CSA week three - sukiyaki with hon tsai tai

I had heard the term sukiyaki and had a passing familiarity with the dish when I decided to make it, but I really didn't know what I was getting into. It's a dish more suitable for a family or party than one guy, but once I get an idea in my head for this sort of thing I find it tough to change course.

Sukiyaki, if you break it down to its basics, has two main parts: a sampler platter of chunks of raw ingredients and some sauce to simmer them in.

I used the most complicated sauce recipe I could locate which I found here.

"Warishita (Sukiyaki Sauce):

1/2 Cup Soy Sauce
3/4 Cup Mirin
1/2 Cup Sugar
1/4 Cup Water
1/4 Sake
1/4 tsp Dashi No Moto(optional)
1 clove garlic smashed (optional)

Combine Warishita ingredients(except for dashi no moto) and bring to a boil while stirring, turn down heat and simmer for 3-5 minutes to burn off alcohol. Remove from heat and add dashi no moto, if desired. Remove from heat and cool. Let the sauce "rest" at least 20 minutes, or over night."

Dashi, in case you're unfamiliar, is a fish/seaweed broth which is probably the most common broth in Japanese cooking. It's available in dried granulated form. From the 1/4 teaspoon measurement I'm pretty sure that's what Kirk K., whose recipe I'm filching, means. Which is a good thing as that's what I've got handy.

This sauce is the good stuff. Sweet but with several layers of rich savory flavors even before I start to simmer anything in it.


As for that anything, there's a a lot of variation--regional I think--about what goes into the pot. There's most agreement on beef, enoki mushrooms and yam noodles. Beef I'm using, of course, enoki mushrooms I wish I had but I'm not willing to go out shopping for them right now. Instead I'm using shiitakes, also common, and creminis. Yam noodles are pretty bland and have a nasty rubbery texture so I'm substituting in egg noodles, a move sure to appall purists. Also going in are sliced bamboo shoots, onion, (scallion if I wasn't just about out of it), tofu, and hon tsai tai.

I didn't turn up any sukiyaki recipes that actually called for hon tsai tai, but I did find plenty using spinach and one using mazuna so it should fit in fine.

A sidebar on the hon tsai tai before I continue here. One common thread I noticed in the sparse documentation on using hon tsai tai was complaints about the woody stems. Our batch this year seems rather better on that score than last year's. I think that's because this is younger. I don't see the distinctive yellow flowers and many of the stems are still green. The more purple the stem the woodier it is so I'm avoiding the worst this time around.

There is still some woodiness, though, so I'm going to pick through the bundle harvesting the leaves and keeping only the most tender stems. Everything else I'm packing away for the next time I make stock.

Last year I suggested cooking the hon tsai tai like kale, but I think this batch is more on par with spinach so it's not going to need a long braise, just a quick simmer in the sauce.

So, step two, after making the sauce (and pre-cooking the noodles), is to brown everything that needs pre-browning. In my case that's the tofu and the beef. Traditionally, a cast iron pan is greased down with a chunk of beef fat. I've still got some lard kicking around so I used that. And can I point out that my fresh-rendered lard is substantially less hydrogenated than the big block from the supermarket so it's no worse for me than butter? First I fried the tofu (which isn't traditional but I like a little texture on my tofu), removed it from the cast iron pan and let it rest to crisp up. Then, when I was ready to eat, I seasoned the beef with a pinch of salt and a few drops of soy sauce, browned it quickly on both sides and gathered it up into a pile at the side of the pan.


Next I poured in the sauce and added the greens. I wanted them to wilt down before adding anything else so I put them in right away to let them cook as the sauce came to a boil.





Once it got there, everything else went in--each to its own sector of the pan--and I simmered at medium heat for three minutes before it was ready to serve.




The traditional method of eating sukiyaki is too keep the pot simmering away. Everyone sits around it picking out what they want and cooling each bite by dipping it into a small bowl of slightly thinned beaten egg. Yeah, I know and I understand your trepidation. Japanese folks accept a wider range of food textures than most anyone else. But it's not a problem in this case; There's no raw egg mouth feel at all. The boiling hot meat and vegetables cook the egg they come in contact with and the tiny bit that sticks to them mixes with the clinging layer of sauce to add body and temper the sweetness--improving flavor and texture as well as doing its job as a heat sink. It's actually an essential step that does a lot for the dish.

I don't have a hibachi to set up on a table--heck, I don't have a dinner table--so I had to eat at the stove which is not a dignified operation let me tell you. I think I had the burner cranked up a bit too high because the beef overcooked pretty quickly; I probably should have used skirt steak or the like instead of the more delicate cut I had in the freezer. The onions passed through a properly cooked, firm but not raw, stage at around five minutes and then started cooking down. On the other hand, the noodles and the mushrooms stayed good throughout which was nice.

The hon tsai tai turned out to be much tougher than it looks and took a very long time to soften up. The leaves aren't as thick as most tough greens, but they're very fibrous. It's like chewing on a strip of fabric if it's undercooked. On the other hand, its slightly bitter flavor played against the sweet sauce beautifully. Even with the textural issue, it was the best component of the dish.

Overall, an interesting experience but I could use a bit of practice to get this right. On the CSA end of things it wasn't the best possible use of hon tsai tai. That really needs a braise. If we get any more I'm just going make up a mess of greens southern-style with a chunk of salt pork and a dollop of molasses and be done with it.

I also made a daikon/cucumber salad but since I accidentally made enough food for four people, I didn't eat much. I'll give it a separate post tomorrow.

CSA week seven - pan-Pacific fried rice

a.k.a. cleaning out the refrigerator.

So I had the leftover negimaki, about half of the hon tsai tai (I used the rest in a dish halfway between the cavatelli with greens recipe and ham, eggs and greens recipe I've written up before. It didn't seem distinct enough to give its own post) the avocado and a good bit of leftover rice I'd accumulated over the course of the week. Looking around on-line, the only avocado fried rice recipe I saw was from the hardly-objective folks at avocado.com, but there are plenty of Japanese dishes that match avocado with soy sauce and non-fried rice so I figured it was worth a shot. I added some shrimp and egg and hot peppers as all of those turned up in both the avocado.com recipe and the more legitimate ones. A lot of them used lemon too, so I figured the lemongrass would work OK. I wanted to add some more heat and some vinegar as avocado goes nicely with those flavors both in Mexico and Japan so I made some more teriyaki sauce and dosed it with a whole lot of vinegar-based hot sauce. And I added some sliced water chestnuts and bamboo shoots because I had some to get rid of and it's fried rice and those always end up in fried rice.

I used the standard fried rice methodology.

I heated a tablespoon of oil to smoking in a cast iron pan and stir fried the rice until it rejuvenated, mixed in just enough sauce to plump the rice up again and give it a bit of color and removed it to a bowl. Then I heated a bit more oil, stir fried the spices and tougher vegetables for a minute, added the medium-tough vegetables, stir fried for another minute, added the pre-cooked ingredients and the shrimp, stir fried briefly, added some more sauce and some chicken stock, let it reduce a little, returned the rice, folded it together until the sauce was absorbed/evaporated, and finally stirred in the delicate ingredients--in this case the egg (pre-scrambled) and the avocado.

The end result wasn't nearly the fiasco you'd expect. It was actually not bad at all. Not good at all either, but not bad. The avocado really doesn't add anything, but it's not weirdly out of place. The lemongrass didn't really hold up against the other flavors so I did have to garnish with a squeeze of lemon.

If you were thinking of trying something like this, I'd recommend considering your sauce a bit more carefully than I did. Using cilantro, lime and hot pepper to bridge Mexican and Thai flavors seems a plausible possibility.

CSA week five - braised greens with lop chong

This, I've got to admit, didn't work out so well. Not that adding a bit of sausage to greens is a bad idea. If you've been reading a while, you know that I don't think adding a bit of sausage to just about anything is a bad idea. The sauce--soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and a bit of sugar--worked fine as well. You've another version of that flavor profile in the sugar and vinegar-based hot sauces added to American greens recipes. No, the problems here were a) the Sichuan peppercorns weren't well crushed so they remained unpleasant crunchy woody bits in the thin sauce, and b) another mess of greens that wilted down into a bowl full of stems.

That latter problem seems to be characteristic of the sort of mid-weight greens we've been getting a bunch of most every week. For light greens, like spinach or arugula, the stems wilt and soften along with the leaves. For tough greens, the stems are incorrigible and removed as a matter of course. But with these greens in-between--mizuna, tatsoi, hon tsai tai, and baby versions of the tough greens--the amount of cooking that tenderizes the stems does the leaves in.

The solution may be to remove the stems, chop them up and cook them for a couple minutes before adding the leaves. Hardly seems worth all the trouble though. If anyone has a suggestion for an alternative method that works for you, I'd like to hear it.

CSA week four - stir fried hon tsai tai and a whole bunch of other stuff

[Edit: as this post is one of the top results for Googling "hon tsai tai", I'd like to add a few ideas I've picked up since I first posted this. First, hon tsai tai is tougher than it looks. Cut out the purple stems (the green ones are less woody) and slice the leaves into thin shreds before cooking them. If you're using them in a stir fry, add them early. Braising like collards would be a good application if you wanted to leave them whole. Or try them in the Brazilian kale recipes I made. I think they'd work well in those too. Also, they have a somwhat bitter taste when cooked. Consider sweet sauces or just adding a pinch of sugar for contrast. If you've got other suggestions, please leave them in the comments for other searchers to find. Thanks!]

I really only wanted to add a flavor or two to the recipe from this week's newsletter, but the dish kind of got away from me. To start, I had it in my head from somewhere that Chinese recipes sometimes season greens with dried scallops. I don't have any of those but I do have dried shrimp and I found a recipe in 1000 Chinese recipes pairing them with Chinese lettuce. I had some fresh scallops so I decided to throw those in too. Both that recipe and a spinach stir fry from later in the book used dried shiitakes so in those went. A variant of the lettuce recipe included bamboo shoots and I had some of those leftover. And while I was looking for those I found some leftover ground pork from Saturday's nachos that needed using up.

Now for a sauce. Nine hundred of those one thousand recipe all have the same sauce: soy sauce, sherry (or rice wine), a bit of salt and a bit of sugar. A bit of stock and cornstarch to thicken. Your generic Chinese brown sauce. Add some hot sauce and now you're talking.

Here's more or less how it worked out:

2 bunches hon tsai tai (1 lb?)
1 small handful dried shrimp
2 large or 4 small dried shiitake mushrooms
1/3 cup sliced bamboo shoots
18 or so bay scallops
1/4 lb ground pork
4 T soy sauce
1 T rice wine
1 t sugar
1/4 t kosher salt
hot sauce to taste
2 t corn starch

1. Soak shrimp and mushrooms separately in hot water. Slice mushrooms and reserve half cup of soaking water straining out the mushroom crud.

2. Chop hon tsai tai and separate out the stemmy chunks from the leafy ones.

3. Mix soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, salt and hot sauce.

4. Mix corn starch with 2 t water

5. Heat wok (or large cast iron pan) until it glows cherry red or the fire alarm goes off. Add 1 T of peanut oil and shrimp. Stir fry for a minute

6. Add hon tsai tai stems, mushrooms and bamboo shoots, a bit of salt and some garlic and ginger if you're not about to run out and are saving the last bits for another recipe. Stir fry 3 minutes.

7. Add pork. Stir fry 1 minute.

8. Add soy sauce mix and scallops. Stir fry one minute.

9. Add hon tsai tai leaves. Stir fry until they wilt. Then lower heat to medium. Cover and steam for 3 minutes.

10. Add mushroom soaking water. Mix, cover and steam for 3 minutes more.

11. Check stems for doneness. If they're still not tender, steam some more. But if they are, clear out a space in the middle of the pan for the sauce to puddle. Stir corn starch mixture and add to the puddle. When sauce thickens, stir the dish one more time, turn it out into a bowl and serve immediately.

I'm pretty happy with the end result even if my hon tsai tai stems were a bit undercooked and stringy (I added a couple minutes cooking time to the recipe to fix that). The sauce was flavorful, but didn't overwhelm the vegetables. The dried shrimp adds an interesting flavor and some nice texture, particularly if you don't soak them for a full hour. Nothing extraordinary, but a decent weeknight stir fry.

You'll notice that I treated the hon tsai tai like kale while the newsletter treated it like spinach. Maybe I misidentified the vegetable or maybe I just got an older tougher bunch, but I can't imagine the newsletter recipe coming close to working. Even if you trimmed off all the stems, which wouldn't leave much, you'd still be chewing those leaves for quite a while after only two minutes of steaming. Have any of you tried it?