Pho-Spiced Corned Beef Banh Mi With Purple Yam Fries

I really enjoy foods that are briny and pickle-y, so I was ecstatic when I read that this month’s CharcutePalooza challenge would be corned beef.  Simply making corned beef hash or straight up corned beef with braised vegetables would’ve been perfectly enjoyable for me, and although a Reuben is one of my favorite sandwiches of all time, those options all felt a little uninspired.

During a recent conversation with my mom, we got on the topic of pho as I told her about the mighty fine bowl I had at Pho Kimmy.  With the aromatic scent of star anise, cinnamon,  fresh herbs, and beef broth permeating her childhood memories, she recounted the times she spent at the pho place her grandpa owned and operated in Vietnam.  However, her fondest memory of the eatery was not of a succulent bowl of pho but of a comforting impromptu sandwich her grandpa would make for her whenever she visited.

The sandwich consisted of only four ingredients: tender brisket straight from a cauldron of simmering pho broth, Maggi, pepper, and a baguette.  Simplicity was the key to keeping his grandkids happy and satiated.  This story gave me the idea to make some sort of sandwich using pho-spiced corned beef as opposed to traditionally-spiced corned beef.  Rather than brisket, though, I decided to use beef tongue because I appreciate the amount of fat and flavor it has.

Despite the fact that I’ve worked with tongue many times in the past, I opted to try my hand at skinning it raw rather than cooked after seeing a video of someone doing it masterfully.  This probably wasn’t the best idea.  It took quite a while to do because I failed to skin the top part off in one fell swoop.  My enthusiasm for trying out a new butchering technique threw a wrench in what was otherwise a no-brainer recipe.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far from doing these CharcutePalooza challenges, it’s that basic charcuterie is really easy.  The amount of active time spent in the kitchen is very minimal, and the tasks required are not complicated.  Corned beef is no different: make the brine, stick the meat in the brine, wait a few days, cook.

When it came to making the brine, I used charred onion and charred ginger for the aromatics and yellow rock candy instead of sugar.  These ingredients are essential to any pho broth and help give it its distinct flavor.  After the brine worked its magic for a few days, I turned to Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure and put my sous vide setup to work.

After 24 hours in the water bath, the meat was super tender and moist.  The flavor was distinctly that of a cured meat, but the aroma and undertones were  undoubtedly that of pho.  In its chilled state, the amount of visible fat marbling found in the beef tongue was enough to make my mouth drool and my arteries cry.  Now that I had easy part done, I had to think of what I wanted on my sandwich.

When conceptualizing the sandwich, I tried to work in as many pho components as I could.  Thai basil, cilantro, green onion, and Sriracha were all shoo-ins, but without any hot pho broth, I needed something to cut the fattiness of the tongue.  Luckily, I still had plenty of pickled radish and carrot from when I made pancetta.  The acidity and crunchiness of the pickled vegetables also served as a substitute for the squeeze of fresh lime and bean sprouts that are commonly added at the table to a bowl of pho.

As for the hoisin sauce, I decided to force myself to find a way to incorporate its flavors into a side dish.  Setting constraints like this can lead to some great ideas that may have otherwise gone untapped.  However, I first had to figure out exactly what hoisin sauce was made of.  To my surprise, the main ingredient in hoisin sauce is sweet potato.  At first, I considered a sweet potato puree, but thought sweet potato fries would be a more appropriate accompaniment for a sandwich.  Furthermore, I opted for purple yams because I was curious to work with them; I’d only worked with the powdered form of purple yam in the past.

The sandwich as a whole came out well.  With each passing bite, I couldn’t help but think of it as a pho banh mi, hence I’m labeling it as one.  Although the purple yam fries didn’t taste exactly like hoisin sauce, the flavor was familiar enough and did a decent job of adding sweetness to the plate just like hoisin sauce does.

When it comes down to it, my pho banh mi simply can’t compete with my great-grandpa’s ad hoc sandwich due to the sentimentality surrounding his, but if it can evoke just a single cherished memory in my mom’s mind (or anyone for that matter) then I’d consider it a success.  The ultimate success would be if new memories are formed and those thoughts percolate into yet another inspired creation.

 

Spice Ratio For Brine

Mise En Place (By Weight)

1. Two units cinnamon
2. Two units star anise
3. Two units fennel seed
4. Two units coriander seed
5. One unit clove
6. One unit Sichuan peppercorn
7. One unit black peppercorn

Method

1. 40 g (1.41 oz) of spice for a 1.27 kg (2.8 lbs) beef tongue in 2.4 L (2.54 qts) of 5% brine

Aromatics Ratio For Brine

Mise En Place (By Weight)

1. Three units onion
2. One unit ginger

Method

1. Char onion and ginger over open flame or under broiler
2. 500 g (1.1 lbs) of onion and 167 g (0.37 lbs) ginger for a 1.27 kg (2.8 lbs) beef tongue in 2.4 L (2.54 qts) of 5% brine

Pho Banh Mi

Mise En Place

1. Pho-spiced corned beef, chilled and thinly sliced
2. Thai basil, stems removed
3. Cilantro, stems preferably removed
4. Green onions, diced
5. Your favorite pickled vegetable
6. Mayonnaise, preferably homemade
7. Sriracha (optional)
8. Hoisin sauce (optional)
9. Baguette

Method

1. Heat baguette in oven
2. Construct sandwich to taste.  Sometimes structural integrity can be improved by placing garnishes on the bottom beneath the meat.

Lamb Heart/Tongue Biryani

I absolutely love South Asian food.  The bold and diverse flavors of Desi cuisine make it arguably my favorite cuisine.  My love for South Asian food probably stems from the chicken curry my mom used to always make in my youth.  It's one of my favorite things to eat in her repertoire and although it's more of a Vietnamese/Malaysian hybrid curry, those heavily spiced bowls of goodness did well to prime my taste buds for South Asian flavors.

One of my favorite things to eat of all time is biryani.  I'd eaten a few times growing up, but it wasn't until college that I really got addicted to biryani: specifically the lamb biryani from Blue Nile.  Their balance of the spices, texture of the rice, and tenderness of the lamb was spot on and pretty much set the standard for which I judge all biryanis against.

Also, because Blue Nile was a Middle Eastern place, each order of biryani came with a side of tahini sauce which gave the dish an extra dimension of flavor with its slight acidity and helped cut some of the meat’s fat.  Slathering biryani in tahini sauce has become my preferred method of eating biryani over the years, and I honestly could drink an entire pitcher of tahini sauce because it’s so good.

After a few years of cultivating my taste for biryani, the time finally came for me to try making some myself.  Lamb tends to be my preferred meat of choice for biryani, so I decided to go with a combination of lamb heart and lamb tongue for the protein.  The heart and tongue both had a nice level of lambiness/gaminess, which is why I like lamb so much.

Recipes for biryani can be highly variable due to regional differences, but they’re plentiful and can be easily found online.  I opted to adapt a recipe that called for heating whole spices and ginger in ghee to awaken them.  I then combined the spices with the meat that was slowly braised overnight in homemade beef stock and biryani spices.

The braising liquid was then used to par-boil the rice, and the meat and spices were folded into the rice.  After a good sprinkling of freshly ground saffron to the top of the rice, the biryani was left to bake in the oven.

As I said before, I love to eat biryani with tahini sauce and made some myself by combining tahini, olive oil, salt, and lemon juice.  I opted not to use garlic in my tahini sauce as I didn’t want it to compete with the numerous spices already in the biryani.  The acidity from the tahini was pretty much a required condiment in order to cut the natural fattiness of the tongue.  Overall, I found my first stab at biryani to be quite a success.  The next time I make biryani, I’ll probably opt for some type of game bird as the main protein.

Red Chile Pork Tamales

One of the things I always look forward to during the holiday season are my uncle Jose’s mom’s tamales.  During the family’s annual Christmas dinner, Vietnamese hot pot and prime rib are usually the stars of the show, but deep down everyone is praying that uncle Jose walks into the house with a bag full of his mom’s tamales.


With a hankering for tamales, I decided to adapt Rick Bayless’s recipe for red chile pork tamales.  I was set on making half the batch with meat from a pig’s head after the great experience I had cooking jook/congee with it.  It’s so hard to resist the many textures and flavors that the head provides.  On my trip to Marketplace on Oakton, not only did I find the usual pig’s heads, but they had suckling pig’s heads too!  Not only that, but they were priced the same as a normal’s pig’s head at $0.99/lbs!



Just like the jook, I used the skull to make some tasty pork stock and substituted it for the water and chicken broth in the recipe.  Also, as I’ve said before and the recipe suggests, freshly toasted and ground spices are always so much better.  I find this especially true for cumin, which was freshly ground along with the pepper.  However, one thing that didn’t work for me was using a food processor to blend the guajillo chiles with liquid as the recipe suggests.  In its defense, it does also say a blender can be used and I should’ve known better by the amount of liquid in the recipe.  Anyways, using a food processor lead to a splashy mess, so I transferred the chiles and liquid to a blender, which worked much better.



With the filling done, I turned my focus to the tamal batter.  Rick Bayless must have known I was making tamales, because the day I went shopping for ingredients he tweeted about his favorite brands of masa: El Popo and El Milagro.  I was set on using fresh masa for the tamales, but I was too lazy to go to a tortilleria or one of the several mercados around Rogers Park.  My next option was masa preparada, which is masa already mixed with lard and salt.  Unfortunately, the Food 4 Less in Evanston, which by the way stocks a good deal of Mexican products, only had pineapple-coconut flavored masa preparada made by La Guadalupana.  As a result, I had to settle with Maseca brand masa harina: dried and powdered masa which needs to be reconstituted with hot liquid.  I decided to use the freshly made pork stock instead of water to reconstitute the masa harina with the hopes that it would add another level of porky flavor to the tamales.



Regarding the lard, I would probably make my own fresh lard next time or go to a proper mercado to get some lard that isn’t shelf stable and not hydrogenated like the bucket-o-lard that I got off of the grocery store shelf.  After whipping the lard until it was fluffy, the masa is added and mixed until a small dollop of batter floats in cold water.



Filling and wrapping the tamales took a really, really, really long time.  I have experience wrapping sticky rice in banana leaves and lotus leaves, so I thought filling the tamales would be a cakewalk.  This was not the case.  Tamales take much longer because of the fact that you have to evenly spread the masa out.  I’m just glad I had an offset spatula to help speed up the spreading process.  The dimensions of the masa spread specified in the recipe was a little wide for my personal preference.  I prefer a thin and tall tamal as opposed to a fat and short one due to it’s fork-sized friendliness.



The first few tamales I ate actually kind of psyched me out.  The fact that I knew how much hydrogonated lard went into the masa made swallowing a little hard.  I thought it was kind of funny that I’m more psychologically averse to hydrogonated lard than I am to things like eyes, tongues, ears, and snout: all of which were in the pork filling.

Overall, the tamales came out pretty good for my first attempt.  Not quite at the level of uncle Jose’s mom’s tamales, but I don’t think I’ll be attaining that level of yumminess in tamal form until I start making tamales on a regular basis.

For my next batch of tamales, I’m thinking sweet rather than savory, much like the one I recently had at Parque de las Palapas in Cancun and similar to the sweet corn tamales I’ve had at Frontera Fresco for many a lunch meal.  The taste of the tamal I had in Cancun reminded me of Vietnamese corn che, che bap, that contains sweet corn, coconut milk, and tapioca or sweet rice.  Perhaps I’ll reconstitute the masa harina with coconut milk and fill the tamales with fresh, young coconut and sweet corn.

I also really want to try making a batch of tamales wrapped in lotus leaves, much like Chinese sticky rice.  When it comes to things wrapped in leaves or husks, I enjoy the flavor and aroma that lotus leaves impart over banana leaves and corn husks.  But the much loved pandan leaves would trump even the mighty lotus leaves if I could just get my hands on some.

Pig’s Head Jook/Congee With 1000-Year-Old Egg

 
  
Jook, congee, chao: whatever you call it, this humble rice porridge is a staple of many Asian cuisines.  I grew up calling it jook, which from my understanding is the Cantonese name for it.  Whenever my family would go to Chinese restaurants, I always thought it was weird to see it called congee, which I would assume is the Mandarin name for it?

I have fond memories of going to my grandma’s house for Thanksgiving and her making jook the morning after Thanksgiving with the Turkey carcass, and this tradition has continued into my parent’s household.  Topped with a 1000-year old egg, a dash of white pepper, and fresh green onion and cilantro from her garden, it’s such a simple yet gratifying thing to eat.  Her rendition of jook is pretty much the gold standard for which I compare all other versions to.  One thing missing from her version, though, was the Chinese doughnut.  The doughnut adds not only flavor, but more importantly a crunchy texture to what is mostly a mushy textured bowl of gruel.  Tasty, tasty gruel, mind you.

  

My initial thoughts were to use pork belly prepared as it is in thit kho, inspired by my mom’s use of thinly sliced, caramelized pork with a similar flavor profile in her jook.  However, the pig’s heads split down the middle at my grocery store always intrigued me, but I never bought it because I couldn’t think of a good use for it other than making a terrine.   I fantasized about the tender cheek, tasty tongue, crunchy ear, squishy eye and heavenly jowl in a bowl of jook and thought it’d be a good candidate.

Not to mention the bones from the skull and copious amounts of gelatin in the head would make for a delicious stock for the jook to simmer in.  So I went with the head and simmered it with mirepoix  to create a solid pork stock and cook the meat until it was fall-off-the-head tender.  As you can see, the head didn’t fit all the way in the pot and the snout wasn’t fully submerged in water.

 


Harvesting the meat from the head was a true test of my will.  Several times I wanted to stick my face into the meat and start chomping.  The rectangular white strips are pieces of the ear that I cut up in order to spread that great crunchy, cartilage-y texture throughout the meat.  I also wished I had some corn tortillas and barbeque sauce so I could make tacos and a pulled pork sandwich while I harvested.  Sadly, the snout didn’t make it into the meat mix since I was afraid that it’d be covered in pathogens since it sat above the water line for several hours.
I let the stock cool overnight so I could easily skim off the fat, and then proceeded to make the jook.  The steps to make jook couldn’t be simpler:

• Simmer the rice in a lot of water or stock for a few hours, stirring occasionally
• Eat

I took a departure from traditional jook and decided to use brown rice, hoping it would add more flavor.  It did, but it didn’t.  It tasted like brown rice, but I missed the comforting and familiar taste of white rice.  Overall, I don’t think it was worth using brown rice.

One thing I definitely did not departure from was the use of preserved egg, or as most of my family calls it, 1000-year old egg.  To me, the use of the 1000-year old egg is essential to my perfect bowl of jook.  In fact, I’d say that if a bowl of jook didn’t have 1000-year old egg in it, I wouldn’t eat it.  I have no idea how to describe how 1000-year old egg tastes, because I’ve never tasted anything like it.  I did notice that on the egg carton that it said lye was one of the ingredients, so perhaps it has flavors that are found in lutifisk?

My favorite part of the egg is by far the creamy yolk.  It’s packed with flavor, while the egg “white” (I guess you could call it the egg opaque black) is relatively bland and simply adds another layer of texture to the jook.  Green onion, cilantro, and pepper add pop and brightness to round out the deeply flavored porridge.



For those not turned off by seeing a pig’s head, there are a couple details about prepping the head after the jump.