So that went reasonably well, but it was a technical challenge in a couple of ways that surprised me.
I skipped the kimchi for now—I was short on time, which ended up being an issue. I wouldn’t have been able to report on it tonight anyway.
The little anchovy-and-peanut snack is nice. Very funky, which I think is the #1 adjective for a lot of Korean flavor profiles, at least from my palate’s perspective. It’s easy to make. I kept thinking to myself that if I were in Southern or Eastern Africa I could make a version of it very easily with kapenta or some other small dried or smoked fish.
Couldn’t find burdock at H-Mart today, so I switched to braising lotus root. That was probably a mistake just in the sense that I’ve never really liked the flavor (more like non-flavor) of lotus root: it seems to me to be 100% a food that is about how it looks. But Maangchi’s version was tastier than many other lotus root dishes I’ve had and made.
I used mild banana chiles for the chile-and-fermented-soybean dish and it was very nice.
The problem with the pork for me began with my not noticing the injunction to soak the potato starch in the requisite water for three hours. I have very rarely used potato starch, so my take was hey, that can be about 90 minutes, right, because we were out too late in the afternoon? Answer: no, I think she means three hours. Because it was super-hard to work with when it came to dipping the pork in it at action stations.
The next problem is that pork shoulder might really not be the right cut for this—or it requires very fine knife work that I didn’t pursue. Meaning, I think it really needs to be extremely thin, and maybe even pounded a bit for tenderness. Shoulder is such a tough cut normally—it’s why I roast it or grill it low and slow for such long times. My pieces may have been a bit thick (though I think they were pretty close to her dimensions) and I might honestly have been better off buying pre-cut pork from H-Mart suited to the dish. Or maybe it needs longer marination in a stronger marinade.
My final technical problem was that I used a deep fryer. This I think was a huge mistake and I should have done it in a wok full of oil. The reason is that the potato starch batter seeped through the fryer basket and boy howdy it did something I’ve never seen a batter do before, which was fry up into gigantic curd-type things that had to be cleaned out of the oil because the basket couldn’t actually get into the oil otherwise. If I was going to do in the fryer, I should have left the basket in and plopped the battered pork slices in to keep them from sticking. Totally my bad.
The one thing that I think might be more on the cookbook is that the sauce, made completely to the recipe’s specifications, seemed neither as sour nor as sweet as I might like it. It was good, and it definitely had that thick texture that stuck to the fried pork nicely for mouthfeel and look, but I wanted it to be much more dramatic-tasting.
VERDICT: Of course we’re keeping it. But I’ll be a bit more wary and respectful the next time I step into the ring with the book.
The pork was really crisp and tasty. I agree the lotus root is a bit tasteless but so beautiful and a nice crunch. The anchovies peanut mix is also really good. Nice textures.