Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man is dedicated to…well, ‘is mildly motivated to’ bringing you food facts and fun. I’m your Dopamine Distributor, Jon O’Guin, and today’s recipe comes from a VERY tangled place. If you want to skip all the bones and roots and just get to the meat of the recipe, click this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Sprink Sprank Sprunk

You know, I thought waiting until Morning, rather than trying to start late at night would REDUCE Title Jon’s insanity, but either I was wrong, or the baseline has gotten troublingly high. Anywho, to explain that gibberish of a heading: today’s going to consist of two recipes, the first of which is an Americanized version of Furikake, a Japanese condiment. Specifically, furikake is a mixture of seasonings including sugar, salt, fish and seaweed, used to add flavor to plain white rice, or fish, or vegetables. It’s named after the Japanese “furi kakeru”, which means “to sprinkle over”. Hence Title Jon’s madness: the dish is like if I made a seasoning salt and named it “Sprink”.

The seasoning also didn’t begin life as seasoning, per se. It was created by a pharmacist to help treat calcium deficiency: the first formula for it included ground up fish bones. The idea was that a tsp or so sprinkled over your rice at a meal would give you the calcium you needed.

Better to have none descript powder than “cartoon depiction of fish skeletons” on the dish, I guess.

It’s similar to, but distinct from, Shichimi togarashi, which we’ve discussed before. Interestingly, shichimi is several centuries older, so it’s likely the pharmacist intentionally made furikake a little more like shichimi than he needed to, in order to help people feel comfortable using it. Since then, with modern diets and other methods, the dish has expanded, with there being many variations of furikake incorporating different ingredients and flavor profiles. I know this because I actually OWN a couple varieties of furikake.

“But Jon,” you ask, “why are we making Furikake if you own it already?” First off, don’t try and police my life. Second off, for content, you rube. And thirdly and most importantly, because we’re not actually making furikake. We are making an Americanized version of it. Why? Well, that takes a whole different conversation.

The First Run is the Deepest

I don’t want to go find the first reference to this, in case I made that exact same joke, but I have to, in case I made that exact same joke.…oh, shit, there is no first reference to this. Oh man, I’ve got to back this ALL THE WAY UP.

Damn it, now I owe Fat Joe money.

Alright, so we’re talking about Deep Run and Vivian Howard for a second here. Why? Because the whole idea of what I’m doing today comes from Vivian Howard’s second cookbook, which I partly chose because I THOUGHT I had already talked about her and her other cookbook before, but APPARENTLY NOT.

So Vivian Howard is a North Carolinian chef, and the owner of several restaurants. She grew up in a town called “Deep Run”, moved to New York, worked in the food industry, got married, started a food business, and ended up getting backing from Howard’s parents to start a restaurant in North Carolina, about 10 miles from her home town. A few years after starting the restaurant, she reached out to a friend who had become a director, and the two shot a PBS show “A Chef’s Life”, focusing on the effort Vivian was putting into finding recipes and food insights from the community, and taking those ideas and presenting them in an (sometimes updated, sometimes not) style in her restaurant. The idea being that, by capturing these recipes and insights on film, they wouldn’t be lost. (And, you know, free advertising for her restaurant.)

A Chef’s Life was, at one point, a cornerstone of my mother’s daily routine. Before my dad got sick, my mother and I would strive to catch a couple interesting episodes of PBS create or Food Network shows as part of our weeknight routine. This tradition continued during the initial run of chemotherapy for my father: Nate came, and became a “Stellino Stan”, frequently insisting the ONLY show worth watching on the channels were those hosted by Italian Chef Nick Stellino. My mother liked A Chef’s Life, and the travel shows. I mostly watched America’s Test Kitchen episodes. So when Vivian put out a cookbook, we bought it, and I dutifully sketched out a couple recipes from it I wanted to make…and apparently never followed up on them? (In my minor defense: the cookbook came out the winter before my dad was diagnosed, and my father was RENOWNED for his unadventurous palate. So it’s entirely possible I looked at the recipes that interested me in the cookbook, put them under a “when dad gets better” header, and…well. Turns out that header should have started with an “if”.)

I knew EXACTLY where this book was when I needed to look for it for this picture. I don’t even know where my combs are with that level of precision.

So look forward to me doing something with THAT sometime. Anyhow, this is actually useful, because both of Vivian’s cookbook have a similar format: in her first cookbook, Deep Run Roots, she highlighted specific ingredients local to her community. So the section about Pecans talks about her history with them, gives you tips on what to look for in the store, and then lists 8 recipes you can make with them.

Her NEW cookbook has a similar format, but instead of focusing on a basic (what I call “first stage”) ingredient, it’s about a series of “second-stage” ingredients. What does that mean? Simple: a first stage ingredient is something you just buy/find. Like, “white bread” or “pecans” or “ salmon filets”. A second-stage ingredient is something you have to make, in order to make other things. To make Pelmeni back in 2020, I had to make Pelmeni Dough, and Pelmeni filling: two second-stage ingredients.  To make the Mushroom Breakfast Burritos from June, I had to make Mushrooms Asado.

It’s an imperfect/loose system, since, you know, you can kind of push either definition either way.  Like, I technically count the Mushrooms Asado as a “third stage” ingredient, since the ASADO SAUCE is a second-stage. And like, you can add steps by becoming more primal: If instead of buying a salmon filet, you bought a whole salmon and carved it yourself, you’d technically have turned the filet into a second-stage. But the point is mainly just to acknowledge when a recipe has ‘sub recipes’. Which all of the ones in this cookbook do: in the new book, Vivian shows off a personalized/special recipe for a “second-stage ingredient”, and then provides several recipes to use that ingredient in: “Here’s how I make extra-special caramelized onions, and 7 recipes that use them.” Sort of idea. And that’s where “quirky furki” comes in.

Seen here decorating cotton candy, in a bold flavor combo.

Quirky Furki is her Americanized take on Furikake. (Yeah, remember when this post was about JAPAN?) It’s a fairly simple recipe, and given my mother’s appreciation of Vivian’s shows, and her generally Pro-Asian nature (and the fact that the furikake didn’t really need any cooking, a great pitch when it’s been a week of 80-90 degree days) I thought it’d be the dish to make. So let’s stop TALKING, and get DOING.

A Total Kak-e Up

So, furikake, as I noted, is basically just a seasoning blend. It’s made of salt, sugar, seaweed, sesame seeds, and…other stuff. I don’t go vague there to be rude, but rather to highlight that after those four base ingredients is where different chefs/mixes get brought into the equation. You can make Kimchi furikake by used ground-up dried kimchi, you can use miso powder, blended bonito flakes, shisito powder, shiitake powder, it’s all a matter of what flavors you want.

Vivian’s recipe goes for a traditional ingredient, and one very untraditional ingredient: for added umami/salt in the mix, she uses either ground dried shrimp or bonito flakes, and then she adds the American ingredient: salt and vinegar potato chips.

Pretend you don’t see the bag on the left for like, 5 sentences.

The chip add texture to the furikake, additional salt, and acidity, meaning the mixture ends up incorporating basically all the flavors: salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. However, the recipe does have one chef-y “flaw” to it: production level, and recommended consumption. This recipe keeps for about 1 month, and makes 4 CUPS of mixture. Mathematically, that means if you want to get the full value of your “furk”, you’ll want to eat an average of 1 tbsp a DAY for the whole month. Which felt like a bit of a big ask, which is why you’ll note there’s a second bag of chips there. I was actually interested in the idea of what kind of chips could be used in the mixture, not only because I personally don’t really like salt and vinegar, but because of the aforementioned range of furikake seasoning mixes. Does Barbecue Quirky Furky work? Sour Cream and Onion? Could I make 4 distinct flavors just by using different chips? I resolved that I should take things slowly: logically, if a primary component of the salt and vinegar chip is the acidity, then we should first explore with other similarly acidic chips. When I walked into Central Market searching for Cape Cod brand (Vivian’s preferred brand for a balance of acid and salt, and one that’s not very common in my area, hence the stop at Central Market), I also found the “hot pepper vinegar” chips. Which seemed a perfect plug-in for variation: it retains the acidity while moving from salt to spice.

That choice made, the recipe is fairly simple, with only a little bit of actual “cooking”: you’ll need to toast sesame seeds. Furikake in Japan tends to use both white and black sesame seeds, which Vivian notes you can do both or either, but that white sesame seeds are easier to watch while toasting, so you may want to start with them. Personally, I went with a mix of about ¾ white sesame and ¼ black. I figured that would give me enough visibility to toast safely, while still being visually interesting.

It doesn’t look like that was a wise call right here, but I assure you in the completed form, it’s a bit clearer.

Toast them for a minute or so, until they smell nutty and have clearly browned, and then move them to a bowl to reduce any residual cooking.

The next step (Or the first step, depending on the order you want to do them in) is to toast some seaweed sheets. And I want to caution you here: be VERY attentive to what you’re buying, and how you treat it. See, Vivian’s recipe calls for generic “seaweed sheets”, and calls for you to toast them yourself, either over a gas burner, or for 4ish minutes in a 500 degree oven. Now, I couldn’t FIND seaweed sheets that were not already roasted, so I figured we’d need less time. I popped 4 sheets into the oven, stepped outside for 45 seconds to toss some seeds to the chickens, and came back to find them fully carbonized.

Another plan ruined by the chickens.

The sweet spot, I found, was about 20 seconds of baking. Around 10 seconds the heat starts to crinkle them and wake up the oils. Just grab them with some tongs, and, as a warning: don’t leave your metal tongs lying next to the burner you forgot to turn off from toasting the sesame seeds. The half-second sear of your fingers and need to grab a new set of tongs is just unnecessary trouble, and a fun omen of tragedy to come.

Seaweed toasted, it’s time to blend. You blend the bonito flakes first, powdering 2 cups of dried fish into what looks like less than half a cup of powder.

Smoked Fish Powder sounds like a fantasy drug.

Next is the nori, which will be… a lot more frustrating. The instructions in Vivian’s book are to CRAM the seaweed in, and it definitely doesn’t want to fit, or to blend: the sheets love to just get pushed flat against the sides of the processer and not feed into blades. It’s a frustrating process, with a lot of shaking, scraping, and double-checking. But I urge you to be patient and careful while performing the process. Otherwise, you could end up like me, and accidentally smack the plate you laid the seaweed on off the counter, and into your own foot, making this the first recipe in months (over a year?) where you’ve broken something, and definitely the first time in years you’ve legitimately hurt yourself while cooking more than slightly singed fingertips. (Warning; the following picture contains dirty feet and blood)

Bit quick on the warning, but it’s not a lot of blood, and not all that dirty.

So, then you get to go have a fun romp of “your mother suggests you might need stitches, the consulting nurse says that given the risk of contamination, you should see a doctor, and it’s Monday so the urgent care is crowded with everyone who thought “let’s see if I can make it through a day of work like this” or didn’t want to lose their Sunday relaxation time.

I especially don’t recommend this, as it’ll add two hours to your cooking time, turning what should have been a 20 minute project into a 4 hour one. (Remember when I burned those seaweed sheets earlier? Yeah, you’re supposed to use a whole packet, so once I burned those suckers, I had to wait for someone to pick up more seaweed on the way home from work, because my car is STILL being repaired. This might be a new record for “nothing is ever as short as it’s supposed to be” in our kitchen.) In any case, split your shredded nori, sesame, and bonito  into two bowls, and then blend up 2.5 ounces of chips for each batch. I did the salt and vinegar first, since obviously a little extra salt and vinegar is going to affect the hot pepper chips less than getting hot pepper on the S&V.

Into the bowls, add coarse/flaky sea salt, and turbinado sugar (the larger granules will fit the texture better, and ensure it doesn’t all fall to the bottom of the container.)

Mix it up baby now.

Stir to combine, and then move to a storage vessel, and you’ve got two pints of furikake, with subtly different flavors.

Technically, since this is “furky”, not "furikake’ ,that means that this is a jar of furk.

The results are pretty good. The bonito and seaweed give it a naturally kind of ocean like minerality, but not oppressively. The hot pepper vinegar and Salt and Vinegar chips definitely create subtle differences in the two mixes: the Salt and vinegar furikake feels lighter, with the acidity not really punching through as its own flavor, instead just lifting up the mix as a whole. The hot pepper vinegar, meanwhile, kind of accents the smokiness of the bonito, creating something that tastes a little hotter, a little meatier, and a little darker. Think the difference between Sea Salt and Smoked Salt. Both are good, they just feel like they have subtly different uses.

So of course, I immediately used them for the same thing, which we’ll talk about on Thursday, because I did NOT know I was going to have to explain who Vivian Howard was, or that I was going to have to spend 2 hours waiting in urgent care instead of working on this on Monday.

TOMORROW/FRIDAY: WE MAKE SLIDERS WITH THE FURIKAKE.

MONDAY: WE’RE NOT SURE, BUT PROBABLY CRAB RANGOON. LOTTA WEIRD CHOICES THIS MONTH.

Recipe

Quirky Furky (from Vivian Howard’s “This Will Make it Taste Good”)

Makes 4 cups

Ingredients

1 cup sesame seeds (white, black, both, your call)

2 tsp sesame oil

10 sheets nori (seaweed) roughly .75 to .88 ouunces

2 cups bonito flakes (Vivian actually recommends a version with dried shrimp, if you want that recipe, buy the book.)

5 ounces  Potato Chips, preferably vinegar-flavored and kettle-cooked (Vivian didn’t specify, but I THINK all Cape Cod chips are kettle-cooked, so I used kettle-cooked for mine)

3 tbsp turbinado sugar

3 tbsp flaky salt

Preparation

1. First up, toast the seeds. Drizzle that sesame oil into a large skillet, get it to medium heat, add the seeds, and toast. (Note: normally, you don’t add oil when toasting seeds, but this recipe does to build in some more sesame flavor.) Toast until fragrant and browned, then remove from the skillet and pour into a large bowl.

2. Toast the nori: slap it on a hot griddle, toast over a gas burner, or bake in a 500 degree oven for somewhere between 4 minutes and 20 seconds, depending on if your seaweed is pre-roasted.

3. In a food processor (mine was about 6 cups, and worked perfectly fine), blend the bonito flakes into powder, about 10 seconds. Pour into the bowl with the sesame seeds. Tear apart the toasted nori, and fit it all in the processor. Blend for about a minute, or until there are basically no flakes larger than a pinky nail. Don’t break a plate on your foot, and move the nori into the same bowl as the sesame and bonito.

4. At this point, if you want to split up the recipe for chip-based experimentation, I’d stir the ingredients in the bowl together, and then separate in equal portions to new bowls. If not, just blend up the chips for about 5 seconds. Pour into the bowl.

5. Now, you can stir everything together and blend it again if you want a finer texture, but personally, my batch was already pretty smooth/consistent, so just stirred in the sugar and salt, and boom, you’re done.  Slap in an airtight container and use within a month.