In Which I Forgot To Post Yesterday, so Have Some Noms &; Blather
Guess what guys? Yesterday was taken up largely by me trying out my new bicycle.
Ain't she purty?
So, yeah, that happened yesterday. It has a bell, a reflector, a back board for strapping stuff onto, and a front basket (not pictured). It's been 20 years since I last rode a bicycle with any regularity, so I'm having to relearn how to use it. Also, I'm maybe 1 inch too short for it, so mounting the saddle is a littttttle difficult. It's probably the best time to get a bike here, because all of the high-traffic events have been canceled, and we've closed our harbors to cruise ships with more than 50 passengers.
I'm excited that I'll get to be more mobile. I'll need a bike lock, but other than that (and some practice) I'm ready for this! I'm stoked!
But enough about a bicycle...
Usually on Sundays I've been posting food, right? So where's it at? It's on YouTube :P I made me some more Nissin Demmai Black Garlic Oil Tonkotsu Ramen after it was requested by a fan who purchased me a couple of Ko-Fi's. This was someone who knows me first-hand, so they knew I had the ramen to test. I probably won't be able to do stuff like this all the time, but it's fun to be able to do it once in a while.
Alright! There's the video!
And hey, if you guys like it, give me a like and hit subscribe on the ol' YT.
That's all from me today - got me some crochet to work on and people to watch videos with!
Using leftover bbq boneless pork ribs to make pork floss
or a reasonable facsimile thereof...
I have been an Asian Grocer's maybe... three times? And those were all on the same day. I saw pork floss then, though I didn't manage to try it, so I actually have no idea how successful this experiment was, regarding flavor and texture comparisons, but as far as how much I liked it? Well... I may have eaten half a quart of it without thinking, so I'd say it went well.
But what is pork floss?
Simply put, it's very, very battered pork. It's pork that's so beat-up that the meat fibers have totally separated into their own crispy/fluffy protein strands, which, combined with sugar and soy sauce, become incredibly addictive. The mechanics of making pork floss (or any kind of meat floss, really, I'm sure) are very simple: Cook your meat, season it with sugar and soy sauce, pound it, then fry it, then pound it, then fry it, then pound it, then... you get the idea. It's not a very difficult recipe, just a long and tedious one. Then again, if you're really annoyed the day you make it, it's a great way to focus your aggression.
First, you start with some meat.
I used leftover boneless pork spareribs that had been cooked in the oven with bbq sauce. Since the ribs were... fairly dry, to be honest, they were my best bet. After all, I wasn't making "leftover potatoes floss" or "leftover Caesar Salad floss", so my options were, at best, limited.
I took my ribs and pounded them with a mallet slightly. I didn't discover until near the end, however, that my best bet would've been to simply leave the meat in its Pyrex dish and beat it with a very heavy glass (be careful not to chip anything!!!). If you don't have a heavy glass or a meat mallet, your next best bet is to find the heaviest cylindrical object (make sure you can hold it for several hours at a time comfortably) in your kitchen and cover the end in plastic wrap, foil, waxed paper, or parchment (held on with probably rubber bands). Basically, you don't want anything that might not be 100% food safe to come in contact with your food.
Once you've slightly deformed your meat (don't go too crazy, you'll get back to it, I promise), it's time to add your marinade. Splash some soy sauce (as much or little as you want) over the meat, then sprinkle a tablespoon of sugar over it. I would add more soy sauce and sugar as I went, just to help the pounding process out. You can just add a buttload at the start, but you might get more caramelization than you'd like.
Remember to cover your meat while you go make a cup of coffee or walk the dog.
Let it sit for a while.
With the marinade on and some time killed, it's time to prep your frying pan. I'd suggest using cast iron if you've got it, because the weight helps it retain heat longer. If you're constantly ferrying meat from pan to pounder and back, the constant heat change can damage the pan (and the constant on/off cycle can mess with your stove!).
I used a little peanut oil to help lubricate the pan, but if you've got a fatty enough cut of meat,
you can probably skip this step. If it's even necessary. I've seen conflicting views on it...
Heat your meat in the pan for a while - this was a step I just... eyeballed. I didn't know how warm to get things, but I made sure there was a little color on at least one side of the meat before I took it out and pounded it some more.
It flattened considerably while I was working!
Then it's back to the pan. And back to the pounder. Over. And Over. And Over.
3rd pounding.
5th or 6th pounding
By the time I hit pounding number 7, I realized that a cup would work better, and that leaving the floss in the Pyrex dish was way more convenient. That's what first tries are all about, folks - learning how not to do things and what ways are better. So I beat that poor floss even more severely. Then I had to leave it in the fridge for a day, but I'd strongly suggest eating it the day you make it! Leaving it in the fridge can make it a bit tacky from the fridge moisture. Ew.
Also, it probably needed another 5 minutes in the pan to really get all the moisture out, but I ran out of time.
But what's this? A bonus recipe?!
Of course! I couldn't just leave you with roughly a quart of beaten pork ribs and no idea how to use them!
We'd also just received our Umai Crate for September, so we were super eager to try some noodz!
I transferred my floss out of the dish and into a zippered bag, which made things much easier to transport. It also made it very easy to fluff the floss, which is a necessary step after settling has occurred.
My re-fluffed floss!
For our noodz, I took two eggs and beat them.
See? Beaten eggs!
The eggs were added to the noodles as I cooked them, and then the eggy noodles were transferred to a bowl and added the seasoning packets.
As you can see, it was an Akakara Ramen, which was creamy and spicy and delicious!
Once everything was mixed together, I mounded up the pork floss on one side of the bowl for aesthetics (and also so that we could add as much or little to our noodz as desired).
They looked fantastic. They tasted better.
This was, without a doubt, the warmest reception I could have hoped for. Not only was I over the moon with how this turned out, but everyone else who tried it was thrilled, too! The meal was awash with yummy sounds, so I was pretty darn proud of myself. I also kept snacking on the floss, since I couldn't fit the whole bag in the bowl...
Ah, what the heck.
Have another glamour shot of the floss!
While the floss was not crispy in the way I've heard it described, it was light, fluffy, and chewy. Since I didn't finish pounding it or frying all the moisture out, it still had a few larger clumps of meat, but for the most part, it looked like frizzy meat wool, but it tasted amazing. Sweet, faintly barbecued, faintly soy-saucey, and intensely meaty, this was a superb ramen topping, so I think that's what's happening to all of the leftover pork in my fridge from now on - it's being sacrificed to the meat floss gods.
If you've got several hours to kill and some slightly dry pork leftovers in your fridge, definitely give this a try! Heck, even if you've just got leftover pork from, say leftover Chinese food, you could probably get a little floss out of it!
Now, if you've followed this far, you probably don't need it, but if you've scrolled around to see if there's any reason to not read, here it is:
Sometimes, there comes a time in a person's life when there are leftovers no one wants to eat in the fridge. It may be that you've had a large party in the last few days and one of your entrees wasn't the favorite. It may be that you just had to cook up a large package of something that was about to go bad so you can extend its potential shelf life. It might just be that you kind of didn't succeed 100% at the recipe you were trying, but while the food isn't great it's still edible.
Regardless of the reason you've had the leftovers, you've probably had them. You've probably also looked at them several times over the ensuing days and thought "boy, I do not want to waste food. I'd hate to chuck it, but I'm just not that into it."
So here is the story of how Z and I survived the Aporkalypse.
My mom is a great cook, but pork products are very difficult to keep tender when you're cooking them en masse (or if they're porkchops, but we gave up on those years ago...), and as she still has the mindset of a mom cooking for six or more people, she tends to cook big.
And that's how we ended up with a container of bone-in pork spareribs in the fridge for several days.
Now, I usually love my mom's pork spareribs. They're always coated in tangy barbecue sauce, cooked in the oven in one of her pretty pyrex or ceramic dishes with the flowers and vines painted on, and they're usually really flavorful and good.
For whatever reason, however, these ribs came out tough, bland, and unappetizing. My dad, who usually takes leftovers in to work for lunch, refused to touch them, and so they sat for days in one of the tall Tupperwares in the fridge.
I needed something to cook with. We were out of meat or meat substitutes that I could bring with me to the kitchen where Z lives, and I wanted to cook. I really, really wanted to.
My choices were thus: I could try my best to make bao buns with the pork ribs, I could attempt pork floss with them, or I could make soup. Since I only had just so much time, the seven hour process of making the bao just wasn't going to work, and since I was not confident in my abilities to remove the bones and properly fry and pound the meat, the floss would have to wait for another time, too. Pity - both would've been great.
Instead, I got the biggest pot with a handle I could find - the one we usually use for mashed potatoes, and I dropped all of the ribs inside. Then I added about 2 cups of chicken broth and dumped in some soy sauce for good measure (probably 1/4 cup, to be honest, and that was a bit much). Then I let it simmer and boil for several hours while I did my blog and drew. That's right, this was a Thursday endeavor.
Here they are with the bones still in, simmering merrily away on my stove!
After several hours simmering away, I started probing the once-tough meat with a slotted spoon. The spoon sank into the meat, so I used it to fish out the bones and set those aside. I should also mention that these ribs were fatty as heck, which made their earlier toughness even stranger.
The ribs are now de-boned and swimming in... far less liquid than before...
I let the pork soup sit on the stove for another hour or so to cool down before dumping it into the same Tupperware it had come from. After washing the Tupperware, of course. I'm not gross.
Here's where things get... weird.
See, I don't visit Z on Thursdays, more often than not, so I wasn't going to be bringing the soup over then. Instead, I waited a day, then brought it over. It took a couple of tries to get the right-sized pot, but then, when I tried to pour the "soup" out, I found it had completely congealed. That's right. I'd simmered all of the broth out, leaving only the rendered fat and soy sauce. How unappealing!
But we saved it with water, more soy sauce, and some frozen corn! Ah, frozen corn, most noble of the bagged freezer aisle veggies. Blessed among the grasses. Yes, corn is a grass.
Regardless, we let that simmer until the pork was beginning to shred into nothingness, and then we went completely mad.
We added a brick of ramen. These were buckwheat soba, so they were pretty umami to begin with, and when we added the packet of flavoring to the soup, it was even better. The seaweed and extra soy flavors really brought out the flavor of the pork, and with the subtle barbecue flavor from their first cooking, this was a really pleasant meal
Even if it looked faintly terrifying.
So why do I call it the Aporkalypse?
Well...
Remember how I mentioned that my mother cooks like there are still half a dozen people living here?
Yeah. Only two people ate ribs the night she cooked them.
I packed four or more servings of pork ribs into this weird noodle stew, and we absolutely felt it. For days. That's way too much meat for two people!
So my only caution for you all is this: if it looks like there's a lot of food, then there probably is a lot of food, and therefore you should try to consider whether to hold some off for later or just invite at least one more person to eat!
