fridge and can’t think of, say, a red/orange dish? Leaf through some cookbooks organized like this and you might get some quick ideas.
2. The Nitty Gritty
My main hesitation about recommending this book for everyone is the food itself and the lack of background information for those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of Japanese food. It includes unusual ingredients that may not appeal to the average American child, like gobo (burdock root), natto (fermented soy beans), ume (sour plum), and eel.
To get some perspective, I showed this book to a couple of mom friends (American and English) who pack lunches for their kindergarten-aged children. Their take was that they might use it for inspiration and general ideas for ways to pack bentos and what to include, but that it looks time-consuming so they’d probably apply their own food. The dishes seemed unusual to them and geared toward a Japanese audience (yakisoba sandwich, anyone?), and they didn’t always understand what some of the bento accessories like sauce containers were, mistaking them for actual food. Japanese readers wouldn’t necessarily need an explanation, but non-Japanese would definitely benefit from more background information or the inclusion of slightly different dishes that are more common here.
Overall, Kawaii Bento Boxes is quite professionally done, but with some omissions that may make it a little confusing to a Western audience looking to quickly prepare recipes with ingredients already in the kitchen. Look at it as inspiration, though, and you’ll come away with a lot of fresh new ideas for lunches you’d like to prepare using foods your family already enjoys.
If you’re already familiar with bento lunches and Japanese food, however, I think you’ll really enjoy this little gem. The Japanese version has been one of my favorites for a while now, so I’m pleased that it’s now accessible to English-readers.
FURTHER READING:
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