Our thanksgiving-day extravaganza is done, and as usual I’m posting a blog entry for posterity and my own reference so I can find these things again if I need them. 🙂
We’ve done “Asian fusion” many times–it’s kind of corwin and my culinary wheelhouse–but this is the first time we really incorporated more filipino flavors.
First, the menu:
2019 Duck Day: Tour of the Eastern Rim of the Pacific
(Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila, Palu)
“Sinigang” Amuse
Tomato Dashi & Sake (Kubota Hekijyu junmai daiginjo)
with a dehydrated mushroom chip
powdered shoyu
powdered tamarind
“Pu-Pu Platter” with Scorpion Bowl
Curry puff with curry mayo
Lumpia (traditional filipino fried spring rolls)
Chicken wings with candied ginger and orange
Pickles: honshimeji mushroom, yuzu-pickled napa
Assortment of dipping sauces
“Adobo” served with Sapporo Premium
duck confit adobo style (with soy, vinegar, garlic and ginger)
with a duck-fat crisped potato and
adobo-style vinaigrette tossed peas
topped with crispy garlic
Zhajiang Mian (fried sauce noodle)
homemade chewy wheat noodle with ground duck and bean paste sauce
With shochu oolong hi-ball
Duck a l’kalamansi (filipino bitter orange) with Trimbach Reserve Gewurtzraminer
Rice two ways
Steamed bok choy
and a caramel vinegar gastrique
Palate cleanser
Yuzu sorbet with finger lime caviar, served with Kikusui Perfect Snow unfiltered sake
Dessert
Saikyo miso ice cream
With almond brown butter Sablé cookies
Puffed rice
And hot chocolate
Tea, Coffee, and Mignardise
candied ginger
almond coconut mango-marmalade thumbprint cookies
almond brown-butter-chocolate cookies
Every year there ends up being something we forgot to serve. This year it was the matchstick carrots and cucumber that were supposed to garnish the zhajiang noodle! Ah well.
“Sinigang” Amuse
Tomato Dashi & Sake (Kubota Hekijyu junmai daiginjo)
with a dehydrated mushroom chip
powdered shoyu
powdered tamarind
This dish combines two things. One is the idea of sinigang, which is a filipino tamarind-flavored stew/soup that often has fish, tomato, and onion. The other is the technique of mixing sake with a hot, intense broth to delicious effect. We learned this trick one wet, cold rainy afternoon while out day drinking with a chef friend-of-a-friend in the Akabane area of Tokyo. One of the places he took us was an oden (stewed fishball & tofu) shop where you could buy a one-cup sake. When you drank half your sake, for ten yen you could get them to top up the glass with the oden broth.
corwin made the broth by starting with our home-canned smoked tomato water (already one of the most umami-intense things we have), simmering it with kombu and bonito flakes to make it tomato dashi, and then going over to a friend/s house to borrow his Spinzall (food centrifuge) to clarify it.
For the tamarind flavor we put tamarind powder on the plate for folks to rim their glasses with. We also gave them the soup and the sake separately to mix as they liked. And also some powdered soy sauce we got as a parting gift at one of the fancy restaurants we ate at in Kyoto: Shimogamo Saryo.
“Pu-Pu Platter” with Scorpion Bowl
Curry puff with curry mayo
Lumpia (traditional filipino fried spring rolls)
Chicken wings with candied ginger and orange
Pickles: honshimeji mushroom, yuzu-pickled napa
Assortment of dipping sauces
Curry Puff
corwin made the curry puff (karipap), startingwith making his own curry powder. He didn’t use the karipap recipe in Asian Dumplings but instead used his own biscuit dough recipe and it worked beautifully.
Lumpia
It was my first time making lumpia. Lumpia is one of those foods that was at every filipino party we went to when I was growing up, but my family was never the one that made them. (We brought the pancit or the dessert.) It was traditional for the aunties to complain about what a pain they are to make, though. Well, now I know what they mean, but it is SO WORTH IT.
This is by far the weirdest dumpling skin or wrapper I’ve made yet. Andrea Nguyen’s ASIAN DUMPLINGS is my go-to book–she hasn’t steered me wrong, yet. The technique for making these involved picking up the entire blob of wet dough in your hand and them blopping it onto a slightly hot pan, and the smear you leave on the pan IS THE LUMPIA WRAPPER.
What I learned is if the pan is too hot is that it just sears the ball of dough in your hand but it doesn’t stick to the pan. This is bad. And if the pan isn’t hot enough, then it doesn’t work either. So there is a very narrow window where it works. I had to turn the burner on and off between each one and also dribble a little extra water into the dough before each one. What would work is I would make one, and when the pan was the right heat, the wrapper would release, and this would mean it was now the right heat for the next one to be made. I would turn off the heat, make the next one, let it cool for a few seconds in the pan and then have to heat it back up again to release it and be ready for the next one.
Here’s Andrea Nguyen’s short video on how to do it:
The filling I used was similar to the recipe in Asian Dumplings, but I replaced the carrot and bean with water chestnuts (and the ground meat was duck). If I do it again I’ll probably use pork and up the intensity of the spices/salt/fish sauce. It could use dried shrimp in the sauce.
Chicken Wings with Candied Ginger and Orange
This was one of those ideas I had one day while we were out and I made a note in my phone months ago: what if instead of just having a chicken wing that was honey-glazed and chewy you could take that to the next level by having actual bits of candied ginger and candied orange rind in the glaze? I tested it last week and was very pleased with the results.
Although I candied my own ginger for the mignardise in this meal, I used some that I had bought at Cambridge Naturals for this recipe, and the candied orange rinds were some fancy artisanal ones corwin picked up at Formaggio. But I think Trader Joe’s or whatever would work just as well.
The first step is oven-frying the chicken wings as detailed by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats (as in this recipe: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2015/01/hot-and-numbing-oven-fried-xian-chicken-wings-recipe.html)
I ran tests last week where I tried both spicing them with a technique as described in the Serious Eats article (toss the crispy wings in oil and then in a spice mix) and also by tossing them in a glaze. Turned out the way we liked them best was tossed in the spices and THEN dipped in the glaze separately. That was a little impractical for a large dinner party so I settled for brushing them with glaze and then sprinkling the chopped bits of candied ginger and orange rind on them. By not coating them completely in glaze, they retain more crispness.
Glaze:
1 cup orange juice
1 cup water
quarter to half cup yuzu marmalade or other citrus marmalade
quarter to half cup apple cider vinegar
1/8 to quarter cup brown sugar
powdered ginger
minced garlic
I am a little loose on the quantities in the glaze recipe because I think it really depends on how sweet the orange juice is and how sour the vinegar is — you just have to taste it to see if it’s what you want.
“Adobo” served with Sapporo Premium
duck confit adobo style (with soy, vinegar, garlic and ginger)
with a duck-fat crisped potato and
adobo-style vinaigrette tossed peas
topped with crispy garlic
Adobo is a filipino dish that has more variations than there are islands. The common element seems to be the combination of soy, vinegar, and garlic. Some have curry powder, some have ginger, etc. Some stew chicken and pork together, some are just chicken. My family’s adobo was usually chicken, potatoes, and green beans, stewed together in soy and vinegar with garlic (and served over white rice).
To deconstruct it, corwin confit’ed duck legs sous vide with soy-vinegar-garlic-ginger in the bags. Then he shredded the meat and crisped it in cast iron, and served it with an adobo-flavored reduction, topped with crispy garlic. I boiled the potatoes in advance, then crushed them slightly to give them crisp edges roasted in duck fat. The beans in the dish I replaced by making a mix of bias-cut fresh snap peas and fresh snow peas tossed in a soy-vinegar-ginger-garlic vinaigrette.
Zhajiang Mian (fried sauce noodle)
homemade chewy wheat noodle with ground duck and bean paste sauce
With shochu oolong hi-ball
Normally we do a lot of wine pairings, but a lot of wines just don’t pair with these strong and tangy flavors as well as other alcohols do.
For this one we made Chu-hi, which is the Japanese shochu high ball, using dark pearl oolong tea and a whiskey-like shochu called Gokoo that we first had at Momi Nonmi in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago. (It’s seriously great if you’re a whiskey drinker.)
For the wheat noodle we ended up borrowing a pasta extruding machine from our friends David and Diane. What was funny is when corwin ran our test, he made the dough way too dry, so the noodles came out very rough and odd-looking. But they were so tasty and the chewiness was really good, so we decided to just keep going and use them in the meal.
The sauce I sort of improvised on some zhajiang mian recipes but I wanted something somewhat spicier to highlight the duck. (Among the ones I looked at: Woks of Life, China Sichuan Food.)
Sauce:
1 lb. ground meat — let sit in 1 tablespoon corn starch, 1 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp white pepper, 1 tablespoon oil 15 minutes before starting
6 slices ginger, minced
6 cloves garlic, minced
6-10 fresh shiitake, chopped/minced
1/4 cup sweet bean paste
1/4 to 1/2 cup ground bean paste
1 tablespoon chili bean paste
1/3 cup dark soy sauce
1 cup water
Soften the ginger and garlic in the oil and then brown the meat. Add the mushrooms after a minute or two, and once the meat is no longer pink, add all the wet ingredients and stir together to combine. Let simmer 15 minutes. Then add 1/2 cup water with 1 TBS cornstarch dissolved in it to thicken. If still too thin, simmer 5 more minutes.
This was the dish where I forgot the garnish! I have all these matchstick cut carrots and cucumber and I forgot entirely to put them on the plate! There’s always SOMETHING that gets left off.
Duck a l’kalamansi (filipino bitter orange) with Trimbach Reserve Gewurtzraminer
Rice two ways
Steamed bok choy
and a caramel vinegar gastrique
This is basically duck a l’orange, which we’ve never done in all these years of making duck. Typically this comes out too sweet because people use regular oranges instead of bitter oranges. corwin ordered a bunch of kalamansi (filipino bitter orange) online, though, when he was getting our now-nnual yuzu order. This is also when he picked up the finger limes for the palate cleanser.
Palate cleanser
Yuzu sorbet with finger lime caviar, served with Kikusui Perfect Snow unfiltered sake
Dessert
Saikyo miso ice cream
With almond brown butter Sablé cookies
Puffed rice
And hot chocolate
This dessert was inspired directly by Chris Chung at Momi Nonmi, who serves a saikyo miso ice cream regularly and damn, it’s good. Saikyo is a sweet miso, but it’s also salty, and the result is sort of like a butterscotch or salted caramel flavor. corwin made the ice cream and I made the almond brown butter sable cookies, and crisped the rice.
The crispy rice topping was probably the most work. You have to cook it three times: first you just cook the rice. Then spread it in pan and bake it until it’s dry (around 45 minutes at 250 degrees, IIRC), and then you deep fry it in small batches and spread on paper towels to dry. It kept crispy in an air tight container with some silica gel packs for a few days just fine.
The brown butter sables took some experimenting but I settled on was not only incorporating brown butter into the sable dough, but brushing the tops of the cookies before baking. Otherwise the brown butter flavor was too subtle. I made these by rolling a quarter of the dough into a log shape, letting it chill, and then slicing the log into circles.
I then used the other quarter dough to make these almond chocolate mignardise. (And the other half is still in the fridge waiting for me to do something with…)
Tea, Coffee, and Mignardise
candied ginger
almond coconut mango-marmalade thumbprint cookies
almond brown-butter-chocolate cookies
Candied ginger: I used Alton Brown’s recipe. If I do it again I’ll cut the ginger thicker.
Almond coconut mango-marmalade thumbprint cookies (GLUTEN FREE!)
— I based these on this recipe by Texan Erin: https://www.texanerin.com/soft-and-chewy-raspberry-thumbprint-cookies/
Using the Trader Joe’s Virgin Coconut Oil gives them a really strong coconut flavor and scent.
I made the mango marmalade by taking yuzu marmalade we already had, and a mango that corwin’s mother mailed us from her yard in Florida that we had in the freezer (she sends a whole box and we don’t always get to eating them all before they start to go too soft). The frozen mango flesh doesn’t even need to be pureed — it’s basically mush — so I just cooked it down with the marmalade and a little extra sugar to combine them and thicken up.
These stay soft. They might have been slightly crisp at the edges right from the oven but they soften as they sit. Still delicious.
That’s all I can think of! Now I can close all my recipe tabs!
