I have an obsession. I love buying cookbooks. And not just the easy-to-make weeknight recipe books but super hard and complicated cookbooks produced by amazing chefs that have some of the best restaurants in the nation (some of them ~ the world). When I buy these cookbooks I read through them with post-it notes flagging countless recipes I want to cook. But I rarely cook them. I’m not even a very good cook. I also have run out of space for them on my bookshelf. So before the cookbooks take over my house I think I should use them… cook with them.
So here’s my project: to cook every recipe in my fancy-smancy cookbooks. And to document them here, as I hope my blog obsession will force me to actually cook these recipes so that I can blog about them.
December 7, 2010
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Cold Chicken with Ginger
was a recipe in my Hawaii’s Best Local Dishes cookbook but since I always feel that sauce (and lots of it) is a must and I’m determined to like the scallion and ginger sauce dish from Momofuku’s cookbook, I decided to mix up my own sauce by merging the two recipes.
I started by decreasing Momofuku’s instructions to 2 C of green onions and 1/2 C of ginger, along with a couple cloves of garlic.
To that I added 1 tsp of sherry vinegar, 2 tsp of shoyu, 1 T of Hawaiian Salt (coarse sea salt is similar), and ½ C grapeseed oil. And then mix it all together. All in all, and with no disrespect to the amazing David Chang, but I liked my sauce better, though it was a little too salty – perhaps should have tasted that sauce before dumping an entire tablespoon in it.
Once that was done, I just let it sit for awhile so the flavors could mix.
For the Cold Chicken, I boiled a huge vat of water with salt and some ginger slices and added a chicken (mine was about 5 pounds). Once the chicken was in, the stove was turned to the lowest heat and cooked on one side for 30 minutes and then flipped for another 30 minutes. Or that’s what the recipe said to do. According to my thermometer my chicken wasn’t ready yet so after about 75 minutes I cranked up the heat (eventually causing spillage – oops) until the bird reached 185 on the thermometer.
Then the Chicken was cooled in cold water, cut up and chilled.
Since at this point I just wanted to serve dinner I forgot to take a picture, so instead you get to check out my leftovers from lunch the next day.
