Several months ago, my good friend Hetty of Arthur Street Kitchen asked if I would be interested in coming into her Brooklyn studio to do a little interview and shoot a recipe. I of course said a yes! I wanted to check out Neighborhood Studio, her new space with Jodi of What’s Cooking Good Looking and I had the perfect recipe in mind, Tomatoes and Eggs Kimchi Noodles. Hetty and I have had a number of discussions on this much loved Chinese dish. Ask any Chinese person and they will invariably have some warm childhood memory associated with this dish. Just a whiff of it cooking still makes me feel as if a warm blanket has been wrapped around my shoulders. It is the one thing that I requested the most of my mom when I was growing up and many a night it made me a very very happy child. In addition to the dry stir fry my mom would also make the dish into a soup and add thin noodles to it. I, of course, LOVED this dish as well. While she always teased me for regularly requesting such an simple dish, I’m sure my mom, as a busy working woman, was also secretly relieved that her child was so very easy to please.
The soup style of this dish is my favorite to play around with. Different misos, hot sauces such as gochujang and sambal oelek became the paints for my canvas. Dried mushrooms and sometimes kombu added welcome dimension to my broth. But if you don’t have any dried mushrooms or kombu, just plain water with the eggs and tomatoes will make magic as well. The key here is that the eggs are cooked over high heat. This is the one part of the original recipe that I will never mess with. This is not the gentle scramble that western recipes teach. No, the eggs are thrown into a wok that is smoking with glistening oil almost alive with heat. If the eggs do not immediately sizzle and bloom, you are doing it wrong. I cannot stress this enough. It is this step that creates so much of the flavor in this dish. To this day, even when making regular scrambled eggs I will always use a screaming hot pan. So at this point you must be worried about how we will keep the eggs from overcooking. About 40 seconds after the eggs go into the wok, tomatoes are added. The juice of the tomatoes and the constant motion of your stirring will slow down the cooking and protect the eggs. I find that treating eggs with initial aggression and then following it up with gentle tending builds the best flavors and brings out the basic essence of eggs.
As for the gochujang, kimchi, and miso in this version of my favorite dish, this is partly because I always have these ingredients on hand and because I wanted to make a vegetarian version of the pork heavy kimchi noodles I love in ramen restaurants. Yes my friends, this is a vegetarian dish and yet my meat loving TK never ever misses the meat when we have this for dinner. It is a great dish to squeeze in all kinds of vegetables to the soup, whatever are your favorites or even the not so favorites that you must finish off in the fridge. This soup will get you to eat almost any vegetable. If you have any picky eaters sitting at your dining table, you can hide all sorts of vitamins in this dish. I almost always use mushrooms, multiple varieties if I have them, and some kind of leafy green. But when asparagus or zucchini are in season, I throw those in as well. Frozen or fresh peas, sugar snap peas, snow peas, etc are also great. You get the picture. The full dish itself should take about 30 minutes from prep to dinner table. The only thing that takes longer are the rehydrating of the dried mushroom, but that you are just leaving them on the counter to get happy. Once you make it your own, I promise this will be a dish that you will turn to time and time again for those nights when you have very little time or even those nights when you have plenty of time but would rather spend it doing anything but cooking.
Hetty also made a delicious seaweed salad while I was at the studio. She has been super busy promoting her gorgeous new cookbook. I will share the recipe when she has a moment to write it down!
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T O M A T O E S + E G G S K I M C H I N O O D L E S
serves 2 – 3
generous handful of dried porcini & shiitake
3 large eggs
2-3 mediums sized tomatoes, unevenly sliced
A couple tbsp of neutral high-heat oil
3/4 – 1 teaspoon of Korean chili flakes
2 teaspoons of gochujang
1 tablespoon of red miso
1/2 tablespoon white miso
1/2 heaping cup of kimchi, roughly chopped if pieces are large
1/4 cup kimchi juice
8oz Shiitakes or 1 large maitake bunch, add as much as you like
2 servings somen noodles (soba or ramen would work too)
seasonal vegetables, I used chrysanthemum greens and choy sum
In a mixing bowl, rehydrate the dried mushrooms with 1 1/2 cups of room temperature water. Chop them up and reserve the mushroom water. Bring a medium pot of water to a boil for the noodles.
Crack your eggs into a mixing bowl and salt with 1/4 teaspoon salt per egg. Whisk with a fork just until the yolk and whites are all together. Heat up a medium size pot over high heat. Once the pot is hot add enough oil to cover the bottom of the pot. Bring the oil to screaming hot. To test the oil, drop a few drops of egg into the pot. It should immediately bloom. If this doesn’t happen, the oil is not hot enough. Once the oil is hot enough, add the whisked egg, and immediately use a spatula to vigorously stir/scramble the eggs. Fold the uncooked parts into the cooked parts to evenly cook. You are looking for big, generous curds. As soon as the eggs are almost all past the liquid phase, add the tomatoes. All this is over high heat and will happen very quickly. The eggs should be ready for the tomatoes in no more than a 40 seconds. Gently press the tomatoes to get them to release their liquid. The tomatoes will slow the cooking of the eggs. Turn the heat down to medium high and keep stirring.
Once the tomatoes have softened, push everything to one side of the pot and add the fresh and rehydrated mushrooms to the pot. Salt the mushrooms with 1/4 teaspoon salt. Sautée until golden brown. Add the chili flakes, gochujang, and misos to an empty spot in the pot. Stir and give the sauces a minute or two with the heat. You can add a little bit more oil if the pot is dry. Add the kimchi, sautée everything together. After another minute, filter the mushroom stock into the pot using a fine mesh sieve. Bring up to a boil, turn heat down to medium low, and simmer for 10 minutes.
In the meantime, cook the somen noodles. Once the noodles are ready, add them to two deep soup bowls. Finish the soup by adding the kimchi juice and adjust taste with more gochujang and/miso if necessary. Turn off the stove, use the residual heat to soften any vegetables you are using. Use the greens that you love. I like to use something with a bite such as tatsoi, arugula, napa cabbage, pea shoots, etc. Generously ladle the soup over the noodles and garnish with the Tokyo turnip pickle (recipe below).
Q U I C K T O K Y O T U R N I P K I M C H I P I C K L E
*radishes and daikon would be great alternatives Pour the hot vinegar mixture over the turnips. Allow to cool and marinate before serving. Keep in the fridge if not eating immediately.
1 large clove of garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon of Korean chili flakes
1 scallion, white part, roughly cut
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1 teaspoon light soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt
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