[Clayton SF]

 

Spoiler: A magnificent photo.

My Masochist's Miso and Sisig Ramen. Designed to punish with a tripartite of pain: mouth-searing capsaicin and boiling broth when served, chest-grabbing/back of neck rubbing pork fat, and foot-swelling uric acid from the miso and gochujang (exacerbated by all the fat; broth also spiked with soy milk). There's some sweet corn in there somewhere too.

 
^ Is that true? My knee swelled up after having three days of miso soup and gochujang-laced concoctions. Could I have gout in my knee? I could hardly walk nor bend my knee all the way. It was very painful.
 
Btw, that photo of your bowl of tripartite of pain is music to the eyes.

 

[watchdog507]

My kids go to restaurants and use my cooking as a benchmark. Tonight was sous vide skirt steak that was seared on BBQ, Yukon gold mashed potatoes, roasted Brussel sprouts, and sautéed mushrooms

 

[ProtegeManiac]

   
^ Is that true? My knee swelled up after having three days of miso soup and gochujang-laced concoctions. Could I have gout in my knee? I could hardly walk nor bend my knee all the way. It was very painful.

 

Yep. I saw a resarch paper last year that said plant -based purines are more easily processed, as evidenced by how much soy-based products are in Asian food but it's not like everybody's hobbling around everywhere, but it isn't entirely true. For starters, alcoholic beverages especially beer are still on tehir list for gout causing food, but it's not like that's made out of lard or ofal. Nope, they're plant based purines. Before I got started on drinking alkaline water regularly, I can have three bowls of miso soup with my dinner, and I wouldn't be walking the next day. 

Actually it happened before that while I was having teishoku (with unlimited cabbage and miso soup) I didn't even make it to the parking lot before my foot started making me regret dinner. At least that was in a mall here in Manila, so on the way to the car, I stopped by a drug store one floor down and picked up Gatorade and Arcoxia. If that happened in California I'd have to drive over to CVS, get out, walk in, settle for OTC NSAIDs then pop some narcotic tabs from the doctors there. Here Arcoxia is OTC (except the box has a warning label on max dosage) but narcotics are practically impossible to get apart from cold+flu pills (you can't even get the cough syrup version, because addicts chug it, while the pills have other stuff in it which you OD on before you're easily knocked out). That's before the country elected somebody who openly encouraged cops to shoot addicts and then plant loose firearms from the back of the police evidence warehouse. Now doctors who are friendly enough to be looser with prescribing knock out pain killers to help you sleep through gout (normally you'd need something like leukemia to get this stuff). You can't even get muscle relaxant without a prescription either, so even painful but otherwise not really dangerous spasms warrant a trip to the ER.

Thanks to alkaline water though I'm regularly eating miso again, and I'm not diluting my soy sauce either.
 

 
Btw, that photo of your bowl of tripartite of pain is music to the eyes.

 
I was sweating the entire time I was eating it (and for half an hour after), and I had the A/C running 

 

[Clayton SF]

^ Thank you, ProtegeManiac, for that informative response. I will, from now on, seek out water with high levels of alkaline to drink before and after diving into bowls miso soup.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

  ^ Thank you, ProtegeManiac, for that informative response. I will, from now on, seek out water with high levels of alkaline to drink before and after diving into bowls miso soup.

 

No need to buy alkaline bottled water, you can get one of those alkalizing filters for use at home. Just watch it though - I drink water like hell* and one side effect of alkaline water is you'll get high blood pressure if you over do it (although more likely if you went with adding baking soda to drinking water). 


*I'm like one of those people who want to see crystal clear piss, except that's not what I'm after - I just use alkaline water to also cancel out stomach acid and keep my stomach feeling full. Along with kimchi with every meal, I lost 55lbs. I managed to cut carbs without havign to cut down on fat and meat.

 

[PalJoey]

I don't buy bottled water. I do have a filter jug though, as the tap water in my neighbourhood doesn't taste particularly great.
 
If I want to have water when I'm on the move, I fill a small vacuum flask from the filter jug. A filter costs £2.50 and lasts about a month, compared to the insane prices that you can pay for bottled water these days.
 
For an alkaline version, stir in a little baking soda. Only a little, though!

 

[ProtegeManiac]

  I don't buy bottled water. I do have a filter jug though, as the tap water in my neighbourhood doesn't taste particularly great.
 
If I want to have water when I'm on the move, I fill a small vacuum flask from the filter jug. A filter costs £2.50 and lasts about a month, compared to the insane prices that you can pay for bottled water these days.
 
For an alkaline version, stir in a little baking soda. Only a little, though!

 

There are places where water filtration, alkalizing, and bottling is local and is relatively cheap. The kind you get and turn over onto the water dispenser. Depending on the alternatives that can be cheaper to some people, although of course for those who can get the filter jugs from Amazon won't see this as economical. Not unless it's for the office dispenser and the bottler is in the next building.

In my case the local bottler near another residential area doesn't make enough alkaline water because they think there's no market for it, which is confusing, because half the time, I ask and they're sold out. So I still ended up just ordering the damn thing from Amazon and paying international shipping. We also have a local alkalizing filter manufacturer that makes them to fit existing Brita mounts, but my aunt tried one and it wouldn't fit properly in our pitcher. I poured water and it was seeping through at the seams. 

 

One other benefit to alkaline water though is it makes a great shortcut for making ramen noodles. Chinese egg noodles are easy to get here but are too alkaline that if you only very slightly overcook it, it has a brackish taste (and that's with normal water). Undercook it, even the kind of undercook you need to do to take into consideration that you'd put it into steaming broth, and it's just stiff. Even Chinese noodle soups here use Korean wheat noodles and we just use the egg noodles for stir fry. This is also the reason why, no matter how great the broth is, if you bought Philippine style ramen from hole in the wall shops (like what you see around Kyoto and Osaka), the noodles just taste weird, since Chinese egg noodles are traditionally used.

 

What I do now it just cook thin spaghetti or linguine in alkaline water and it comes out closer to the texture of ramen noodles, although I have to add a bit of sea salt in the water.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

Another round of my suicidal miso ramen topped with sisig.

 
Garlic sausage (the kind we get in Northern Luzon is waaaaaay more garlicky than any other garlic sausage I've tried from anywhere else in the world) and roasted tomato+chili pepper aglio olio topped with poached egg and grated cheddar

 
Cheddar, Kewpie, Pastrami, Kimchi,  Sriracha, and Pepper Jack "grilled cheese." Toasted on my carbon steel skillet with a LOT of butter.

 

[PalJoey]

I have a couple of pork cheeks marinating in a honey, mustard & thyme mix. Once they are cooked (long and slow, with echalion shallots and a clove or two of garlic), I'll add some sour cream to the sauce. Should be okay...

 

[ProtegeManiac]

  I have a couple of pork cheeks marinating in a honey, mustard & thyme mix. Once they are cooked (long and slow, with echalion shallots and a clove or two of garlic), I'll add some sour cream to the sauce. Should be okay...

 
Damn, now I'm hungry 

 
You can also try some other bit with the pork cheeks. Don't slow cook too long (but use lots of garlic and scallions, plus some soy sauce), dry it out on a rack, score, and then deep fry. Serve with a hot dark cane vinegar-tamari dip (saute onions and chili peppers in a little butter, then pour in the liquid) and some pickled papaya or daikon, or even kimchi. Lots of those actually - when I have food like this it's cut a piece of meat, dip, then top with the pickled veggies and all that in my mouth in one go.
 
Sometimes it's the whole face and not just the jowls and cheeks.

 

[Clayton SF]

   
Damn, now I'm hungry 

 
<snip>
 
Sometimes it's the whole face and not just the jowls and cheeks.
 

Spoiler: Face!

You must have amazing markets in the Philippines. Or maybe one gigantic one that you love.

 

[PalJoey]

   
Damn, now I'm hungry 

 
You can also try some other bit with the pork cheeks. Don't slow cook too long (but use lots of garlic and scallions, plus some soy sauce), dry it out on a rack, score, and then deep fry. Serve with a hot dark cane vinegar-tamari dip (saute onions and chili peppers in a little butter, then pour in the liquid) and some pickled papaya or daikon, or even kimchi. Lots of those actually - when I have food like this it's cut a piece of meat, dip, then top with the pickled veggies and all that in my mouth in one go.
 
Sometimes it's the whole face and not just the jowls and cheeks.

There's some intriguing flavour ideas in that post.
 
The only local shop (Morrisons supermarket) that sells pork cheeks does them as trimmed items - like a small fillet steak in size, but four of them for just over £2. You gots ta like them numbers!
 
The vaguely improvised recipe I posted above turned out very nicely, after 1 hour slow cooking on high and about 3 on low (plus plenty of resting time). I cooked it in a roasting bag, inside the slow cooker/crockpot, which allows me to cook smaller dishes without needing too much liquid (and also cuts down on the washing-up!).

 

[ProtegeManiac]

  You must have amazing markets in the Philippines. Or maybe one gigantic one that you love.

 

Not really, for beef I gotta go far from my north end of Manila and go straight to the center because the ones near here have chewy local beef or past its prime imported beef - frozen solid or suspicious looking "fresh" in the display. Pork is easy enough to find (ditto chicken, ie, they sell just the carcass for like, $0.50/kg, basically a quarter per lb) as the places with crap beef have most pork cuts, even blood by the liter for stew, but the biggest retailer (the mall developer owns the dept stores and the grocery in their own mall), SM, sucks. Not just the suspicious beef - sometimes even the pork looks like they left it out of the freezer, put it back at the end of the day, then brought them back out that morning. On the upside, Ayala or Gokongwei malls are usually rght across SM malls or otherwise within walking distance, so even when I step into an SM grocery and my nose already tells me to get the hell out, I can just walk over to the other mall and get something else. The frustrating bit is that SM has the pig faces.

 

I still prefer shopping in the US though (specifically California), although of course it's still delineated the same way. I get my steak, brisket, and ground beef from Costco or Von's, and then I get my pork (and thinly sliced beef) from Asian groceries. Pork face is a total PITA to find over there though apart from how many Filipino restaurants (and possibly Italian delis) seem to have already made arrangements with the butchers to get the faces, which likely will not easily sell in the groceries. Pork shank, which is my favorite cut of pork for making ramen broth (bones for collagen, marrow and fat, skin for crackling toppings), is a bit harder to find as even Asian groceries don't consistently have it, but Ranch and H-Mart are most consistent.

 

[PalJoey]

On the subject of food, strap yourself in and read Jay Rayner's review of Le Cinq (3 Michelin stars) in Paris: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/09/le-cinq-paris-restaurant-review-jay-rayner
 
Very funny!

 

[ProtegeManiac]

Had some pork belly in the fridge and decided to make some charsiu. Then I made a broth out of instant dashi and lots of garlic, then used the charsiu liquid as the tare for a bowl of shoyu ramen. Chili oil and tare on the bottom of the bowl, poured the dashi and garlic broth over it, swirled the noodles in it, then the charsiu, tamago, pork cracklings (a staple in many Phl-style noodle dishes), and spring onions.

 

 

Last Saturday's KFC - Korea, not Kentucky. Breaded bite sized chunks of chicken breasts, double fried, then tossed in hot chili garlic oil infused with leeks and more garlic.

 
Quote:

  On the subject of food, strap yourself in and read Jay Rayner's review of Le Cinq (3 Michelin stars) in Paris: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/09/le-cinq-paris-restaurant-review-jay-rayner

Hilarious! Very harsh though. But then again, if you charge that much, then I guess people getting disappointed would be that angsty about it.