I have cooked out of the Momofuku cookbook much more often than I have visited one of David Chang's restaurants. Until the homophobic hate chicken place on 123 in Clemson magically turns into a Fuku, it's likely to stay that way. One of the challenges and frustrations of living in a region that is thin on restaurants is that you -- well me, anyway -- spend a lot of time trying to recreate those fleeting tastes from rare visits to places like NYC or Charleston. I have spent more than a few weekends trying to recreate various meals I can't buy around here, with mixed results. More recently, I have reached a place in my walk with Jesus where I can let myself make a gesture in the direction of an idea of something I ate at a restaurant, but without sweating the details. This approach clicked recently with the Thai Thighs I made, vaguely following a recipe from the Pok Pok book in an effort to recapture the vibes from a recent trip to Xao Bao Biscuit.
The famous Momofuku pork buns are one of those dishes from Away I've tried to make at home -- the first time was a fiasco, and the second time was a success, but it might have been cheaper to hop the Crescent to NYC. This time, what happened was I had some pork left over from a shoulder I was turning into home made Slim Jims. I had a chunk that was about 1.5 lb. I squirted some Hoisin on it, wrapped it up w some garlic cloves in the skin from the whole shoulder, let it marinade for a while, and threw it covered in a 300f oven for maybe 4 hours. I let it rest, defatted the juices, shredded the pork, added the juices back and reheated until the liquid was mostly gone. I did not want to fuck with making buns, so I got some King's Hawaiian rolls. Meanwhile, I mandolined a couple
of cukes, let them sit in a mix of 3 parts sugar 1 part salt for an hour or so, drained them, tossed with rice vinegar and a little bit of korean hot pepper.
I split and toasted the King's Hawaiians, hit them with some Duke's, some shredded pork w a bit of extra Hoisin, and some cukes. Am I going to put Dave Chang out of business? No. Could you call this a vaguely Asian-inflected version of the pulled pork sandwich you can find lots of places around here? Sure. But for my purposes, it was a low fuss prep that made for two solid meals out of surplus from another project. Look for my upcoming TED talk on the virtues of half-assing it.
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