Lev Lazinskiy

Soupy Hot, Help Me, Help Me

Around this time last year, Aosheng and I went to Reno for the fourth of July and I brought a whole box full of veggies with me because we just started getting our CSA box and I didn’t realize how much food was going to show up at our door every week. It felt awful to waste it.

We stayed at an Element suites, which came with a little kitchen. I brought my induction wok with me along with some essential spices, but I forgot to bring soy sauce. Against my better judgment I got some random soy sauce from the closest grocery story. Things went ok for the most part, but a couple days into the trip I decided to make a spicy garlic sauce with soy sauce as the base. This is when I learned that there was a huge difference between Chinese soy sauce and Japanese soy sauce. I also learned the importance of cooking the garlic all the way through in oil before trying to do anything else in order to get rid of the bite. In short, the sauce was disgusting. It literally tasted like vomit. This was the low point of my culinary journey so far. This moment would have been the sob story I told if I ever made it on Master Chef to remind people of how far I have come.

Fast forward to last week when I followed a great recipe I found online to make Sundubu. It was delicious and I was supposed to add it to our weekly rotation. But instead of just following the recipe and enjoying a nice meal, I started to use my imagination and pretend that I was a chef, and thought about what I could do differently.

The core ingredients of this Sundubu are:

• Kim chi
• Beef slices
• Gochugaru Korean Chili Flakes
• Anchovy Broth
• Silk Tofu

Since I make Sichuan style pickles at home (thanks to this awesome recipe from Vivian Aronson). I had this brilliant idea to make a mala tofu soup, inspired by this delicious Sundubu. When I shared this idea with Aosheng, he gave me a very skeptical look, but I was determined to prove him wrong.

The main differences of what I had in mind are:

• Kim Chi -> Sichuan Pickled Cabbage
• Beef Slices -> Reverse seared pressure cooked pork made with some Sichuan flavors that Aosheng’s mom recommended. This included ginger, Sichuan peppercorn, star anise, Chinese licorice root, and a bay leaf.
• Gochugaru -> Sichuan Chili Flakes (that we got from Aosheng’s parents friends in Nanchong)
• Anchovy Broth, the same but also added the broth from the pressure cooked pork
• Silk Tofu -> Same

It was delicious in mind mind. Some parts actually were delicious. When the pork was releasing the steam from the pressure cooker, the smell coming out of the kitchen reminded me of the wiffs of yummy you get as you walk around street food stalls around Chengdu. It’s possible this dish could be amazing, but I completely fucked it up. I made the same mistakes that I made in Reno, and the soup brought back those awful food memories of me wasting an entire pot of veggies in 104 degree heat in Reno last year.

The main mistakes that I think I made are:

1. I didn’t let the garlic cook out all the way before mixing, this left a very bitter taste that I could not get rid of no matter how long I simmered the soup for.
2. I didn’t realize how huge of a difference in spice level there is between the Sichuan chili flakes and the Gochugaru
3. I added Sichuan peppercorn powder and cooked it, I think this was a horrible mistake because it basically just got burned and turned everything incredibly bitter

The part that makes me most sad is that I knew that I could not salvage the sauce but I kept adding things in and trying and ended up wasting even more ingredients like the delicious silky tofu.

Aosheng came home tonight and said “you look defeated”. I really was. This was not my best performance. But I hope to take these lessons and not make these same mistakes for a third time. Tomorrow I’ll go back to following actual recipes and try to make miso salmon and twice cooked pork from Vivian’s cookbook. I’ll dream of new recipes again once I get a few more solid wins.