I really have come to think of Sunday’s meal as the meal that seeds about two other dinners in the week to come. So this particular Momofuku dish does especially well: it gives me rice for fried rice or something else like arancini, it gives me pork for multiple possible other meals, and it even usually leaves some lettuce for tomorrow’s salad.
This ssam sauce was the opening for me to fermented flavors. I’d had some kimchi, but I didn’t love it (it likely wasn’t a good brand or mix) but after I really fell in love with the soybean paste for this sauce I began to try Korean cuisine more actively and to experiment with pickling and so on. This last summer I made a fermented chili sauce that was very hot but really quite lovely—I’m looking forward to a better version this summer.
One small beef I have with this recipe (so to speak) is that Chang wants the pork coated in brown sugar and cooked at 500F for a bit at the end to crust it up hard. It’s a great technique and it does wonders for the pork but it really makes a damn mess in whatever pan you use. I don’t like disposable foil pans but this might be the rare case where it’s the right thing to do.
I love meals where there’s a common set of plates/sauces and people can combine as they please—it’s great for family meals but it’s also great for a big feast with friends. It’s the easiest way I can think of to make sure that everybody is covered—if I had a vegan friend over for this dish, I’d make something like roasted mushrooms or a squash that could also do well with the ssam sauce, the rice and the lettuce. It can be really enjoyable to see what different people do in assembling a good bite. If I had a lot of people over, I might do the second Momofuku sauce (the ginger-scallion one) and maybe something that gets a bit at the taste of the oysters—something with some briny, fresh seafood flavor—shrimp in lime chopped finely. Or heck, maybe some fried oysters. I’ve also thought that thin slices of firm avocado would be great in this.
I think I’ll likely do a sequel to this visit to Momofuku in the future—there’s a good six or seven recipes in the book I still mean to make that I’ve never tackled. The only one I know I don’t want to do involves “meat glue” to make what looks to me like a chicken dish that wouldn’t be particularly special.
Ooh I like the oysters and avocado idea.