Cooking Experiment: Tomato Beef Sauce on Crispy Rice

[tuftears]

Maybe you've had tomato beef sauce on Hong Kong-style pan fried noodles. It's one of my favorite dishes from my childhood, but the downside is that cooking ramen noodles, then frying them in oil, is not really all that healthy. The sauce is fine, it's just... You need at least about a teaspoon of oil per serving to fry the noodles crisp.

Sometime this past week, I was chatting with my brother and the subject of 'nohm' came up. I'm not sure what the proper name would be; that's just what we call it in our family. What it is, is the rice crust left over at the bottom of the pot after you cook rice and serve most of it out. When you let it cool off, it is crispy and delicious with meat gravies.

There's only one catch: I cook my rice in a rice cooker, and rice cookers don't do that. By design they steam the rice perfectly, leaving no crust.

So... This time, I tried baking some leftover cooked brown rice in an oven. I spread it thin over a cookie sheet, put it in an oven at 400 degrees for about 20-30 minutes, give or take. When it smells like it's about to burn, it's done! At this point you now have a sheet of crispy brown rice crust.

Then I whipped up the tomato beef sauce. I'd recommend the following if you try making your own:

1 pound of ground beef or turkey, seasoned with soy sauce, garlic, and powdered ginger
One stalk of celery, cut to small pieces
One can of diced tomatoes
One cup of chopped onions
One tablespoon of sugar
A dash of crushed red pepper
One tablespoon of corn starch
One egg or Eggbeaters equivalent, if desired, scrambled in the microwave

I sautee'd the ground turkey in some chicken stock, then put the celery and onions in, then finally the tomatoes. I put the sugar and crushed red pepper in at that point, then with the remaining chicken stock, I dissolved the corn starch and mixed that into the meat and veggies. At this point, I noticed that there seemed to be insufficient meat/veggies for the amount of sauce, so I quickly scrambled some leftover Eggbeaters-- 2 minutes in the microwave kept me from having to use another burner or pan-- and diced that up before mixing it in.

I tore off a square of crispy rice and put it on a plate, then I poured enough sauce to liberally cover the rice.



Ta-dah! I left some of the brown rice crust visible at the bottom.

If you elect to make pan-fried noodles instead, you'll need to use a pot to boil the ramen noodles, then extract the noodles, put 'em in a colander, then fry them in a pan with about a teaspoon of oil per serving. The sauce dissolves the noodles just enough to allow you to break it apart, but the noodles stay crispy in your mouth. This is the original and best way to eat tomato beef sauce, but I thought the brown rice crust did a pretty good job too.

Comments

[archangelbeth]

Gonna make a cookbook someday? O:D

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Seconded!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

You just want to pillage the food. >_>

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

That too. But a recipe book is still easier to leaf through than LJ-memories.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

There are good cookbooks out there though! I can't think of anything me publishing a cookbook would add to the body of culinary wisdom out there.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

It doesn't have to be a gift to the world; it'd be useful enough just to your friends who are interested in your cooking. While assembling it would take a non-trivial amount of effort, it needn't cost you much to publish. Print-on-demand is nice that way, and is well-suited to projects where you don't plan to work the publicity machine and sell tens of thousands of copies.

If you want a gimmick/extras, doodle kitties in the margins. Instant appeal among the fandom, at minimum };>. You're well-enough known that that probably _would_ sell at cons and the like.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Making it an illustrated cookbook would just be a whole new level of effort on top of that!

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

You're overthinking it, IMO. Literally, doodle 30-second-sketch kitties in some of the margins, and that'd be enough to give it furry appeal.

"Illustrated" suggests a lot more detail and coherence than I was intending to propose. Save illustration for the cover art };>.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

It would be beneath my standards to release a slapdash cookbook!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

On a related note, Bad Home Cooking (http://www.badhomecooking.com/) kind of exemplifies my attitude toward my cooking. };)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Unlikely, I don't think I'd write better recipes than restaurant or TV chefs do, like Martin Yan (http://yancancook.com/) of 'Yan Can Cook'. I just post these sorts of things as sharing "what I've been doing" with friends. :)

[archangelbeth]

Darn. That means I'll have to tag veggie-modifiable ones on my own! O;>

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Oh, like switching tofu in place of ground turkey? Yeah, probably doable, but you'll want to think about baking or frying the tofu in thin sheets and then slicing them up to give it a bit of crispiness!

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Sometime this past week, I was chatting with my brother and the subject of 'nohm' came up. I'm not sure what the proper name would be; that's just what we call it in our family. What it is, is the rice crust left over at the bottom of the pot after you cook rice and serve most of it out.

Soccarat!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yum! I've heard about Persian rice crust dishes too. Have you actually made this?