Momofuku #1: pork buns

I've had the momofuku cookbook longer than I've had ad hoc at home, but I haven't warmed to it as much, even though I like David Chang's food as much as I like Thomas Keller's, and enjoy reading Chang's writing more than Keller's. Maybe I'm just more interested in cooking European/American food than Asian food - I've already documented previously how I'm drawn to Europe so much more than to Asia - although Chinese food is deeply ingrained in me and I cook it regularly. Maybe that's the problem, that I associate it with everyday food, and not special enough to warrant following a complicated recipe.

Chang's simple recipes (i.e. pickled vegetables) are things I already do because my mom did it and taught me many of her easy recipes. The complicated recipes (i.e. chicken wings or brick chicken) seem overly complicated because I already cook pretty damn good versions of it (I make my chicken wings a version of "three cup chicken" with rice wine, sesame oil and soy sauce). Whatever the reason, even now, browsing the cookbook, I love reading it - it's a great read, I share his love of pork fat, and am inspired by his creative uses of fatty pork (aka bacon) - but I don't really want to follow any of his recipes.

Except for the pork buns. When I had them at Milk Bar in NYC, it was one of those rare moments in life when something truly lives up to its hype. And boy was this pork bun hyped up. Everything you read, heard, watched about David Chang referenced these pork buns, and just the idea of it is so genius, I can't believe no one ever thought of the exact combination before: combining fatty pork with the sweet, fluffy "mantou"-style bun usually used for Peking duck. Even more genius, he solved the crunch problem - the duck skin usually provides the crunch for Peking duck - by adding refreshing pickled cucumbers, which also balances the extra fat (yes crispy duck skin is fatty, but side pork/pork belly is even more so). This stuff was good, and I was willing to go to great lengths to eat it again.

It turns out I didn't need to ... go to great lengths, that is. While there are lots of components, and it is a multi-day process (something I'm getting used to after all those Keller recipes) the preparation of each component is surprisingly easy.

Pork

I had done the pork part of the process several times already, with varying results. I usually find 1.5-2 lb slabs of pork belly (side pork works, too), rather than the 3 lbs called for by the recipe, so I've both oversalted and overcooked the pork before. This time, I had a much better sense of how much salt-sugar rub to use, and how long to cook it. I mixed 1 tbsp each of salt and sugar together and used maybe 3/4 of it to rub down my little 1.5-lb slab of side pork. I'm always tempted to pour the rest of the salt-sugar mixture on so as not to waste it, but I resisted that temptation this time, and it paid off.

Twenty or so hours later, I pulled my side pork out of the fridge, dried it off with paper towels. I guess-timated the oven time because my slab was only about 1.5-lb and the recipe is tailored for a 3-lb slab. First on high heat (450 degrees), basting halfway as instructed, until the top is nicely browned, which took about 45 minutes. Then at 250 degrees for about the same time.

Chang claims you can decant the liquids from the bottom of the pan to get both fat and juices, but I always end up with just fat (no juices that are supposed to turn into a gelatinous layer under the fat), which I reserved for cooking. And a good thing, too, because unbeknown to me at the time, I needed that fat, and exactly that much fat, to make the mantou.

If you start cooking early in the morning, you can complete the pork, the steamed buns and the pickled cucumbers in a day (you'd still have to budget the the day before at least for grocery shopping and rubbing down the pork at least 6 hours before roasting), albeit an exhausting day if you're like me, not a professional cook and not used to slaving away in the kitchen for that long. Besides, Chang recommends chilling the pork before slicing for more even slices, so I set it aside in the fridge until the next day, and made something else for dinner that night (something simple).

Buns

The next day, I made the steamed buns, and then the quick pickled cucumbers (and sliced the scallions) right before dinner. He says you can make do with commercially-made buns from "even a well-stocked freezer section at a local Chinese grocery store," but I think he throws this in just to make the recipe seem more accessible. Don't fall for it. The ones from the freezer sections don't even come close to making it fresh from scratch at home. I can't speak to his other suggestion of buying from a Chinese bakery or restaurant, but I know first-hand that the packages from 99Ranch or Marina's freezer sections don't cut it. You're going to get the steamer out to heat those up anyway, so why not get the steamer out to make fresh buns from scratch. Your handy mixer with the dough hook makes it easy.

This was my first time using yeast, so I was nervous about somehow getting it wrong. It turns out I had no reason to be nervous. Active dry yeast does its job, without poking or prodding. All I had to do was drop it into the mixing bowl with some room temp water, and then add in the other familiar ingredients: flour, sugar ... and pork fat?!? Yes, pork fat! Thank goodness I had kept the pork fat rendered from the side pork the day before.

The dough hook does its job, too, and you get this beautiful, fragrant dough.

Which you let rise for 1-hr 15-min. Then you divide it into 50 small pieces, which he instructs you to roll into balls. It's not possible to make them into perfectly round balls because of the resistance from the dough, but it ultimately doesn't matter.

I tried both covering with a dry towel for this rise, and covering with plastic wrap and placing it in the oven (no heat, just dry, dark and a little warm). Both works just fine, although I liked having the towel for easy re-covering for the shaping step later.

They rise again for a half hour, and then they're ready to shape - flatten, roll and fold. A final half hour's rest where it just puffs up a little more, and you're ready to steam. 10 minutes per batch.

Straight out of the steamer, the taste of my homemade mantou was amazing. I'm sure I've never made anything that tasted this pure. It was like eating a warm, perfectly sweet, cloud. It was ... the single most triumphant food moment of my life thus far. My eyes popped wide open, I turned to Mark, and literally uttered the sound "nom nom" for the first time in my life.

I had prepared the accoutrements while the buns steamed: quick pickled cucumbers, hoisin sauce and scallions.

Oh yeah, and the pork. Sliced and heated for a minute or so on each side over medium-high heat.

Nom Nom!

Perfection!

I called my mom right after dinner to tell her how great they turned out. She happily designated me the family mantou maker. Triumph squared!

And guess what? The steamed buns are almost as good frozen and re-steamed days later - still so much better than store-bought frozen packages. It makes no sense to me, but it just is.

The Power of Pull by Hagel, Brown and Davidson

Imagine if someone took all of your vague and random notions about today's global connectivity and communications capabilities, and how they work to your advantage while at the same time challenging you to keep up, and gave you a vocabulary to speak coherently about it. That's essentially what The Power of Pull does. It explains why job hunting today is so much more complicated now than it was a decade ago, but also why you're able to broaden your job search geographically and otherwise without much physical effort. It explains your friend's success in the business of message board technology, and your other friend's success at promoting games like WoW and Starcraft II.

The phenomenon began all around me over a decade ago, and everyone I know, myself included, has been living it ever since. We just never formed it into a theory, with a special vocabulary. Well, now we have it. It's "push" (old institutional infrastructure) versus "pull" (flexible networks allowing individuals to find, create and share in ways and magnitudes never before envisioned). And tapping into the "knowledge flows" on the "edge," which penetrate the "core" more quickly than ever due to people that use "pull" to advantage.

The intro and first chapter of the book are slightly difficult to wade through because the jargon is new, even if the concepts are not. I had to mentally build a dictionary as I went along. But after the first chapter, I was rolling along easily.

The underlying message throughout is that change and innovation is happening at an exponentially more rapid rate that even a decade ago. Like most people, I'm resistant to change, but The Power of Pull inspires me to be excited about this rapid progress and how I can be a productive participant in it by teaching, or at least starting to teach, how harnessing "pull" is key to succeeding in today's and tomorrow's world.

The first stage of their method is termed "access," something we're all familiar with, even if we don't use it in the targeted, strategic manner suggested in the book. Using networks and putting out feelers, whether through technological means or not, to identify people useful to you to make a greater impact than you could alone or in a closed community (i.e., a company or firm). They include examples such as the tweeting campaign during the recent Iran elections that gave voice to Green protesters, and the community of big wave surfers that share videos of their latest innovative techniques online.

The second stage of their method, "attract," I think is more difficult for most of us. I find the hardest part of attracting is giving enough, providing enough value, to those I'd like to, and potentially can, attract, so as to maintain the relationship long enough to create value. The book warns that the successful use of pull requires that there is mutual benefit to be had, and that otherwise the connections you make are not bound to last.

The last stage, "achieve," is where the method starts to fall apart for me. Maybe this should not have been a "stage" so much as a goal of accessing and attracting. The book at this point begins to rehash the age old endeavor to maximize individual performance, in part by marrying your passion with your profession. It's not entirely clear how this stage naturally follows the first two.

While the concept of "pull" can be superimposed on a wide range of applications, the authors' prescribed methods of accessing, attracting and achieving, and the diagrams littered throughout the book (essentially a single diagram with slight revisions) has limited applicability. Business leaders (i.e., executives, principals, division heads) are the target audience, business leaders are their prime examples of successful case studies (with a few exceptions), and although the authors make a small effort to broaden the application of their theory, business leaders are ultimately the ones that will benefit most from implementing the strategies suggested by this book.

The last few chapters of the book are little more than a strung-together list of platitudes, such as "what is, is only a precursor of what could be" and "For the first time ever, we have the real opportunity to become who we are, and more importantly, who we were meant to be." Really? As with many books of this genre - how-to management, leadership, self-improvement - the conclusion is a bit of a let down.

However, despite a disappointing, and somewhat painful to read, ending, I still think the examples discussed in the first half of the book were interesting and helpful.

Troublesome Young Men by Lynne Olson

Did you know that Winston Churchill's political ambition, along with that of other members of the British parliament in the 1920s and 1930s, nearly cost the allies all of Europe in World War II (WWII)? Did you know that despite Churchill's ambitions to become prime minister one day, he sacrificed his personal moral views against appeasing Hitler, voting against the rebellion that ultimately made him prime minister, because he was afraid to lose his political standing? Did you know that the British parliament was dominated by gutless appeasers? Did you know that their leader, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, was the ultimate gutless appeaser and gave up the only independent democratic country in Eastern Europe at the time, Czechoslovakia, to Hitler for an unrealistic chance at avoiding war with him? Did you know that Britain was woefully and deliberately unprepared to engage in WWII, ensuring their failure to make good on their empty promise to defend Poland against a German invasion?

I learned none of this in my high school history textbooks, but according to Lynne Olson's account of the happenings in Britain's parliament in the years leading up to WWII, these are all truths. The history books I read were all U.S.-centric, focusing more on D-Day and the plight of the Jews. The details about Britain's and France's failed negotiations with Hitler prior to his occupation of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the numerous bluffs they could have called that would have stopped Hitler in his tracks, were glossed over, and all we knew was that Churchill, one of Britain's great orators, was named prime minister at the war's outset and successfully led Britain through the war, which are also true.

If, like me, you have a fascination with British history (which the success of movies like Braveheart and Elizabeth, not to mention the numerous movies and TV series about Henry VIII, indicate is true of many Americans), then you'll love reading Olson's accounts of the rebellion that put Churchill in power, the nature of the government toppled by this rebellion, and her mini-biographies of the rebellion's cast of characters. It will shock and frustrate you to learn how long it took for Britain and the world to wake up to the horror that was Hitler, and how many lives were lost because of the cowardice and political ambitions of the world's leaders, but at least we all know that the story ends well on the whole.