7
votes
What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
I have tried okonomiyaki for the first time just today! It is a savory Japanese pancake made primarily with shredded cabbage. Here is the recipe I used:
https://www.budgetbytes.com/savory-cabbage-pancakes-okonomiyaki/
It was fast and easy to make. The most time consuming thing was to slice the cabbage but I just chopped up the whole thing at once and stored the remainder, so next time it'll be basically effortless. Cabbage goes a long way too.
I think next time I will add some onion. It seems like a great "use up what's in the fridge" recipe, easy to modify.
I also used a "sweet with heat" mustard to top it instead of the sriracha mayo and it worked really well!
I used this exact recipe just yesterday! It's an excellent starting point, but small tweaks ( like your onion idea) really elevate the dish.
My favorite modification is to add mushrooms and garlic to the mix, as well as a dash of Sriracha directly into the batter.
I am absolutely a fan. They're fast, delicious and filling. It's a regular in our house, and does indeed work pretty well with any crunchy vegetable. We've done it with carrots, cabbage, broccoli, red onion (in small amounts), anything that'll still hold up when shredded.
Looks delicious!
I’ve found a Norwegian cheese slicer works great for thinly slicing cabbage if you have one. (And they’re great for cheese too, so definitely worth having.)
This recipe is pretty forgiving for thick cuts of cabbage. I’ve even had it with cubed cuts before and it turns out pretty good.
This is a bit of a weird recipe to me, but that’s Ok because okonomiyaki is a really free-form food. As long as you have a batter and cabbage it’s still okonomiyaki. The thing this is missing the most for my pallet is a sweet sauce to augment the savory flavors. Japanese style mayonnaise is another must. You can also try adding noodles or katsuobushi.
Practicing with cooking steaks. Think I've gotten pretty good at seasoning and cooking them for the right amount of time for them to be medium rare.
What I do want to try is dry-brining one, ideally with MSG. Problem is you can't get monosodium glutamate from regular supermarkets here in the UK, only in smaller Asian convenience stores. Could go Amazon but it feels like overkill to order a bag of MSG online.
In my experience from cooking with MSG, and paralleled by what I’ve heard from YouTube, MSG does not improve the flavor of things like steaks. For one thing, MSG works to trick your tongue into thinking you’re eating a high protein food even if you’re not. Doritos taste so good because they’re salty, starchy and have umami. To your tongue they’re part way to being beef jerky. If you add that attribute to steak it’s just umami on umami. Inferior to salt on umami and potentially not even very noticeable. Additionally, when food is already delicious on its own MSG isn’t usually super helpful. It’s best at enhancing bland foods. I had good success mixing MSG into vegan cheese for a vegan pizza (why the manufacturer doesn’t do this I’ll never understand). Or if you deep fry something and realize it’s pretty bland - just a big wallop of fat - MSG can save the meal.
Guga has had some very promising results with MSG.
He's also experimented with dehydrating tomatoes, parmesan cheese, anchovies, onions, dried kombu kelp seaweed, mushrooms and garlic, putting them in a spice grinder and making a homemade umami seasoning. Apparently it's like MSG on crack.
Just FYI in that video he mentions MSG penetrates the meat in the video but it in fact does not. I'm not a chemist or anything but AFAIK the glutamic acid, aka the part of MSG responsible for 'umami' mentioned by @teaearlgreycold will not penetrate the meat at all, only the sodium ion and less so than table salt. You'll still taste the MSG but it will be similar to a rub.
Also I'm immediately skeptical when he mentions not wanting to oversalt when brining. It's very hard to oversalt something by physically putting too much salt on the meat -- it's the time spent in the dry brine that you need to control far moreso than the amount of salt.
I understand the appeal of MSG but imo pick up a box of kosher salt and start there — if you enjoy cooking you’ll find it super useful in your kitchen.
We just celebrated Canadian thanksgiving here and I did a dry brine on our turkey — kosher salt with a tiny bit of brown sugar. It was fabulous!