Momofuku is easily my favorite cookbook of all time, even though I’ve never eaten in any of David Chang’s restaurants.
I don’t even recall why I bought it—it wasn’t based on knowing anything about Chang, anything about his restaurants. I don’t remember if I bought it in a bookstore or from Amazon. It just sort of showed up on my shelves around 2012 or so. I think I may have gotten it at the time when I’d just returned from Japan and was seized with a new enthusiasm for East Asian food and felt determined to learn how to make it.
There was just something about the recipes that immediately grabbed me as I read through it—and for once, I was also inclined to read the narrative text for some reason.
The recipes seemed challenging but comprehensibly so—I was able to quickly process what they were asking me to do and why, even though I wasn’t very expert in any East or Southeast Asian cuisine at the time. The food seemed clever somehow, and original to its author. It wasn’t fussy either: I could see my then 12-year old eating it, my spouse eating it, friends eating it.
I still have a few things marked out in the book to try and cook—it’s one of the few I own where I’ve made some effort to keep going back and trying new recipes in it. But I also have some old favorites. I make the cookbook-accurate ramen broth about three or so times a year and I love the all-day attention it takes, as well as the resulting meal—it’s one of my favorite things to do for guests.
Today, though, I’m doing the ssam pork shoulder, which was an extraordinary revelation the first time I made it for my family. It’s something we do on average about once a month now—the shoulder usually becomes meat for tacos or fried rice a couple of days later, so it keeps on giving. I try to keep the ingredients for the ssam sauce around; I stopped making the excellent ginger scallion sauce that also goes with the recipe because nobody but me liked it enough to alternate using that with the ssam sauce, which everybody loves. So typically the only things we need to get are the pork and some lettuce that’s good for wraps, I have everything else on hand most of the time. I have to admit I don’t get the fresh shucked raw oysters that the book calls for (and that I assume are served in the restaurant) mostly because I absolutely will not eat a raw oyster unless I’m 100% it’s a pristinely fresh cold-water oyster, which generally means only have oysters on the half shell in a really good restaurant that I trust. Maybe not even then: vibrio is dangerous. Plus once again they’re not really something that anybody else in the household likes. (Though they do like fried oysters, go figure.)
So this is a slightly simplified version of the Momofuku recipe—what tends to happen when a cookbook dish becomes a household favorite, I think: you streamline it, get it down to the essentials. One thing you can’t skip with this, at any rate, is the cooking time—shoulder has got to be in the oven for a long while—so I’m about to get underway on that part of it.