Chicken legs and oxtails

A nice springtime dinner: green pea soup, roasted asparagus, baked chicken leg (the only kind of bone-in chicken regularly available) with lemon and garlic, and rice. Everything turned out great and for once I have recipes, or at least links to recipes. 

Pea soup with creme fraiche(I used home-made yogurt instead of creme fraiche, which doesn't exist here) is from Epicurious, and the lemon chicken  is from the excellent blog Simply Recipes (which also has a recipe for roasted asparagus, a dish that really only needs a recipe the first time you make it).

A less successful recipe was David Chang's (of Momofuku fame) oxtail soup. It was tasty but overly greasy with a hint of an organy/bloody flavour--very slight and probably not a bad thing for a true beef lover, but it was a bit unpleasent for me. I had been wary of the recipe's lack of usual stock-making instructions, with no pre-soak or barboil for the tail bones and no removal of scum or fat from the stock: the tails are simply roasted and then simmered. So although I did skim the foam and try to remove some of the fat, it was obviously a mistake not to give the tails a quick boil first, and next time I'll be sure to follow my instincts.

Daikon peel sauteed with kombu (kelp) leftover from flavouring rice; kimchi; hiyayakko (cold tofu); mizuna greens and red pepper salad; oxtail soup with daikon; rice (not shown).

The next day, with more fat removed and poured over rice, the soup was even better. In fact it was so good that all my complaints from the day before were forgiven. I'd like to try this again--but maybe with a more traditional Korean recipe (anyone have a good one), and next time I won't bother serving the rice and soup separately: they really belong together

Comments

[Marcelo]

Hello!
I've been reading your blog and I think it's great.
I showed to my kids and they loved too.
I like the photos of food, you seem to be a great chef, right?
And the photos of flowers, beautiful.
I lived in Japan, Aichi, for a short time and I really miss curry rice. Do you have any recipe of curry rice?
Sorry about my poor English.
Congrats for your cool blog.

[M.Kate]

wonderful food, always love japanese food :)

[Amy from NY]

Hi you're probably on track if you pre-boil the bones first- it will have a more "refined" taste. I was reading two different Korean recipe books- one called for pre-boiling, and the other did not. The latter book was more about homecooking, while the first one was written by someone who grew up in upper-class household. So I think if I make a soup in the future, I'll follow the pre-boiling recipe. Thanks for sharing your experience.

[Tess]

I just bought a Korean cookbook from the little grocery store down the block from me (as if I'll have time for another cookbook!), and the oxtail soup recipe says to boil the oxtail, drain, and discard the water in the first step. I've seen this technique in Japanese cooking and it has a name. Something to do with frost because the fish or meat turns white? It's a good technique I've transferred to other non Japanese cooking; wish I could remember the Japanese word?

Then the oxtail is boiled, and you skim the foam off. I think the recipe you used with the kombu is better, this one uses msg instead.

The pictures in the book show that the soup is sort of whitish/opaque, though the recipe does not explain how that happened. I'd say from my recent experiments with making ramen broths with pork (and chicken bones), that the way to get this milkiness is to boil (rather than to gently simmer) the soup. You have to watch it closely and add water as needed, but the rapid boiling emulsifies the gelatins and fats from the bones into the broth—a different mouth-feel and richer taste for the broth.

Now that I think of it, when I first learned to make chicken stock all the recipes cautioned against boiling the bones or your stock would become cloudy. hmmm.

hope this helps. contact me if you want me to send you pictures of the recipe in my book.

[margo]

Hello again, still adore your blog.
I'm korean-canadian and I make the roasted oxtail soup both ways. The "white" soup I make as mentioned above, by parboiling & draining & boiling again. The "brown" soup is a bit different: I trim as much fat as possible from the oxtail pieces (and it isn't easy, oh no), then bake the oxtail for about 3 hours (yes, that long) in a low temperature oven - at about 285 degrees. The bones and meat turn very very very dark brown, and most of the fat should render off. Then it's into the stockpot for the boiling.

In both cases I always chill the stock overnight to let the fat harden on top (so it's easier to take off).

So that's how I do it... I'd like to read any other comments on the brown stock? More tips?

Please keep blogging!

[Tess]

I did a few test recipes for a woman who is writing a cookbook called "The Asian Grandmothers' Cookbook" and one of her testers made braised oxtails:
http://theasiangrandmotherscookbook.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/tender-tails/
I think it's Chinese not Korean, though.

[Jae Young]

Hmm, I can ask my mom, but I think she boils only once, but she definitely skims the soup. We also actually add no flavouring, so it's just beef with maybe some garlic or daikon and only add salt upon eating. My mom claims the salt makes it more likely to spoil. And it is almost always eaten poured over rice. It's too greasy really to eat plain.

I'm not a big fan of David Chang's attempts at modifying Korean food. I think much of what makes Korean food delicious to me gets lost in his translation.

[Amy]

Thank you Marcelo. Japanese curry is really easy to make if have the "curry roux" (pre-made blocks of flavouring). Can you get that where you are? If so, you can easily find a recipe online--they're all similar. At the moment I'm working on a recipe that doesn't need the curry roux, and I hope to post it soon.

Thank you M. Kate!

Amy from NY, it's really good to know that the recipe wasn't "wrong", and that there is another way to do it that might appeal to me more.

Tess, thank you for the tips. So is Korean food your next project?

The pre-boil is widely used in Japan, but I had no idea there was a name for it!

I find it a bit confusing which stocks are supposed to be clear and which ones are supposed to be opaque or cloudy--and I rarely get it right anyway. But I'm kind of relieved that in this case the soup was not supposed to be clear. I've had a highly refined version of Korean oxtail soup in Japan and it was clear, so I just assumed that was the correct way.

One more thing: I also like to chill stock to remove the fat (not always overnight--an ice bath and a few hours in the fridge will do the trick), but with rich stocks like this the whole thing tends to turn to gelatin, with no easy-to-remove hard layer of fat on top. All I can do is use a ladle to skim off the fat when the stock is hot, or use a few of those "abura-tori" sheets, but if you have any tips for removing excess fat from a gelatin-rich stock please let me know!

Jae Young, thanks! So you're supposed to pour it over rice? In Japan lots of people do that with miso and other soups but it's considered bad manners (unless it comes to the table that way, as in ochazuke). Good to know I was doing it the right way!