Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- On a recent trip to Australia, we discovered that it's not all about shrimp on the barbie.

In fact, it may be the most exciting cuisine in the world, and that's because it's near Asia and Indonesia, so all those influences have come down to a real fusion cuisine.

The first thing we discovered was pulled pork, but it's made with miso and gochujang.

It's absolutely incredible.

The second was cauliflower, roasted with a thick miso glaze.

And, finally, we had a very simple miso ginger dressing that goes on everything from vegetables to chicken.

So, stay right here at Milk Street, as we explore the new Australia.

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- I got to start by doing some selling here, okay?

So, we all love pulled pork, at least almost everybody does.

And it's one of those dishes you think are iconic, and you don't want to mess with it, and you just can't make any better.

Now, ha, we were in Australia not too long ago and discovered, to our surprise, because we don't know any better, that Asian food, Indonesian food, has greatly meshed with what was Australian food.

In fact, almost everything is Asia-influenced.

You were there, actually, not too long ago too, right?

- I was.

- Yeah.

And so you see wasabi and gochujang, and you see miso, cilantro, mint, etc., etc.

So, the cooking was quite different and fabulous.

We went to a place called the Bird & Ewe-- E-W-E-- a couple called Mills and Kim, and they do a pulled pork.

The two things they add to it that make it stunningly different and wonderful are white miso, here, and gochujang, the South Korean hot paste.

And it's not harder...

I mean, it's an incredibly simple recipe, but it completely transforms pulled pork.

I think one of your kids just eats it cold, right out of, out of the tub.

(laughter) I mean, it is so good.

So, this is a story about Australia, about Asian and Indonesian influence, and how to take an iconic American dish and turn it into something that's-- okay, I'm saying it-- better.

It's better.

- You did say it, and, frankly, it is, in part because it's so much easier.

For this dish, we're really counting on these high-impact flavors for big, bold flavor and a very simple method.

We're going to start with a five-pound pork butt.

We're going to break it down into roughly two-inch pieces.

So, I'm going to use a very flexible, thin knife and just trim some of that fat cap away.

So that's a fair amount of the fat.

At this point, we can cut it into two-inch slabs.

And then we can break these down into two-inch pieces.

Probably say about like that.

- So, can I ask a question?

So now, a lot of people, when they do this, are going to look at this and go, "Do I need to take this out?"

- It's a good question.

For the most part, I would leave it in.

- Okay.

- Because you can always skim the fat off at the end, and as we all know, fat is flavor.

So at this point, I'm just going to chunk these up.

Again, it's two-inch chunks.

You don't have to be precise here, there's no need to break out the ruler.

And it looks like a ton of pork there, but remember, that's really going to cook down as it braises and we're going to end up with far less.

And to this, we're going to add our flavorings.

Half-a-cup of gochujang.

This is the Korean fermented chili paste.

Tons of flavor, it's lightly sweetened, this stuff works miracles.

Next, hoisin sauce.

We've got a quarter-cup of hoisin sauce.

Hoisin is Chinese, you're usually not going to mix something like gochujang and hoisin.

But it works beautifully in this dish, and we've already decided that, you know, in Australia they feel, feel pretty... - Free to mix anything.

- Yeah.

Hoisin adds some really nice sweetness, which intensifies the pork flavor.

And one more fermented product, we're going to add two tablespoons of white miso.

So, now we have Chinese, Korean, and Japanese flavorings in an American pork... (laughing) - In a classic American pulled pork recipe, yes.

- We're going to add the stems off of a bunch of cilantro, about three ounces of ginger.

Now we peel it so you don't get any of the bitterness from the skin.

And then one cup of water.

It doesn't seem like that much, but remember, that pork's going to break down.

It's going to sort of stew in its own juices.

So, let's bring this up to a simmer.

So, a lot of hard work here, right?

We dump everything in the pot, bring it to simmer, - That's why I said, it's an easy recipe, yeah.

- It is.

Those really strong, bold flavors allow us to get really amazingly flavored pork here with very little work.

Now it's time to cover it, would you please.

And we're going to transfer it to a 325-degree oven, and cook it on the lower-middle rack until it's easily pierced with a knife, about three hours.

So while the pork's braising, we're going to make this amazing onion-miso mixture to add to the pork, which is going to help sort of cut the richness and balance it out with this great bittersweet profile-- it's really good.

Let's bring this pan-- medium-high heat, two tablespoons of oil.

You want to wait for that to start shimmering.

So we're going to add two large onions, thinly sliced.

(onions sizzling) Half a teaspoon of salt.

And we're going to mix that up a little.

The salt draws out the moisture from the onions and helps them cook faster.

It also sort of collapses them down.

We want a really nice jammy texture to these onions.

We're going to cook them until they're really brown.

because we want that really bittersweet profile.

Takes about 15 minutes.

You can see how the onions have broken down.

There's a little bit of char on them.

That's all going to counter that richness of the pork.

Here comes the secret ingredient-- miso.

So we're going to add four tablespoons of miso paste.

Again, it's the white miso.

We put two tablespoons in the pork itself.

We're going to add more here, to layer that flavor.

- So quick question-- white miso goes better with pork than a red miso, which would be better with, like beef or...?

- Not necessarily, I just... for this dish, uh, it works better.

Red miso can be really strong, it's very salty, it's more robust, it can be a little bitter on its own.

- Okay.

- So, we want to cook it until it darkens a good bit.

About four or five minutes.

- So I do have a question, when you were in Australia, was this merger of Asia, Indonesia, Australia, is this something that's been going on a really long time?

Or is this something that's more in the last ten years?

- Australian cooking is very open, uh-- they're not hidebound by rules, and there's a lot of flexibility there.

The meat pie, that's a very Australian thing, and there was all sorts of Thai-flavored meat pies and it was really exciting.

You can see that the miso's darkened up a good bit.

And you can smell it, too.

It's lost that sort of just sweet flavor and there's some bitter tones coming through.

We're going to pull it, so it doesn't cook anymore, otherwise it could get really bitter.

Just let me put it on this plate here.

Spread it out.

So, we can refrigerate this till the pork is done.

- Chris, it's been three hours, I checked the meat when it was in the oven, easily pierced with a paring knife, and now let's go ahead and finish the dish.

- Mmm.

- Look at that.

That looks really good.

- Well, I mean, you could look at it, but... (inhales deeply) that's better.

- Yeah, the aroma is amazing.

The ginger comes through really clearly.

So we're just going to use tongs to lift out the meat.

You want to make sure to grab those chunks of ginger.

Those would be a surprise, wouldn't they?

- They would be a surprise-- one right there, too.

- Oh!

Thank you.

So at this point, let's go ahead and skim that fat off.

Just use a big serving spoon, and really just skim the surface.

- Now, this might be a time to use a fat strainer though, right?

- If you have one, it's a great time to do that.

So, Chris, that looks pretty good.

We got the bulk of the fat off.

So, now we're going to reduce that liquid down.

So bring it up to medium-high, and we're going to cook it till the sauce is really thickened enough that you can see a streak when you swipe a spoon through it.

Should take about four or five minutes.

You can watch that; in the meantime let me shred the pork.

- This is why Matt and I get along so well.

I watch the pot and he shreds the pork-- this is great.

I'm just, like, it's perfect.

- You could make me a cocktail.

- This is, this is a real relationship I can understand.

- Chris, that looks perfect.

Now let's go ahead and finish this off.

We're going to add four tablespoons of fresh gochujang at this point.

Refreshes the flavor, adds a little heat.

I'll use a whisk to really incorporate that.

- You know what's going to happen in a couple years?

Maybe it's already happened.

Gochujang is going to be the new sriracha.

It's going to completely take over.

- A couple years?

I think it's two months.

- Because it's got that sweetness to it, you know?

- It does.

And now we're going to add the meat back in, and the onions.

Let's give that a stir.

It's amazing how much that pork has cooked down.

Remember when it was raw?

It was almost to the top.

- Looks a lot better than it did raw, though, I have to say.

(laughing) - I might agree.

So, we want to warm everything back up over medium heat for about five, ten minutes.

- Okay.

It's bubbling away, it's clearly warmed through.

One final touch, we're going to add three tablespoons of unseasoned rice wine vinegar.

Helps really cut the richness, brings out all those flavors.

Along with the pork recipe, we picked up a couple great garnishes from the Bird & Ewe, including this gochujang-spiked sour cream.

Super good, might replace mayonnaise in my house.

- That high enough for you?

- No.

- Keep going?

- Well, yeah.

And these really gingery shredded carrot pickles, which are fantastic.

- And pickled jalapenos and some cilantro.

- Absolutely, it's almost like a Vietnamese sandwich.

You get the pickles, the cilantro, the jalapenos.

- Mmm.

- That is fantastic.

- Yeah.

- And about the messiest sandwich I've ever had.

- It's so much better than just plain pulled pork, which is also great, but... - There's this remarkable complexity to this.

You have all those fermented flavors, add layer, after layer, after layer of flavor.

- Mmm, there are two things I love about this.

You're taking a standard, classic American dish, which is great, but you're making it more complex, right?

It has sweet, savory, it has depth, has the miso, gochujang.

The other thing is it's not any harder, because you're basically throwing everything in a pot and putting in the oven for three hours.

Do some onions in between, freshen it up at the end with a little bit of vinegar and gochujang.

But it's not more work.

So it's more complexity, it's more interesting, but it's not more work, which is perfect.

It's why we're here at Milk Street.

(chuckles) Easy, but actually more interesting.

So, miso gochujang pulled pork is pulled pork with miso and gochujang.

(laughing): 'Cause it actually is that simple, you just throw it in the pot and walk away and come back.

It is absolutely terrific.

Thank you, Matt.

- Oh, you're welcome.

- You know, one of the many surprises we had in Australia was that miso is a core ingredient in lots of recipes.

Now, miso you could think of almost as MSG.

It's one of those basic foundation flavorings.

We don't use it much here in America, but we can, and it's a way of improving your cooking really quickly.

So what is miso?

Well, it's fermented soybeans, usually with a grain, like rice.

So a white miso has rice and soy beans that are fermented.

It's sweet, it's not too salty, it's sort of our all-purpose miso.

Yellow miso is fermented a bit longer, so it has a little bit more flavor.

And then a red miso is fermented with barley, so it has a much richer, deeper flavor, probably better for meats than anything else.

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

There's a lot of things you could do with it, a couple ideas, before we get to our dressing.

You can mix it with butter, 50-50, one part miso, one part softened butter.

You get this wonderful umami flavor.

It's great put it over grilled meats, for example.

Or you can make a stock.

Instead of buying lousy chicken stock at the supermarket, you can use half a cup of miso, four cups of water.

You could saut some garlic and ginger, add the miso, then add the water.

Takes about five minutes to make, has a lot of flavor.

So now we're going to make a miso ginger dressing.

This is a great all-purpose dressing-- it's good for salads, it's good for vegetables, even chicken salad.

So, how do you do it?

Well, we start with a third a cup of walnuts, and a third of a cup of white miso, that's the mildest form, it's what we usually use.

A teaspoon of lemon zest, and a quarter-cup of lemon juice.

Also a quarter-cup of water.

That helps loosen up the miso.

We have an ounce of peeled, sliced, fresh ginger.

Goes in.

Um, we have a teaspoon of honey.

And we also have a teaspoon of Dijon mustard.

And, finally, a half-teaspoon of white pepper.

And we'll put that in a blender, and about a minute or so.

(blender whirring) (blender stops) By the way, the walnuts are not toasted.

We like sort of the creaminess of the raw nuts.

That's pretty good.

And, finally, we have half a cup of neutral oil.

Grapeseed oil is used a lot.

It doesn't have that fishy flavor canola has, so we like that.

And we'll put this back in the blender for about 30 seconds to emulsify.

(blender whirring) (blender stops) So, now we have a really nice, creamy and a bright dressing, lots of ginger, lemon in it.

It's really nice, goes with almost anything.

So, you can use it over salad if you like.

I'm only going to use a little bit of it.

Like that.

So, a couple rules about dressing a salad-- use a big bowl, um, only put a small amount of dressing on at first, and then toss for 15 or 20 seconds with tongs.

The more you toss, the better coated everything gets.

You end up using less dressing than you think you need.

So, that's our very simple miso-ginger dressing.

Miso's a great ingredient to use in your kitchen when you want a lot of flavor fast.

So, being in the food world over many years, decades... (chuckles) foods come in and out of fashion, right?

And so, kale, blah blah.

Well, it's cauliflower now.

Every time we do a recipe for cauliflower, it's, like, goes to the top of the list.

So, we were in Sydney about a year ago, on the waterfront at a restaurant called Fujisaki.

Japanese restaurant, of course.

And they served a cauliflower dengaku, which means glazing with sort of a miso glaze.

Uh, and we'd never seen that done to cauliflower before.

So, we thought we'd bring that concept back to Milk Street and do a roasted cauliflower with a miso glaze.

- Yeah, this is, I do have to admit, this is one of my favorite recipes.

- See?

- Yeah, from Milk Street... - You got the cauliflower bug now?

- Yeah, I do, it's, it's amazing.

And it's really, really simple.

So, the first thing we're going to start with, we're going to prep our cauliflower.

We're going to start with about a two-pound head of cauliflower and I'm just going to peel off these leaves, the greens, as much as I can.

All right, and set these aside.

And we want to cut these into florets that are about an inch-and-a-half to two inches, they're fairly big, because we're going to be roasting in a really hot oven.

And I'm going to start by cutting this, actually, from the bottom down, because I do that, I want to preserve all the little florets.

I don't want them to crumble into little pieces.

So I'm going to start by cutting in half.

Then I'm going to cut each one into a quarter.

You don't even need to necessarily cut all the way through.

Can break apart the rest.

I'm going to take each quarter and turn it on its side, and then just cut away the core.

And then with each quarter, then you can just gently break through the bottom stem there.

- Mm-hmm.

- And break them apart.

- Huh.

Transfer them to the bowl.

- You have a gentle touch.

- (laughing): Well, yeah.

There's a couple crumbles, but it's pretty... it's not bad.

- You know, I like the tip of not cutting all the way through.

Because when you cut all the way through, you get these flat slabs.

- Right.

- Not the florets.

- Right.

And, again, because we're roasting these in a hot oven, we really want them to be an even size-- you know, larger pieces.

Now we're just going to toss these florets in three tablespoons of peanut oil, and we're going to add a quarter teaspoon, we have white pepper here.

We felt that really tracked well with the other flavors in the recipe.

It has nice, floral notes.

We're just going to toss these, to coat.

Okay, so these are nicely coated with the oil.

And so now I know I mentioned that I was going to be roasting these, but we actually have our baking sheets, been pre-heating in a 500-degree oven with the rack set in the lowest position.

And I'm going to go get that-- we're going to work real quick because we want to retain the heat of that baking sheet.

- Okay.

- Thank you.

Just going to make sure we get all the oil out of the bowl.

And I'm just going to distribute these in an even layer, and you want to make sure that they're actually on their cut sides, not on the floret sides.

'Cause that'll get better browning.

You want to move pretty quickly, because you want to keep the heat of that baking sheet.

(faint sizzling) - You can hear it sizzling.

- Yeah, it's already started-- the browning and the caramelization's already started, which is great.

Okay, so this is going to go back into that oven, and it's going to roast for between 15 to 18 minutes.

You want it to be just tender, and, uh, a little bit spotty brown on the top.

- Okay.

- Okay, Chris, while that's roasting in the oven, we're going to go ahead and start our glaze.

And, again, this is really, really simple.

We're going to start with a third a cup, this is red miso.

We prefer this for this recipe.

It has a slightly heartier, a little bit more savory flavor.

You can also use white miso.

This can be a little harder to find.

To this we're going to add four teaspoons of rice vinegar.

You want to make sure this is unseasoned rice vinegar.

We're going to add two teaspoons of sake.

Teaspoon of honey.

- Going to have to use your finger.

- I'm going to have to use my finger.

Hands are the best tools, sometimes, right?

And then we're going to add, also, a teaspoon, this is finely grated fresh ginger.

That's going to give it a little heat as well.

And then, now we're adding two tablespoons of water, and this is just to get the right consistency, to loosen it up a little bit.

We're just going to whisk this all together.

The vinegar is going to add a nice kick, and it's going to help offset all the other sweeter ingredients that we have.

Miso has a little natural sweetness to it.

We have the honey and the sake.

I'm just going to whisk it till it's smooth.

And that's basically it, we just have to wait for the cauliflower.

- So you, you're in charge of simple recipes this year.

- Exactly.

(chuckling) Few ingredients, ten minutes, we're done.

- That's it.

Okay, Chris, this looks great.

I roasted it till it's just tender, and you can see it's got that really nice spotty brown coloring on the edges of the florets, which is going to add a really nice flavor.

So now we're going to add this to our bowl, that we have our glaze already made.

- So it's, it's glazed post-roasting.

- Exactly, exactly.

We tried to roast it with miso, can burn quite easily.

So, this way we get the nice roasted flavor on the cauliflower, but the miso retains its nice, bright, fresh flavor.

And you can see the edges of the cauliflower, really beautifully golden brown.

because we had that nice, hot sheet pan.

So, I'm just going to gently toss this to coat it.

And you do want to be fairly gentle because, you know, it's cooked now, so it's a little bit softer.

I also love the color of the red miso.

Okay, this looks good.

And now we're just going to add our last few garnishes here.

We're going to be adding a quarter-cup.

These are pistachios that have been toasted and chopped.

That adds a nice crunch.

This is a bunch of scallions that we've thinly sliced.

And it's okay to add, we're adding both the white parts and the darker green parts because the heat of the cauliflower's going to slightly mute that you know, raw onion taste.

And this is a quarter-cup of chopped fresh cilantro.

This adds a nice bright green color to this, and the fresh herb flavor.

- You know, I grew up eating boiled cauliflower.

- Oof.

- So, I think that's maybe why people like cauliflower now, because it was... - They've never had it!

- It was prepared so miserably for, like, the last 150 years in America.

Finally, someone figured out that you could put something spicy or interesting on it.

- Mm-hmm, I think you might be right.

And that's it, you just want to... - Boy, that looks good.

- Yeah, toss it till it's just combined, and we're ready to eat.

- Thank you.

- You're welcome.

- So, see if this is an improvement over 1950s cauliflower.

Yeah, I hope so, I think it will be.

- Oh!

- Mmm.

- That is fabulous.

Yeah!

- It's got a nice, bright, sweet-tart flavor I really love.

- You know, there are two ways of thinking about growing up in the '50s and '60s.

One is the food was so bad that now I'm older, I've gone from terrible to great food.

And so, you know, it's the top of the bell curve.

Things are looking good.

The other is that I grew up with terrible food, you know?

- (laughs) - I mean, if you're a kid now, you have, you know, pretty good food.

- It's true.

- Mmm.

So, this roasted cauliflower with miso glaze comes from an old Japanese concept, dengaku, which is glazing with a miso, sort of sweet miso glaze.

We found this recipe, or a similar one at Fujisaki, a restaurant in Sydney, and we brought it back here.

And it has great flavor, and it's really easy to do, and it transforms cauliflower.

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For more information on our extensive collection of kitchen products, we're on the web at fergusonshowrooms.com.

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- Since 1899, my family has shared our passion for everything that goes into our Mutti 100% Italian tomatoes.

Only tomatoes.

Only Mutti.

- Designed by cooks for cooks for over 100 years.

Cookware collection by Regal Ware.

Handcrafted in Wisconsin.

- The AccuSharp knife and tool sharpener, designed to safely sharpen knives in seconds.

AccuSharp: Keep your edge.