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Deadhouseplants' Review: Momofuku Sep 24, 2009 (52 of 54 found this helpful)
What is Momofuku? Is it a book about Asian food, a cookbook, or an outfielder for the Cubs? As it turns out, it is both a book about Asian food and a cookbook. The book starts off telling the great tale of how famed chef David Chang put everything aside and aspired to attain his dream of owning and operating his own successful restaurants.
That is just the story part of Momofuku, what most of you will want this book for is for the cookbook. This is where I have to give a warning to perspective buyers of this book. These recipes are genuinely Korean, meaning, that some of the ingredients might not be easy to find at your local supermarket. In fact, this is where you might want to look up your local H Mart or other Asian supermarkets to find ingredients such as;
Konbu (Kombu)
Nori
Fish cakes
Bonito flakes (katsuo-bushi)
Bamboo shoots
Ssamjang
And so on, and so on, the list is a hearty one. In my humble opinion, this cookbook is best for strong intermediate cooks to even gourmet cooks. I can't see a novice cook doing even the easiest of recipes such as momofuku fried chicken.
This brings up the second point I wanted to make, that being of time. These recipes are lengthy. I've had the book for 3 days now, and have made 4 recipes. Each of which was very time consuming. This isn't a bad thing. More or less a heads up, to the people who work a 9 to 5 who might or might not want to toil in their kitchen for 30 to 90 minutes. What creates these lengthy recipes is the fact that most recipes refer to another recipe in the book. So you'll have to prep one ingredient to prep your meal. Yes, that can be tedious and mind-warping at times. However, I have always believed that the best meals come from the ones you work so hard at.
Some highlighted recipes are:
Spicy Pork Sausage & Rice Cakes - My friends thought I was insane or messing with them when I pulled out all of the ingredients for this recipe. I chose it simply because I had most of the 17 ingredients it calls for, sans the rice sticks and tofu. The aroma that emanated while I was simmering the sauce was amazing.
Momofuku Shortcakes - I needed a dessert for my meal, and this seemed to be the most appetizing for my guests. You will need 3 hours to make this recipe, as the strawberries need to go through a macerated process.
All in all, I'm more or less dying to try the steamed bun recipe. Problem is, the recipe serves up 50 buns, and I have no place to store that much food in my pantry or freezer at the moment. In summation, I would have to say this is a solid entry for a Korean cookbook. I can't believe that a chef was so willing to share his prized secret to the masses. For that, I give this book a 5-star rating. Good eating.
(Just got the e-mail as I wrote this review, Amazon does sell a lot of the ingredients needed for this book. However, they are quite costly for this poor college student's budget.)
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For (party-hosting) Momofuku fans only Sep 30, 2009 (45 of 51 found this helpful)
I'd like to take many of the other reviewers here to task. If you're going to review a cookbook, TRY TO COOK FROM IT! The back story to David Chang is interesting, but the stories lead to the food. Why not try to understand his cooking and story a little bit better by trying to make his stuff?
I've had the privilege to eat at Momofuku Ko when Chef Chang was cooking that night. The black and white pictures in the proof copy don't do justice to the food. I've also eaten at the Noodle Bar and the Milk Bar, but somehow just skipped over Ssam (though friends of mine say it's really good). So I was pretty excited to get this book.
I offer this critique, and I think it's a pretty major flaw: this book in general is not practical. The recipes are daunting and clearly in quantities only a catering company or large dinner party would serve. Many people will probably find the recipes too difficult to do on their own.
For example, his ramen broth alone is very long and complicated, and makes literally gallons of the stuff -- and that's after you cut it in half. The ramen noodles are equally terrifying -- beyond the scope of most at-home cooks. Needless to say, I didn't try this.
I did try to make the steamed pork buns. It is incredibly time consuming -- making the dough alone takes a few hours, especially for an amateur cook like myself who has never done it before. The pork belly takes hours, too. And it makes more pork buns than I care to think about -- I lost count at around 35. The taste comes close to Noodle Bar, but there's just something about their food that's just different (and better). Maybe it's their hoisin sauce. Instead of slaving away in the kitchen literally all day, you almost think it's better to drive to the restaurant in NYC and get the pork buns there instead, regardless of where you live in the US. Or abroad.
The pork belly ssam in the book is just a hop, skip, and jump away with the pork belly cooked for the pork buns. But since I've never been to Ssam Bar, I can't compare it.
The frozen foie gras is a revelation when eating at Ko. Reading the recipe turned my stomach (picking out veins and green bile spots?? Bleah!). Didn't try this either. The pine nut brittle that accompanies the foie gras looks good to make, but who has isomalt lying around?
You can kind of tell Chef Chang doesn't care too much about desserts. When I ate at Ko, all I got was funnel cake. In the book he only includes two or three, most of which are just impossible to make. There are no recipes from Milk Bar in the book, either. I wish there were -- I really like the pies there.
If nothing else, this book makes you appreciate how much work Chef Chang puts into his food. But at the end of the day, this won't be a book I'll open to find recipes to serve for dinner parties; I'll look at it before my next trip to New York City to remind myself to get more pork buns at Noodle Bar.
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Momofuku Oct 18, 2009 (31 of 38 found this helpful)
I enjoy cooking Asian cuisine and was excited about getting this book and trying some of the recipes. After receiving the book, the excitement was over. Most of the recipes have a long list of ingredients, and a lot of them include another recipe in the ingredients which makes them time consuming to make. So far, I've only managed to try 4 recipes, and those were ones that didn't require a lot of prep time. I especially like the ginger scallion noodles. Others just aren't practical for me, like the Pig's Head Torchon. I can just imagine running all over town trying to find an available pig's head :-)
There are times when it's just best to go to the restaurant to eat rather than try to duplicate what they do at home because as in this case, it's not practical. This is not a cookbook that I would buy or recommend.
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Food Porn of the juciest kind Oct 12, 2009 (10 of 13 found this helpful)
As Anthony Bourdain would say: This cookbook is food porn. Picture after picture of stunning dishes and restaurant situations, page after page of vivid descriptions and recipes. For sure, the recipes are not easy, but eating is only half of the fun of this book.
Momofuku is a Cookbook from chef David Chang, owner of Restaurant legends: Momofuku Noodle Bar, Ssam Bar, Ko and Bakery and Milk Bar. The recipes in this cookbook are pulled from those restaurants and are broken down into sections based on each restaurant resulting in an incredible array of Chang's particular fusion style.
I have never been to any of these restaurants, I live in a state with precious few stand out eateries, so when a cookbook like this comes out, I jump on it. I regularly cook out of my French Laundry Cookbook, my Akvavit cookbook is in tatters and I regularly set aside Saturdays to spend time working my way through their complicated recipes. My house gets to become my little gourmet restaurant. Momofuku makes this adventure even funner by fusing stunning recipes with a story. Each chapter is a perfect mix of Chang's story and life and the food that fills it.
To be sure, the recipes in this book are not for the average evening meal. They are complicated, lengthy and they require ingredients that are more than a little difficult to find depending on where you live. For me finding pork belly, fluke and kockukaru is no easy task. But no matter, it is worth the hunt and if your search ends up fruitless the recipes are solid enough that they can handle a substitution. But whatever it takes, the food is well worth the work. The roasted rice cakes are tangy and light, the ramen is stunning with firm, flavorful noodles and rich, salty broth and the pickled chantrelles are destined to become a regular around my house.
If you just like reading about the giants of the food world, this cookbook is worth the purchase for that alone. But if you, like me, aren't afraid to spend a few hours and experience a few failures to create a masterpiece, this book is an excellent cookbook as well. Just be prepared to do a lot of searching and a lot of experimenting.
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Interesting story, difficult recipes, gratuitous cursing Nov 19, 2009 (5 of 6 found this helpful)
Momofuku, the book, is a combination of the story of how David Chang developed his cooking and restaurants along with recipes. The prose sections of the book are interesting reading. Chang's self-deprecation, praise for his collaborators and mentors, and slightly goofy style of story-telling is highly entertaining and enjoyable!
The recipes included are fascinating in their detail, though many of them are hardly ground-breaking, such as "5:10 eggs". The biggest difficulty in many recipes is that they include ingredients that are not commonly kept in home kitchens. In fact, many are not items that the local grocery store carries. I will have to seek out a specialty Asian market for these items, or find them online.
The liberal use of pictures throughout the book would normally be considered a big plus in a cookbook, but Momofuku's pictures are too dark, captionless, and mostly pointless. They do not serve to clarify the cooking techniques, illustrate the finished dishes, or help in any meaningful way. They might help set a mood, but they really don't have anything much to do with the content.
The other item is that the text is sprinkled with gratuitous cursing that feels really out of place in what is, despite the prose sections, a cookbook. The co-author starts it by dropping the "f-bomb" a few pages into his introduction. Why? It is used as an adjective, and adds nothing to the text. I only point out the cursing because it really feels like it doesn't belong in this book, or really any book in the genre.