Lemongrass Pork for Less Than Perfect Weather

Well little pals, it's been a hot minute since I've last posted. I've been back home for well over 6 months now so I suppose I should get my act together and finish one of the dozen or so incomplete food blurbs I have hanging out on my account.

It's supposedly summer already, although you wouldn't have known it by looking out the window last week in Vancouver. Let's keep on fooling ourselves into thinking it's the right goddamned season with some de-licky grillables, shall we?

....I know this post is going to come across as pretty uninspired, but trust: the meat compensates.

Grilled Lemongrass Pork

-about 3 lbs of pork butt roast

-1/2 cup lemongrass pulp
-1 shallot
-6 cloves garlic
-1/4 cup kecap manis
  (sweet soy sauce)
-1/2 cup nuoc mam
  (fish sauce)
-2 tbsp vinegar
  (anything not balsamic)
-2 tbsp raw sugar
-2 tbsp garam masala
-1/2 tsp salt

First off: lemongrass. This can be a bit of a ball ache because chucking in some roughly smashed stalks will not suffice for the marinade. Some Vietnamese markets keep frozen lemongrass pulp on hand, which is fan-fucking-tastic.

But if all you have are fresh stalks please do yourself a favor and know that in this particular circumstance the blender/food processor is not your friend. You're best off slicing the whites into thin rounds and then mashing with a mortar and pestle. I wasn't about to put in the effort given my convenient prepackaged solution, so make do with my shit diagrams:

 Processing it all with an automated blade will result in horrible, pointy shards of cellulose and despair. It took two batches of regrettably prickly chicken to defeat my formidable lazy streak, but I have since learned my lesson about the use of lemongrass.

Finely mince the garlic and shallot, then add them to your lemongrass along with the remaining marinade ingredients.

Turn your meat from this:

into this:

Then the layer meat slices and lemongrass slurry in your vessel of choice and leave it to mingle overnight in the fridge.

The thinly sliced meat should cook pretty quickly, so keep your eye on the bbq to avoid drying out the goods. Grill over medium high heat until you have fatty, salty, slightly charred pigfection.
Good with most anything, but makes for killer banh mi filling!

Cheesy Sea-Things

Every month I cycle through highly predictable waves of stocking my fridge with treats, and then struggling to empty it of said treats. I am pretty ingredient ADHD, so this has become a regular thing; the next recipe is a product of this nonsense. Withering citrus fruit, salvageable cheese, and near-freezer burnt seafood were combined in a desperate attempt to spare things from my garbage can. I know the thought of creamy, tangy sea-bugs may not appeal to everybody, but this seriously takes about 5 minutes to make. You should try it even if you aren't as silly about resource acquisition and expenditure as I am.

Blue Cheese and Citrus Shrimp

- 300-ish grams shrimp
-1 bunch black kale (about 2 cups chopped)
-1/2 lemon: juice and zest
-1/2 orange: juice and zest
-1 tbsp butter
-1+ tbsp blue cheese
-pepper to taste

You'll notice that I don't use any salt in this. That's because blue cheese is insanely salty and does the job of seasoning just fine. Also, I list 1+ tbsp of blue cheese because it was probably closer to two...I didn't really measure (me lazy) but I included a photo below for comparison with my finger and a rough tablespoon of butter.

Zest + juice the citrus. You'll need about 4 tbsp of juice - equal parts lemon and orange. Mince up the zest so it's nice and small.

Remove stiff stems from kale and slice into ribbons.

Now that you've got your stuff together, warm up a pan on high heat and melt the butter. Add the shrimp and grind on some pepper. Cook for about a minute, until pink on one side. Seriously, it shouldn't take more than a minute. There are few things worse than overcooked shrimp, so flip those things over quickly. Once you turn the shrimp over, toss the kale and citrus zest on top.

After another minute, give it all a stir and deglaze the pan with the citrus juice. Crumble the cheese over the whole thing and take the pan off the heat to allow the cheese to melt for another minute.

Toss to coat everything in creamy goodness and you're done. This is best eaten right away - not just because your fridge could use the space, but leftover and reheated "creamy, tangy sea-bugs" sound fucking terrible.

  

Malcoholics rejoice!

Fear not, fellow and future ex-expat boozehounds: I have perfected my delicious, boozy, and very replicable formula for honey makgeolli! Below is a shot of brown sugar makgeolli and wildflower honey makgeolli.

For those who have never sampled/heard of/gotten trashed in Korea on makgeolli, it's a tasty tasty rice wine which is not at all like sake (which most people immediately ask me to compare it to). It's milky in colour, slightly sweet, a little bit carbonated, and super habit forming. It's unlikely that you'll find a palatable bottle in many North American liquor stores as the good stuff has a very short shelf life due to its probiotic nature. You may be able to find it at some Korean restaurants and specialty bars - or you could just make your own. As far as brewing goes, it's easy and cheap.

My primary brewing resource was mistermakgeolli.com, although....me lazy, so I took a few liberties with ingredients and shortcuts and all seems to have turned out just fine. There is a lot of discussion with regards to method and ingredients on various brew forums, I read as much as I could and ended up doing what I figured was the bare minimum for a decent batch of mak. For your benefit, I'll first distill a little bit of my newly gathered knowledge on some of the makgeolli essentials. If you're new to home brewing, you should probably give it a read. If you just want the recipe, skip this next chunk and just scroll on down to the ingredients list.

1. Nu-ruk 
누룩

If you're brewing outside of the ROK, this is definitely going to be one of your limiting factors. I've read some threads on brew forums where people tried subsitutes using amylase and other types of brewer's yeasts, but I steered clear of this option after reading a little about the analysis of nuruk's microflora, which happens to include a total of 64 bacterial species, 39 fugal species, and 15 yeast species. Inclusion of all these species is not universal to all nuruk sources (durr), the primary common microbial agents appear to be Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, B. subtilis, Lichtheimia corymbifera, Pichia jadinii and some kind of saccharifying fungi. I suppose you could play around with commercially available brewing cultures to try and best determine which will impart the best mak-esque flavor by brewing batch after batch of questionable rice wine, but c'mon now.

So I went on a quest for nu-ruk in Vancouver. H-mart didn't have it, nor did 3 other Korean grocers I tried. Unsuccessful attempts were made to order online through g-market, and I couldn't find another English source for the stuff. If you've got somebody handy who is great with hangul perhaps you could find another Korean supplier online, but my Korean is embarrassingly poor. Finally, FINALLY I found a supplier through the warehouse that imports for Hyundai Oriental Market (3488 Kingsway). So there, that's where you can find this stuff in Vancouver.
If you happen to live in America, suck my balls because you can skip all of that fuss and just order it online --> here <--

You'll also need some more conventional yeast to help it along, but that's pretty piss-easy to find. I've heard of others having success with regular ol' baker's yeast, however I used some brewer's yeast I had left over from cider making.  

2. Equipment

Makgeolli is a fucking cakewalk if you've ever brewed anything before. You'll need

• a large jar with a wide mouth (10 litres is a good size, glass cleans better than plastic) 

• bottles which can withstand pressure. The makgeolli will carbonate itself in secondary fermentation, so be sure to use something like plastic soda bottles or beer bottles which can withstand the pressure.

• cheesecloth and rubber band - just to secure over your large jar to keep nasties out.

• muslin bag (jelly straining bag) - you CAN strain your makgeolli with a cheesecloth or fine sieve, but I find it so much easier with the bag.

• funnel, ladle, etc - for bottling.

• stirring thing - for stirring.

2. Sanitization
Zedomax boiled all of his equipment, mistermakgeolli disinfected tools and washed his hands in soju, and I totally did none of this. Keeping things clean is always good, but you're not scrubbing up for surgery. In my experience with makgeolli, wine, and cider I have found that the microbial culture is pretty goddamned aggressive, particularly in the state of primary fermentation. You're not exactly leaving a petri dish of agar out for competing microbes to take over. Years ago grain fermentation was helped along by farmers chewing mouthfuls of rice which would then be spat into the mash (blech), and analysis has shown that nu-ruk often contains small amounts of food borne pathogens such as B. cereus or Cronobacter sakazakii anyways. Despite all of this, the yeast, fungi, and lactic bacteria will take over to produce the makgeolli we know and love. If anything, I save the thorough cleaning work for bottles - you want to disinfect things to keep the good cultures in your brew which are now settling down from the turbulent stage of primary fermentation. So here are my lowest-common-denominator rules for sanitation:

• Wash your hands, bowls, spoons, etc well with hot water and soap.

• Keep bugs out. Fruit flies carry acetobacter, which will spoil your whole batch by turning your tasty wine into vinegar. Avoid this by always keeping cheesecloth secured over the mouth of your primary fermentation vessel.

• Sanitize bottles for secondary fermentation. ... once again, me lazy, so I just run the bottles through my dishwasher with sani-brew instead of dish soap. Works great! Alternately you could boil them, or put them in a large tub of sani brew (or some other food safe disinfectant). 

That being said, there's nothing wrong with erring on the side of caution and disinfecting everything. It's too much of a ball ache for me, but it'll better ensure that your brew won't get contaminated.

3. Brew time
This is highly subject to both the mash as well as temperature. I've read anything from 4 days to 2 weeks with makgeolli, but I've personally never needed more than a week for primary fermentation. You'll see your brew go from a bubbling porridgey slurry to a stratified jar of boozy liquid and sediment. I got really lazy with my last batch and ended up leaving it be for nearly 2 weeks in primary fermentation without any noticeable difference or problems with the final product. It's pretty forgiving. Secondary fermentation (after bottling) takes just a day or two in a warm room. Be sure to have ample space in your fridge to store the finished product as cold temperatures are needed to drastically slow down fermentation once you have a product you want to drink. 

막걸리!!!
5 cups uncooked short grain rice

2 litres of water for primary fermentation, additional 1.5 litres for bottling
1 cup nuruk

1 tbsp brewer's yeast
2 cups honey

Wash your rice well, and cook it as you normally would. Then set aside to cool. I've read that you need to wash the rice 30 times - nuts to that, I wash it out 5 times maximum, the runoff water seems clear enough to me. I've also read that you shouldn't cook the rice all the way through, it has to be a particular kind of al dente - nuts to that, it's always turned out just fine after regularly cooking in my rice cooker.

So there's my lazy opinion and experience getting around rice pickiness

While the rice is cooling, soak 1 cup of nuruk in 1 cup of warm (not hot!!) water. I do this to soften the chunks which i eventually squish apart with my fingers. Alternately, you can grind it up dry with a mortar and pestle, coffee bean grinder, whatever.

Add the cooled rice, nuruk, brewer's yeast, and 2 litres of water to your large jar for primary fermentation. 

Mush it around well with your clean hands so it's all well mixed and your rice takes a bit of a beating.

Cover the jar with clean cheesecloth and secure in place with a rubber band. 

Leave it to ferment in a dark, warm place. I just ferment it under my table in the living room, so I always wrap a thick towel around the jar to keep the stuff insulated from drafts and light. 

After the first day your mash should look like a nasty, bubbling porridge.

Stir the concoction well once every day with a clean spoon to aerate the mash. 

After about 5 days your makgeolli should have topped out at around 16% abv, and the smell should have gone from yeasty to good and boozy by this point. The amount of time may vary by a few days depending on the temperature of your brewing environment, but it should look like the photo above.

Strain the liquid through a mesh bag (cheesecloth, jelly strainer, whatever), and discard the mash. Do it SLOWLY as the rice pulp will quickly clot your strainer. While trying to massage the mesh bag to express more liquid, my roomie remarked that it's best to pinch and roll away the sediment on the inside of the bag. Apparently, "it's just like scratching my balls, which probably why I'm so good at it." Les mots justes, Peter. 

Add 1.5 litres of water and the honey to the strained makgeolli. Just before adding the honey I like to warm it up a little bit on the stove or in the microwave to thin it out and make it easier to blend. Be aware of the type of honey you use, as the rice wine will carry it's flavor. My favorites to use are wildflower and lemon blossom.

The wine will be quite sweet at this point, however it will ferment a little more once bottled. This allows the beverage to get slightly carbonated and a little boozier as the remaining microbial culture metabolizes some of the honey into even more alcohol.

Funnel the makgeolli into your bottles, but leave a generous gap at the top to allow for fermentation. You can see how I filled mine below.

Keep your bottles at room temperature for another day or two.  When it is left at room temperature I would highly suggest gently bleeding the gas from the bottles once a day (or leaving caps on loose) lest you do what I did with my first batch and send a solid stream of highly carbonated liquid straight up and all over your ceiling. After a couple of days you can move them into the fridge to slow fermentation - it's now ready to drink. Putting the makgeolli in a cold place will SLOW fermentation, but not stop it. It's best to drink this stuff within a week of making it (although it apparently keeps for about 2 weeks). If you find it too boozy or perhaps sour when you go to enjoy it, just dillute with more honey and water to suit your tastes. Unlike other wines, makgeolli doesn't benefit from being left to age - in my opinion it tastes best as soon as it's ready to be consumed. Be sure to gently agitate the bottle prior to serving; you want to mix in the sediment for a better taste and that nice, milky look.

I suggest you experiment with sweeteners and flavoring. In Korea most commercial makgeolli uses artificial sweetener, and is sometimes flavored by adding blended fruit just prior to serving. I tried different types of honeys, sugars, and spiced syrups which yielded some of the best mak I and my fellow ex-pat mak-enthusiast Steve have sampled (his frank assessment, not just mine!). Flavoring is definitely best done after primary fermentation, as compounds in flavoring agents may interfere with the initial boozy process.

Alright, that's all. You can go and get wasted now.