Toasted dark-rye ramen in duck confit sezchuan broth

A good friend told me the other day that she would never want me as her physician. The comment left me in a moment of paralysis. When you have been running like a tireless horse for a singular goal for most of your adult life – to be a doctor-, comments like these can make you feel like both your motivation and competency were called into trial.

I asked her why, and her response was “you are too curious about food”. I was so shocked to be hearing this, especially from a fellow med school classmate. I was shocked not from the negative comment itself but from the fact that even soon-to-be healthcare providers feel that doctors cannot have outside interests, beside medicine. Patients expect the stereotype of doctors giving bottomless compassion and sacrifice of their identity, and many physicians pleasantly internalize that stereotype. It is not common that anything that a doctor does outside of the medicine-realm may be considered, by both peers and patients alike, as a deterrent to providing quality care.

Suddenly, stories I tried to understand a while back but couldn’t, start to make sense. Stories include a resident with a passion for dancing, who actively tried to his dancer persona from his patients, or an attending physician with a passion for photography doing the same. The common motivation was that they don’t want their patients to associate their professional image with preconceived image of a dancer or a photographer. I didn’t buy their logic back then. My jerked reflex thought was, “why would anyone penalize a doctor for having hobbies?”

The more intensely I searched for answer for this question, the more questions I was left with. Can I be a competent and compassionate doctor, in concert with my love for culture and food? Will my future patients look at me as a reliable doctor if they find out my blog? Or, am I finally reaching the age where my child-like curiosity should be muffled to death? These are hard questions to answer. I don’t have answers right now, and I doubt that I will have answers in the near future. But, what I do know is that in the future, for whatever reasons, even if I ever chose to let go of Lime and Cilantro, I will always reflect back on the good times I spent on this cyberspace.

Yesterday, as I lied on my bed, I couldn’t help but to murmur a phrase from my favorite childhood book The Little Prince, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important”.  

Notes on the recipe

Contrary to what many people think, making ramen noodle from scratch is not technically challenging, but it is certainly crafty. By that I mean, you are not required to do impressive techniques, but you do need to develop a feel for if the dough is behaving right. Take my recipe for a reference point. There will be times, your gut will tell you that you need more water than suggested, follow that. If you fail the first time, don’t worry. I personally tried several times, of course in small batches, until I feel confident in my judgment.

Also, don’t feel afraid to make homemade ramen noodles for a dinner with friends. In fact, it can be quite fun to make those chewy strands while conversing with your friends.  If you choose to actually do a ramen dinner party, here are my tips:

1) Make the dough ahead up to the point of “dough resting” step. In that way, if you somehow f-ed up in the initial steps, you can easily rectify before your friends knock on your door.

2) Obviously, make the broth ahead of time. The broth I use in this particular post doesn’t take long to make, but I feel that doing ahead somehow frees me from this ever-looming-cloud of anxiety.

3) Cook the protein ahead of time. I am using duck confit in this recipe so I like to plan at least 2 days ahead – one overnight day to cure, and one day to cook for cooking. Poached dark meat chicken or fatty unctuous pork belly roasted slowly in oven also make good company to ramen.

Sezchuan pepper-scented duck confit

By Soe Thein
Published 03/24/2017

Classic duck confit technique with a twist

Ingredients

6 duck legs
½ cup of coarse kosher salt (if you are using fine table salt, ¼ cup should be enough)
1/4 cup of Sezchuan pepper corns
2 heads of garlic (peeled)
Duck fat or regular olive oil (enough to cover the duck pieces)

Instructions

Rinse your duck legs with cold water and pat them dry thoroughly.

Grind sezchuan pepper corns either with a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle. Using a fork, mix together the crushed peppery bits with salt flakes.

Apply the salt mixture thoroughly on duck legs. You may notice that compared to many confit recipes, this one does not require as much salt, because I really don’t like how many recipes turn gorgeous duck pieces into hypertension-inducing ones.

The next day (after at least 12 hours of curing), wash down the salt and pepper corn flakes from the duck legs as thoroughly as possible with water. Pat them dry with paper towel.  The scent of those licorice-y peppercorns should not overpower, but linger on the flesh at that point.

In a Dutch oven, layer your duck legs, and strew your garlic cloves on top. Pour over either duck fat or olive oil enough so that all the duck pieces are submerged. Although I say that either choice of duck fat or olive oil is fine, I secretly adore that musky gamey aroma of the feathery animal triglycerides.

Preheat the oven to 300°F and cook the duck pieces for about 2.5 hours until the meat falls apart from the bone. When it is done cooking, let the pot come to room temperature, and store in the fridge. It should last up to a month.

When you are serving the duck confit, the easiest way is to place the cold duck leg, along with the hardened fat globules stuck at crevices, in a cast iron pan, skin side up. Roast for 15-20 min or so in a 350degree preheated oven, until the skin is golden brown and crispy.

Yield: 6-8 servings
Prep Time: 0 hrs. 10 mins.
Cook time: 14 hrs. 00 mins.
Total time: 14 hrs. 10 mins.
Tags: duck, confit, sezchuan

Toasted dark rye ramen

By Soe Thein
Published 03/24/2017

This amazing ramen recipe is adapted from Ivan Ramen.

Ingredients

35g of dark-rye flour (about ¼ cup) (I use Bob's Red Mill Organic Dark Rye Flour, 22 Ounce (Pack of 4)
310g bread-flour (about 2 cups)
150g of cake flour (about 1 cup)
5g of kansui powder (recipe here)
1 cup of cool water
6.5 g of salt (1/2 tbsp)
Corn starch (to prevent noodles from sticking together)

Instructions

Toast the dark rye flour on medium high heat until you start to smell nutty toastiness. I really suggest you put your nose close to the skillet to try and smell it. As soon as you start smelling that addictive aroma, weight out 30g and put the weighed amount in your kitchen stand-mix bowl. The rest 5g is there only to compensate any loss that might have occurred during the toasting process.

Place the rest of the flour in the same stand mixer bowl. I know it sounds excessive to use three different types of flour but Ivan Orkin knows his magic, and it really works.

Dissolve kansui powder and salt in cool water by stirring. Then, turn on stand mixer with a dough hook to a low setting, and the pour in the salty alkaline water slowly into the rotating dough mixture. The dough should starts to absorb all the water in a few minutes. Then, turn up the speed to medium-low, and knead for another 15 minutes. The dough will still be quite crumbly at this point. Don’t be alarmed.

During the next step, you should have wet paper tower by your side. Divide the crumbly dough into 6 portions.  Wet both of your hands liberally, and try to bring each crumbly pile into a coherent ball by pressing with the palm of your hand. If you are used to making Italian pasta, you will probably feel like you are failing badly.  The dough ball will have cracks and crevices on surface and will feel very shaggy. This is how a ramen dough should feel like. So breathe, don’t worry. Cover the dough ball with wet paper towel as you work through your portions.

As you finish forming each pile into a dough ball, wrap each in a ceramic wrap and let it rest for at least an hour at room temperature. By this time, your dough should be quite pliable.

Roll out the dough into an oval shape until the dough is about ¼ inch thick. Use the widest setting on your pasta roller and roll out the pasta. Then, use the setting 7 (two notches before the thinnest setting), roll out the thinner pasta dough sheet. Shred the dough with the thin pasta shredder. Sprinkle corn starch on top to stop the noodle strands from sticking to each other.

Either cook immediately in a boiling water for 2 minutes or cover in a wet paper towel, and store in an air-tight container. It should last for 2-3 days.

Yield: Makes about 1.5 lbs.
Prep Time: 00 hrs. 10 mins.
Cook time: 0 hrs. 35 mins.
Total time: 45 mins.
Tags: noodle, ramen, rye, homemade

Quick sezchuan ramen broth

By Soe Thein
Published 03/24/2017

This sezchuan ramen broth is quick to make but packed with all bold flavors

Ingredients

1.5 liters of chicken broth
10 red dried chili
1 tbsp. of whole sezchuan pepper corn
2 tbsps. of duck fat (rendered from duck confit)
1 tbsp. of tomato paste
1.5 tbsps. of ramen
5 star anise
2 tbsps. of Korean red chili powder
2 cloves of garlic (sliced)
Soy sauce (to adjust the taste)

Instructions

Heat the duck fat, rendered from your duck confit, in pot (medium high heat). Then, plunge in sliced garlic, star anise, dried chili, sezchuan pepper corns and tomato paste. Cook all the aromatics together until the pot is extremely fragrant – about 5 minutes.

Pour in chicken broth, and bring the broth to a boil. Then, put in gorgeous ruby red chili powder, and simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off the heat, and stir in miso. Taste the broth (it will probably need quite a bit of salt at this point), and adjust the saltiness accordingly with soy sauce.

Yield: 3-4 bowls
Prep Time: 00 hrs. 5 mins.
Cook time: 0 hrs. 20 mins.
Total time: 25 mins.
Tags: ramen, broth, soup, sezchuan, spicy, chinese

Soy-cured egg yolk

By Soe Thein
Published 03/24/2017

This umami bomb egg yolks will blow your mind.

Ingredients

2 yolks
1/2 cup of soy sauce

Instructions

Separate the egg yolks from the egg, and place it a bowl.

Pour over soy sauce. Cover in a plastic wrap and let the yolks cure in the fridge for 4 hours, until the gorgeous yellow sunset balls turn into deep dark salty fudginess.

Yield: 2 yolks
Prep Time: 0 hrs. 00 mins.
Cook time: 4 hrs. 00 mins.
Total time: 4 hrs. 0 mins.
Tags: egg, cure,soy

Assembling the bowl

Floor the bowl with 1 tablespoon of duck fat.

Then, place your cooked noodle (about 100g)

Ladle the broth.

Top with shredded duck confit, and soy-cured egg yolk. 

** I thank Tasty Duck for beautiful duck legs, and Bob’s Red Mill for Dark Rye**

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