Last year, my friend Margaret invited me to the international festival at the local elementary school. I had a great time, and indeed such a good time, that I asked if I could run a table this year. The good folks at RC Edwards elementary were kind enough to let me participate, and after some deliberation, I decided to go with Bo Ssam tacos. In retrospect, it was a choice that offered a number of technical challenges, but I am pretty happy with the outcome -- people seemed to enjoy, and, critically, the Cinetrix and I will not be eating bo ssam tacos for the foreseeable future. I wanted to write a little bit about the process, both to keep a record of how I did it, and to think about what to change for next time, and also to invite the input of dads and uncles of all gender expressions and identities.
The ask was for 150 servings. Doing some asking and some weighing of actual tacos, they come in at around 2 oz of protein. So that's just shy of 19 lb of finished bo ssam. I got 4 picnic shoulders, which added up to somewhere around 26 lb of fresh pork. The shoulders were skin-on so that's an immediate loss of mass. They are bone-in, too. I should have weighed the finished pork, but I did not have an appropriate scale. Also, I ended up with some, uh, burnt ends when I reheated, so, not all of the pork was fit to serve.
The main aforementioned technical challenge was keeping all of that pork warm -- and at a safe temperature to serve -- in the hallway of an elementary school. The school staff was very handy with extension cords and power strips. I have two crock pots, and more pork than fit in them. I preheated the crock pots, put as much reheated pork in them as would fit, and put the rest in an enamel casserole.
The other hot challenge was keeping 150 flour tortillas warm enough to be pliable. A little tinkering indicated that 20 flour tortillas, at 3:00 in the microwave, with wet paper towels on top and bottom and in the middle, wrapped in aluminum foil, and tucked in a small cooler with the other packs of tortillas worked like a charm, and much better than I had a right for it to work.
The cold challenge was the keeping the sauces at safe temps. I made the sauces David Chang calls for to accompany his bo ssam recipe, plus the toppings for the Hooni Kim/Sam Sifton bulgogi sliders. If you are scoring at home, that's ssamjang, ginger scallion, kimchi and kimchi puree on the Chang side, plus scallion salsa, spicy mayo, and cuke kimchi. It is possible that seven condiments is overkill, but I am hard pressed to know which one I would drop. I pretty much quadrupled the recipes in the Momofuku book, or the NYT recipe, and I have quite a lot of leftover of some sauce, which is not such a bad problem. 8 quarts of stuff at fridge temp pretty much fills up a regular cooler. If I had had to hold it for longer, I would have put ice on the deli containers, but it was a pretty narrow window of time, and the sauces were still cold enough on the way home.
There is a lot of great food at this festival, because there are a lot of talented and generous folks from a lot of different places. One good thing about working at a STEM school is that we get graduate students and faculty from around the world, and they bring their cooking chops and traditions with them. There were a lot of great choices, and when demand slackened, my crew (1st, 4th, and 6th graders, in shifts) and I decided to cut prices from 10 tickets to 6 tickets, or from $2.50 to $1.50. We did sell out, which was my main ambition. Based on the number of leftover tortillas, we sold about 100 tacos, so I may have been too generous, or I may have underestimated the various subtractions along the path from gross to net.
I am not going to lie - the path I chose was a lot of work -- the closest H-Mart is 80 miles away, and I had to hit up a BJ's in another remote corner of GA for my shoulders. I am still digging out from the messes I made. But it was a lot of fun, and I can't wait to do it again.
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