Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- It's tangy.

It's bright and acidic at the same time as it is buttery and full of meaty flavor.

It's really a fantastic combination.

- The savory miso with the depth of the sak, and then those pops of color from the scallions.

It's absolutely delicious.

I can't get enough of this.

- So glad you're here to help me, Chris.

- You're always so glad to see me, I noticed that.

- This week on Milk Street, we're upping our miso game.

We start with a pan-seared steak with smoky miso butter, and then sauted corn with miso butter and scallions.

And we finish up with one of our favorite recipes of all time, a peanut butter miso cookie.

Please stay tuned for three miso makeovers.

You know, once in a while in cooking, you find an ingredient that is identified with a particular cuisine.

You know, gochujang in Korea, for example, za'atar from the Middle East.

But miso in Japan, it's not just for cooking Japanese-style recipes.

It's one of those ingredients you can use for almost anything, you know, from desserts to salad dressings-- we're going to do salmon right now.

What is miso?

Well, it's fermented rice and soybeans.

You could also use barley or other grains.

It's fermented for a week or two or a year or two, it depends.

In the United States, there's usually white miso, which is this or "red" or darker miso.

In Japan, there are probably a thousand different kinds of miso.

So here we're going to start with white miso.

White miso is a little sweeter than dark miso or red miso.

It has sort of a lighter flavor as well.

It's great with fish, for example.

So one other thing about miso, it has deep, rich, umami flavor.

Think of it just as an umami booster and not as something specifically for, let's say, miso soup.

So we're going to make a little bit of a paste here to put on top of salmon fillets.

Throw them under the broiler for a few minutes, and it's going to add just a ton of flavor.

It's a really good quick weeknight recipe.

So we have some white miso, we have some soy sauce.

We have some honey.

Which is good under the broiler, of course.

We have a little toasted sesame oil.

Little cayenne pepper, and a little mirin, which is similar to sak.

It's less alcoholic, and it's also a little sweeter.

And we're just going to mix that up.

In a nice paste.

And if you like, by the way, you can reserve a little bit of this and stir in some water, et cetera, to make a sauce when you're finished broiling.

Okay, so now we have this miso-based paste or sauce.

So now we'll put this under a preheated broiler for about six to eight minutes.

So now we're going to do a simple dressing, which we've made-- it's a blender dressing.

Just throw everything in the blender.

Walnuts, lemon juice, lemon zest, white miso, of course, a little mustard, black pepper, and honey.

And we're going to dress the salad.

And just a nice little tip about dressing.

Use about a third as much salad dressing as you think you need, and then spend a fair amount of time tossing the salad.

Because what happens is, if you do it enough, even a small amount of dressing is going to coat the greens, right?

So we did broil the salmon for about seven minutes.

We took that paste that I used to coat the top of the dressing, add a little bit of water and mirin to it, and we can just sauce the salmon.

So miso is a great example of taking an ingredient from a different culture cuisine and applying it to your Tuesday night cooking.

Simple salad dressing, a way of dressing up salmon.

Miso is just one of the core ingredients we use here at Milk Street to change the way you cook.

- If you're in the mood for a really good steak, but you don't have a lot of time to spend on it, strip steaks are a fantastic option, especially boneless strip steaks.

They cook very quickly.

You can cook them to whatever degree of doneness you like.

And we're doing something fantastic with our strip steaks today.

We are making a smoky miso butter to go on top of our steak after it cooks.

This miso butter we're making is simply a compound butter.

What that is, is it's soft butter mixed with an assortment of high-flavor ingredients.

It could be herbs, it could be spices.

It could be whatever you might want to put in it.

Today we're using miso.

We have two tablespoons of soft butter, and we're using white miso today.

You can use red or white miso.

The difference with those two is white miso has a slightly milder flavor, a little more sweetness to it than red miso.

Red miso has a richer, deeper, intense flavor.

Now, miso is made from fermented soybeans.

It has a salty richness to it.

Look at the texture of this.

It's a very soft paste and very smooth.

So you want to add this to the soft butter.

And this right here is where the depth of flavor is going to come from in our miso butter.

Then we'll add a little bit of smoked paprika.

This gives a smoky taste to the steaks, sort of like they were just off the grill.

If you don't have smoked paprika, use sweet paprika or hot paprika.

And we'll add a little bit of dry mustard.

As you know, mustard has that sort of tang to it, that sharpness and that tang, and the dry mustard contributes that.

If you don't have dry mustard in your pantry, do a little squeeze of a nice Dijon-style mustard.

And a little splash of a seasoned rice vinegar.

We'll mix that together; if your butter is soft, it's not difficult to mix, and we'll mix it until it's fully blended.

You don't want the butter melted because you want this to end up in a paste-like texture.

We'll set this aside at room temperature while we cook the steaks.

If it's really hot in your kitchen, you might want to refrigerate it so it doesn't melt too much.

Now it's time to talk about the steak.

We're using boneless strip steaks for this today.

Strip steaks are very nicely marbled, really tender, high quality steak.

Boneless steaks cook faster than steaks on the bone, so take that into consideration with your cook time.

You want the steaks about one inch thick.

Now, strip steaks can be a little pricey.

There are a lot of steaks, however, that work really great with this miso butter.

You could use skirt steak, tri tip, even sirloin steak works great with these, too.

So really go with whatever you have on hand or whatever you can find at your store.

So before we get started, we are going to heat our pan.

We're doing the steaks completely in a saut pan.

They're going to cook from start to finish in this pan on the stovetop.

We're going to heat that on medium-high and add a little bit of olive oil.

While the skillet's heating, we'll season the steaks.

You always want to preseason your steak before searing and before cooking.

That's just sort of the rule of thumb.

This is a very simple way to cook any type of steak, strip steaks in particular.

We're going to do a generous amount of salt on each side of the steak, and add a little bit of cracked pepper as well.

Really like to pat that salt in so it doesn't fall off when you flip the steaks over.

Do a little bit of pepper.

Pat that in; try and use freshly cracked black pepper whenever you can instead of the pre-ground pepper.

It's going to give you a more intense pepper flavor.

And you also get a little bit of crunch from the coarser cracked peppercorn.

Flip this over.

Salt.

Okay, see, our oil is smoking, so we're just about ready to get going.

(sizzling) That's what you want to hear.

Good.

Now here's the trick; don't move them around.

Leave them there in the pan undisturbed.

You want to form a good, solid brown crust on the bottom before you turn them over.

Four-inch thick steaks will go five to seven minutes on the first side.

Then we'll flip them over and do another five to seven minutes.

And that will get you a really nice medium-rare.

Just keep the pan hot the entire time the steaks are cooking.

Look at these steaks.

Gorgeous brown.

It's been five minutes on the other side.

So we're going to check temperature now.

For medium-rare, we're looking for 120.

Then as the steaks sit and rest, they'll continue to cook a little bit further and come up in temperature.

To use a thermometer like this on a flat steak like this, you don't want to go down through the top because you'll probably end up hitting the pan.

So go in from the side, just like that.

Get in a decent amount till you're almost to the center, and that's where you look for your temperature.

Okay, these look great.

So we'll take these out.

Ah, these got really nicely brown, all in a stainless steel skillet.

Now we'll use our miso butter.

We're going to put it on top of the hot steaks.

It melts, it oozes, it coats the steak, and it becomes more of a sauce, which is what you want.

You don't want to serve cold butter on top of steak.

You want this butter to warm up and become sauce-like.

We'll divide it between the two steaks.

These are pretty big steaks, these are a pound each, so they will easily feed two people per steak.

So you're going to have four servings out of this.

There we go.

I'm going to spread it out a little bit so it melts evenly over the steak.

The steaks are piping hot.

There we go, it's already getting soft.

Perfect.

Okay, now we will tent this with foil, which will keep the steaks warm.

It'll help the butter finish melting, and the steaks will come up to a perfect medium-rare during this time.

Now, while the steaks rest, we'll finish making the watercress salad.

Remember the rice vinegar we used in the miso butter?

It was seasoned rice vinegar.

We're using more of that to make the salad dressing.

If all you have is regular rice vinegar, that's fine.

Just add a little pinch of sugar to it, and that brings up the seasoning a little bit.

Okay, there we go there.

We have a little bit of soy sauce and some toasted sesame seeds.

All right, that's a very simple dressing.

We have a lot of nice fat in that miso butter and in the steak itself so we want our salad to be full of bright, punchy flavors.

Fresh watercress here.

Watercress has a really nice, almost a peppery slight tone; there's a tiny bit of bitterness in it.

It's fantastic as a flavor counterpoint to the steak.

Add a little bit of sliced scallions as well.

We'll just toss that to coat with the dressing, and then we'll be ready to slice the steak and plate it pretty quickly.

The best time, it's steak time.

The steaks are ready, they're fully rested.

We're just going to transfer the salad to the platter.

This is going to be a bed for the steaks-- now the big reveal.

Oh, yes, all right.

Now you have those steak juices with the salt and pepper mingling with that rich, smoky miso butter.

So now all that's left is to slice the steak and assemble the platter.

You want to slice against the grain.

That's true of any steak.

Tender, tough, whatever cut of meat you have, slicing against the grain will give you a more tender slice because you'll have shorter fibers.

Okay, now I can see that the grain of this steak is going in this direction like that.

So I'm going to slice counter to that.

That crust from the salt and pepper and that hot pan sear is really fantastic-- I can feel it as the knife goes through it.

Okay, we're almost ready.

Don't leave behind these amazing steak juices that have that miso butter dripping in them.

This is like a sauce almost.

I do wish you were here to share this with me, but it's not going to stop me from having a little bit.

Mm, mm-hmm.

Contrasting texture and flavor in this, is just everything you want in a meal.

It's rich, it's savory, it's tart, it's tangy.

It's bright and acidic at the same time as it is buttery and full of meaty flavor.

It's really a fantastic combination-- our pan-seared steak with smoky miso butter and watercress salad.

- Today I want to show you how to make a really easy, very vibrant, colorful, and flavorful side dish.

We're going to make sauted corn with miso butter and scallions.

Let's get started.

So I'm going to add some sak to my miso.

Miso is such a thick paste that we don't want it to get clumpy in this recipe, so it's really important to mix it up really well, get all those lumps out and stir this into a smooth paste.

This is looking good.

Nice and smooth and creamy.

I'm going to set this aside and move on to my scallions.

So I'm going to use the greens and the white part of the scallions.

We're going to cut the greens into one-inch pieces and then thinly slice the whites.

Okay, so my greens and whites are separated.

Let's move on to the corn.

So I have most of my corn prepped.

I'm using fresh corn, which is great if you can get it in-season.

If you can't, then you can use frozen corn, which has been thawed and patted dry.

So let's go ahead and remove the remaining kernels from this ear of corn.

Now you can see the kernels kind of jump everywhere, so using a dish or some kind of container to catch them is a very practical idea.

All right, this looks great.

I have all my corn ready and prepped.

Let's go ahead and start cooking.

I'm going to heat a nonstick skillet on medium.

It's important to use a nonstick skillet.

If you were to use a conventional skillet, Miso has a tendency to stick, so a nonstick skillet is much, much better.

I'm going to melt some butter, making sure it doesn't get browned.

So the butter is melted, I'm going to add in my corn and then the scallion whites.

Giving that a quick stir, and this is going to cook for about five minutes until the corn starts just slightly browning.

Okay, so my corn has been cooking for about five minutes, and you can see how it's browned so beautifully on the edges.

A lovely golden brown, we're not trying to scorch this.

I'm going to add some grated ginger.

This is going to add some really lovely depth of flavor.

Cooking this for about 30 seconds, just until it's fragrant.

Okay, this is so fragrant.

I'm going to go ahead and add in my miso slurry.

(sizzling) Listen to that sizzle.

In go my scallion greens.

I'm going to give this a last stir to marry everything together and then we will be done.

Make sure you really scrape the bottom of that pan.

The miso and sak slurry is going to pick up all that flavor and deglaze the bottom.

Look at this, this is so beautiful already.

I cannot wait to taste this.

Okay, I am so excited about this dish, and I want to tell you about a couple of options you have to garnish this dish with.

You can use shichimi togarashi, which is a Japanese seven-spice blend.

It has some heat, and it is delicious.

You can also use furikake, which is a mixture of sesame seeds and seaweed.

Sometimes it has fish flakes in it, et cetera.

This one has just seaweed and sesame in it, and it is also very beautiful and very tasty.

I want to add some of this.

These are totally optional.

The dish holds its own without, so you can totally skip it if you don't have them.

Okay, I am going to make myself a plate.

Let's give this a taste.

The savory miso with the depth of the sak and then those pops of color from the scallions, and the corn is just slightly browned.

It's absolutely delicious.

I can't get enough of this.

- This is a case-- peanut butter miso cookies-- where you're taking umami, miso, and using it as a foundation sort of to offset the sweet.

I think you and I both like sweets that have a little bitterness to them or a little something savory to balance it out.

- Right, balance it out.

It's all about the balance.

- And this comes from the Falco Bakery in Melbourne, Australia, oddly enough.

But I think, I think using miso with a cookie is really a good idea.

- Yeah, it is great, and I think already, peanut butter cookies just on their own are a little bit, you know, a little bit savory.

They've got that nuttiness, and this just takes it up a whole other notch.

And these are just one of my favorite cookies, I gotta say.

So we're going to go ahead and get started.

We have all-purpose flour here.

If you could go ahead and whisk in we have both baking powder and baking soda in this cookie.

And just going to whisk that to get rid of any lumps and combine it evenly.

And I'm going to get started over here.

I have some salted room temperature butter.

And I'm going to add to that dark brown sugar.

Also white sugar.

And I'm going to go ahead and cream these together medium-high speed.

It's going to take about three minutes.

We want it to be nice and light and fluffy.

Okay, Chris, this looks great.

So we're going to be adding our peanut butter.

And here we have crunchy peanut butter.

You just want to get the regular store-bought brand.

You don't want to use any kind of, like, natural peanut butters because they're a little bit coarser and they tend to separate.

I'm going to go ahead and add this.

- I love the fact you're buying supermarket peanut butter and recommending it.

- It's emulsified butter.

- I love it.

It is.

- Yeah, it's one of those few products, like ketchup, that actually is a good product.

- Yeah, it is.

Yeah, I love it.

And then we're going to also add now the miso.

This is white miso we're using, it's a little bit more delicate, and it works better in sweet applications.

So when you're shopping for the miso, Chris, for this recipe you want to make sure that it has a relatively moderate amount of sodium in it, or else it'll make the cookies just too salty.

Somewhere around 300 milligrams.

And then last I'm going to add the toasted sesame oil, which is sort of like a secret ingredient, but it's really nice because it adds a nice, nutty Asian flavor to these cookies, which pairs well with the miso.

- It's not secret if you just told everybody.

- The secret is out!

(laughs) - What used to be a secret ingredient, now it's not.

- I'm going to go ahead and mix this for a couple of minutes till it's nice and fluffy.

This looks good; now I'm going to go ahead and add one egg.

And a little bit of vanilla extract.

I'm going to go ahead and give it a nice scrape.

To make sure I get the thicker peanut butter mixture on the bottom incorporated with the egg, Okay, now I'm turning it down to low because we're going to add our flour.

Okay, we just want to mix this till it just starts to come together.

That's great.

I'm going to go ahead and finish this by hand just to make sure that I get all the flour incorporated.

So now I'm just going to cover this with some plastic wrap, and I'm going to put it in the refrigerator for at least two hours, and you can hold it up to 24 hours, so that it's going to be firm enough for us to scoop and roll into cookies.

Okay, so the dough is nice and firm now.

It's been in the fridge for a long time, and we are ready to shape the cookies.

I really like to use a scoop to portion out cookie dough because it makes it much faster.

- You can buy them in different, like, ten different sizes.

- Right, yeah-- and for these cookies, we're looking to get about three tablespoons of dough per cookie.

And you want to roll it, and we want them to be about an inch-and-a-half thick.

We're going to go ahead and dip it in some nice crunchy turbinado sugar, just on one side, and then I'm going to place them sugar side up on our baking sheet here lined with parchment paper.

If you want to go ahead and help me.

- Oh, so we get to compare mine to yours now?

Is that... - (chuckles) Yeah, always.

And we want to get nine cookies per tray, because these are going to spread quite a bit in the oven.

We don't want to overcrowd them.

So glad you're here to help me, Chris.

- You're always so glad to see me, I noticed that.

I'm just going to show up at your house someday.

Just stand there and be ready to help you.

And you'll go like, "What are you doing here?"

- Great.

Great job, Chris, those look... they look wonderful.

So these are ready to go into the oven.

We're actually going to bake these one sheet at a time so they bake nice and evenly.

Gonna bake at 350 degrees on the middle rack, and I'm going to go ahead and put the first tray in for ten minutes.

Okay, Chris, so the cookies have been baking for ten minutes, and I'm actually going to take them out, and I'm going to give them a couple of sharp whacks on the countertop.

And what this does-- I know, you're looking at me like I'm crazy.

- Why?

Maybe you want to explain.

- Because it deflates the cookies, and then they bake up really nice and thin and chewy.

It's worth it, so I'll be right back.

And they're going to go back in.

Okay, so those are going to go ahead and bake for another five to seven minutes until they're nice and fissured on top and golden brown on the edges.

Okay, so these are all for me, as you can see.

- Well, I noticed they're all in front of you.

- Yeah, right?

I love these cookies, they look great.

Look at those beautiful fissures and the nice, like, sparkly sugar on top.

I let these cool for about ten minutes before I transfer them to a wire rack-- you don't care.

You're like, "Mm!"

- I don't care.

- (laughs) You're like, they're good, they're done.

- Mm, you know, I feel, feel a speech coming on.

No, I know for a fact that if we put tahini in brownies, for example, or miso cookies, people go like, "Eh."

- Mm-hmm.

- But it turns out that actually it's a great idea.

But I think slowly bakeries around the world are starting to do this, so, you know, two years from now, all brownies will have tahini in them, right?

- (chuckles) I love how chewy these are.

- Mmm.

- They're light but chewy at the same time.

- Mm-hmm.

- And they've got a nice crunch on the outside.

- You know, the mark of something that's really good is you take a first bite, you take a second bite, and third bite.

Every bite, you sort of get something more out of it.

- Yes.

- Because it's complex.

- You know, you can tell the miso is in there.

It doesn't, like, scream miso, but you can just, it adds that extra layer of flavor.

- It just makes a better cookie.

So peanut butter miso cookies from a bakery in Melbourne, Australia.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

And I really suggest you get this one.

- Mm-hmm.

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