Recipe Ninja
Korean life October 7th. 2006, 11:10pmLiving in Korea as a foreigner can mean sacrifice. Specifically, the familiar food you have access to on a daily basis shrinks considerably without access to a military base or other sources. This trend is only going to continue, with the departure of both Wal-mart and Carrefour from the domestic Korean food shopping market. Even if I didn’t shop at the two stores out of principal. Wal-mart because of some of it’s business practices, and Carrefour because they have been completely rude to me in the past, it’s still really hard to get the food you want at times.
Case in point: We went to Homever, the new domestic rebranded Carrefour. It was just to check out if there were any deals to be had as they started decreasing their product mix and stopped having the "foreigner food aisle" that was good, if not really expensive. On the way around the store, my wife and I found lasagna pasta. I was sure I had seen them somewhere in Korea, but for months I hadn’t come across them in all the pasta and noodle aisle I shopped in. Silly me, they aren’t in the pasta aisle, they are in the "foreigner" food aisle, no wonder. Retailers quarantine food, as if it’s a bad idea to let Korean housewives know about variety. If it’s not one of the three hundred different kinds of ramyeon noodles, no one cares about pasta.
Anyway, I’m a lasagna fiend of Garfieldian proportions. I love the stuff. I always thought that the ingredients included in my mother’s awesome recipe were impossible to find. Once we found the noodles, we were only missing one other thing. Ricotta cheese. Everything on the list was in the store. I was desperate enough to consider tofu and cheez whiz as possible alternatives to make the recipe work. So close, yet so far. To fail because of a cheese that is never on sale in Korea was depressing.
My wife then mentions to me, "Oh, that cheese? Ricotta? I looked up how to make it on the Internet. I’ll just make the cheese for the recipe. Don’t worry. We’ll have lasagna for dinner tonight."
Forgive me if I was skeptical, but make cheese? As in, forge an ingredient we need from it’s elemental parts? That’s a quest on par for a Culinary Macgyver. Consider me impressed. We went about now buying the ingredients for the ingredients we needed for our dish.
My wife had indeed gone on the Internet and found a chef telling how to make cheese. We even bought some cheese tofu cloth and everything. She mixed the ingredients into the pan when we got home, and thus began the long process of making lasagna the hard way. We made the dish together, only realizing the recipe was for 12 (!) people. Since acquiring the ingredients was so difficult anyway, it’s for the best we made enough for a few meals.
The cheese turned out exactly like the ricotta you’d buy in a store. Once that was accomplished, we were both pleasantly surprised. Several of our "fusion" cooking experiments have ended in disaster. The rest of the recipe had me translating and helping out with portions and directions. We split out tasks evenly from then on, and by the end were really surprised that the result looked or tasted as good as it did.
Just like Mom’s back home, the highest compliment any lasagna can achieve. It’s better than any in Korea I’ve ever had, that’s for sure. The last time we went shopping, there were only a few boxes of lasagna noodles left. With the withering of the foreign owned super chains, I might need to pick up a few otherwise I might not have the pleasure of eating this dish without making the noodles myself, which seems even more absurd, but strangely plausible, now.
6 Responses to “Recipe Ninja”
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October 7th, 2006 at 11:41 pm
sounds good. and do you have a link to the recipe?
October 8th, 2006 at 10:56 am
I have the recipe. http://www.zenkimchi.com/FoodJournal/2006/08/fff-17-how-to-make-cheese.html
You can also use the ricotta to make cheesecake, cheese blintzes — and I’ve made good ravioli from it using mandu wrappers.
October 8th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Torgo’s and Wife’s Lasagna
Ingredients:
15 oz of ricotta cheese* (See below)
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Meat sauce * (See below)
16 oz of lasagna noodles, slightly cooked, drained
12 oz mozzarella cheese
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup onion
1 pound ground beef (500 g)
1/2 cup parsley (optional)
2 cans of whole tomatoes (28 oz cans each)
1/2 can of tomato paste
Basil
Oregano
Sal,
Pepper
Sugar
Prep time: It’s going to take a while if you need to make the cheese. Depending on what you need, 3-4 hours?
Meat sauce:
In a large pan or bowl, add 2 tablespoons of oil. Set to medium heat. Add 1 pound of ground beef (500 g), 1 cup chopped onion, 3 cloves of minced garlic,1/2 cup parsley. Stir frequently until meat browns. In blender, add 2 cans of tomatoes,cover and blend until finely chopped. Add this to beef mixture. Add (6 oz) tomato paste,2 teaspoons sugar,2 teaspoons dried basil, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon oregano leaves, 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of pepper (to taste). Bring meat sauce to a boil. Reduce to simmer, stir occasionally Cook meat sauce for 45 minutes.
In bowl stir together ricotta cheese, egg, and 3/4 cup of the Parmesan cheese. In a large deep baking pan, spread 1 1/2 cups of the meat sauce on bottom of pan. Layer 1/3 of the lasagna noodles on top. Then add a layer of 1/2 ricotta cheese mixture, and 1/3 of the mozzarella cheese. Repeat once. Top with the remaining noodles with sauce and mozzarella cheese and Parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 degrees F ( 180 Celsius) for 50 minutes, or until bubbly.
Cheese recipe: See below
October 8th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Making Ricotta Cheese:
(Units are metric)
1 liter of milk
500 milliliter of cream
1 lemon
2 teaspoons of salt
First, simmer milk and cream with very low heat. After warming cream and milk, add one lemon’s juice and salt.Mix. Simmer on low heat for 1 1/2 hours. (Don’t need to stir, low heat is very important)
After simmering for 1 1/2 hours, The cheese will lump together 20 or 30 minutes later, cheese and water will begin to separate. Place cheesecloth over a strainer, then pour cheese/water mixture through cheesecloth, catching the cheese lumps in cheesecloth. Tie cheesecloth with string with cheese lumps inside.
To harden cheese, place dish cloth on plate, then place cheesecloth with cheese, tied, on dish. Place in refrigerator for 4 or 5 hours.
Cheese cooled after 6 hours*
We didn’t harden the cheese this long. It was in the fridge for 1.5 hours and was fine to mix and work with. If you harden for the full time, you can keep extra hardened cheese by placing them in a jar filled with olive oil. Cut the cheese with a hot knife, add herbs.
See picture
October 9th, 2006 at 3:05 am
Hi Kids,
Thanks for the compliment on my cooking! By the way if you have cottage cheese available you can subsitute it for the ricotta cheese. I do it all time. And the last batch of lasagna I made I did not have the noodles so I used macaroni instead. It was OK in a pinch.
I will have to try the ricotta cheese recipe.
Love ya,
MOM
October 9th, 2006 at 8:48 am
Wow. And I thought I liked lasagna. But you. You made your own cheese. I tip my hat to you, sir.