Yum, Food

Well, this one is a brand-new type of project for me. Big thanks to Maangchi for her instruction on making this food. What you see here are blocks of meju. Basically it's soybeans cooked and made into a paste and then dried out.

The process will take maybe a year so I'm really hopeful for success and a good outcome. If all goes well, after hanging them to air-dry and to ferment, these blocks will go into a crock of salty water, creating the wonderful foods of traditional ganjang as well as doenjang.

It's pretty basic really. Well, no, it's acidic... but pretty much all do is put some salt in with this, and it keeps all the bad bugs out and lets our friendly lactic acid bacteria take over and keeps your stuff nice and fresh while adding a delicious tang and funk! I used 2% total salt here, including the weight of the peppers in addition to the water when doing my math. This is the kind of task that makes a kitchen scale SO helpful (essential? essential, tbh.)

The Tabasco company (no relation) ages their salted pepper mash in barrels for three years before blending to a thin liquid and mixing with vinegar before bottling. Only three ingredients!

Tonight it's pizza! I tried to make this one in the NY style as much as I could. I use J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's "simple NY pizza dough" recipe, which gives instruction for mixing in a food processor. I used the food processor to grate the cheese and then gave it a quick rinse and wipe before using it to mix the dough as well. Used a stick blender to pulverize san marzano tomatoes, added a little tomato paste, and seasoned simply with oregano, garlic powder, red pepper flakes, salt, and a tough of sugar.

I've been experimenting with different methods of trying to get the crust nice and crisp without overcooking the cheese (I just bake it until I don't want the cheese to get any more cooked). In this case I used a perforated pan, which did make for a nice bake, despite not getting super crisp. Heated my oven to 550 (as high as it goes) and I would say the pie probably took about 7 or 8 minutes, but that's also a total ballpark guesstimate that might be *way* off.

I thought tonight's light dinner turned out kinda lovely.

The Japanese dish in the blue bowl is called onsen tamago (hot spring egg) and is "boiled" at a low temperature to where the white part stays fairly-liquidy even as the yolk starts to set. I'm still toying around with the method but as of now I heat water on the stovetop to 70C/158F and put the eggs in for 13 minutes. A flame on low maintains the temperature pretty well on my burner. Cool them under cold running water and the crack them in a bowl to serve with a broth made from mirin, sugar, and dashi.