Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where Jon spent Saturday wondering “what am I going to cook”, before being reminded that Past Jon had, in rare form, pre-loaded recipes for posts into January as well. And some of them are particularly timely: while not the hot-ticket item they were a few years ago, in the post-Christmas season a lot of people will be playing with their newly acquired kitchen gadgets, such as Multicookers/Instant Pots. (We’ll try and get an air fryer recipe out soon, for the NEWER hot gadget, but…well, we’ll see.) Today’s dish is one that was somewhat off-putting to research, for reasons I’ll explain later. If you don’t want to know, here’s a link to go straight to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s dig in.  

The Whims of A Mad God

So, because I know my (immediate) family only rarely reads the post, I feel comfortable in calling out that both today’s recipe, and another one we may get to in a while were cooked as the result of a “fey mood” from my mother. I would feel even MORE comfortable if I didn’t know that reference was too obscure for 95% of my audience, and I’d have to immediately explain it: So, there’s a video game called Dwarf Fortress, that was made in 2006, and is basically “Minecraft meets the Sims/Civilization”: you create a fantasy world, and get dropped onto it with a team of Dwarves to build a fortress. Very simple explanation, not a very simple game. For one thing, the game was created by two brothers, working solely on donations, so they couldn’t invest in silly things like “graphics”.

As you can see, maybe a rough category to cut.

The game is rendered in TEXT SYMBOLS, that you have to learn to decipher. (or rather, did, in the long-long ago, since that time, many other teams have created translation software that make the game more visually parseable for the new player.) The game was also known for being…rather weirdly and stupidly hard. Like, you need to dig fairly quickly and find metals to make traps and weapons, or a passing goblin army will likely wipe you out. But dig in the wrong spot, and you could flood your fortress with water, lava, giant spiders, unspeakable horrors from the depths, etc. A VERY common end-state for Dwarf Fortress games is “Look, guys, I made a new version of Moria”. Especially made difficult because your dwarves had physical AND mental health to care for: if that initial wave of spiders kills the captain of the guard’s baby, he might go on a rampage, killing spider and dwarf alike until his own guardsdwarves put him down…which is hell on THEIR morale too… You also had less reasonable issues, like super-killer carp: certain events would drive wild animals to attack your dwarves, and due to a coding issue, carp leveled up by swimming. A thing that, being fish, they have to do constantly. So within a year or so of the game starting, the carp in nearby rivers are, for some reason, utterly swole monsters, capable of snapping the backs of minotaurs. So if THEY come climbing out of the river seeking dwarf blood, oof-da. In short, there was all sorts of FUN, as the community dubbed it, to be found in the game, since, again, just two brothers working alone. The game was actually featured in a MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) exhibit discussing the history of video games, because my comparison to Minecraft wasn’t by accident: it was literally cited by the creator of Minecraft as a influence.

If you’re wondering why I’m spending so much time on this explanation, the first reason is that it’s more likely to bore my family (who do not care about video game history) out of reading the unflattering comparison. The other is that the recipe today is in a frustrating position of being rather opaque: it’s not that it’s hard to explain, but rather…there’s not a lot TOO explain. Anyway, the relevant point of information from Dwarf Fortress is that one mental health event that could trigger for your dwarves is “a fey mood”: a dwarf in your city might suddenly get an idea for an amazing peace of art, run to the nearest workshop, and kick everyone out of it, demanding a series of weird materials to build their masterpiece. If given the tools they need, they’d create a great work of art, become a master of that and everything goes fine. If NOT given what they need (like, if they demanded snowy leopard fur and you’re based in the desert), they…well…

NOT NOW, ALF.

Having played the game a fair bit, I was therefore aware of the signs when my mother, apropos of nothing in late October started asking me about an ingredient that I had never heard of: Chu Hou Paste. A quick Google search told me very little, so I suggested that, on an upcoming trip to Bremerton to pick up some Pirozhki, we could hit up the Asian markets in Bremerton to see if they had any. The answer to that question was “No”. Three different stores, none of them had it. But, having read some basic facts about it, we WERE able to find Garlic Hoisin, which I thought would get us CLOSE to the right flavor.

Seize the Workshop, our Artifact Awaits

So, what is Chu Hou Paste? Well, it’s Chu Hou Paste. Literally, for the first like, TEN sources I checked, that was the most information I could get: it’s a mixture of fermented soy bean, sugar, garlic, and some other ingredients, popular in Cantonese braised dishes*, and it’s named Chu Hou paste (Or Chee Hou Sauce, or zhu hou jiang), which doesn’t have any clear translations. It wasn’t until I found the blog Emily’s Kitchen that I got some BASIC information: according to Emily, zhu hou jiang is a variation of dou ban jiang (a fermented bean paste we’ve referenced a couple times on the site), but sweeter, and smoother. She says that Chu Hou was actually a restaurant chef, who made his variation on the sauce, and served it, and the sauce was named after him following his passing. So a little like the Chinese version of Alfredo sauce in why it’s so hard to get a clear explanation of it: there’s just not a lot to SAY. It’s a sauce, it has these ingredients, it was named for some guy, but most people don’t know who he was.

So most people don’t know why the sauce is called Alfredo, but do they know why Alfredo is called “The Sauce”?

Another thing about the mix, and it’s where that asterisk last paragraph comes into play: man, as an outsider to the culture, is it HARD to parse at first if it’s actually “popular” in Cantonese braised dishes. By which I mean that looking for recipes for it feels a lot like, going back to my previous comparison, what someone unfamiliar with Italian food feels when hearing that “Alfredo is a popular sauce in American Italian cuisine”: You find 100 different versions of the same 2 main dishes, and then maybe 20 actually different recipes. I almost gave you the wrong recipe for this post, because the SAME YouTuber made a version of Chu Hou Beef Brisket with Daikon, a braised beef and veggie dish in a stew-like sauce, AND “Chu Hou Beef Brisket Noodle Soup”, and I just clicked on the first “Chu hou beef brisket” video with her in it that I saw, which turned out to be the wrong one. It was weirdly affecting: like, I’m used to not having much of an idea of what’s going on in other cuisines, but this sort of “nothing to explain” situation has really opened my eyes about communicating baseline expectations better.

Personal revelations I will quickly forget aside for now, apparently my mother had gotten a recipe video recommended to her, and she’d decided she wanted to make it, despite not knowing what several of the ingredients were, probably motivated by her oft-cited love of beef stews.  Which is a mood I am 100% okay with backing: why should I be the one having to push the culinary envelope every month?  Especially because it was an Instant Pot meal, which means it’s also a DUMP MEAL.

And not just because it looks like one! (low-hanging fruit, I’m sorry.)

If you haven’t been around since I last referenced the idea, I have a particular fondness for ‘dump meals’ , a term I use to refer to dishes based around the idea of “dump it in, and let it sort itself out.” There’s a LOT of over-lap with One-pot meals, but not always. Like, I count meals where you’ve gotta toast the spices in a second pan, or sear the meat, as “dump meals”. And it’s a particular trait of instant pot cooking, because of…physics, I guess? Like, the point of an Instant Pot (or other multicooker, they don’t pay me for brand loyalty. Because they don’t pay me at ALL.) is that it’s ONE machine, and the primary use of it is to make pressure-cooking accessible and acceptable again. If you’re going to pressure cook a meal…it’s got to go INTO the pressure cooker, you know?

As such, this is a pretty simple recipe, when you break it down: cut up some beef brisket, toss it in the pot. Chop up some aromatics, toss them in the pot.

This looks like half a Mulled-wine mix. How foreign can it be?

For a more thorough breakdown: you’re going to slice up some ginger, mince some garlic, and then just toss in some cinnamon and star anise, and, if you’re feeling fancy, rock sugar. Rock sugar is a partially processed sugar popular in Chinese cooking, probably best replicated by demerara sugar, but if you don’t have that, either normal sugar or light brown sugar will do. THEN, you make the sauce. The sauce is a combination of the aforementioned chu hou paste (which will pair nicely with the star anise, garlic, and cinnamon), soy sauce (for salt), DARK soy sauce (for color, mostly: one of the common uses for dark soy sauce and rock sugar are to give braised dishes more of a luscious sheen), oyster sauce, and shaoxing wine.

Sometimes spelled “shaohsing”, “shaozhing”, “shaoshing”, and…look, we have talked MULTIPLE times on how hard it is to transliterate from Asian phonetic systems.

That’ll add some acidity (to help break down the meat), sweetness, and general complexity of flavor. Once everything’s in the pot, pop on the lid, and…you’re done, for like, 30-40 minutes. Specifically, the cooking time is 35 minutes, but it has to come up to pressure first (a process that can often take 10-20 minutes), then you’ll have to RELEASE the pressure…and before you’re done, you’ve got to make the noodles for this noodle soup, right? The original recipe used fresh rice noodle sheets, which…ha ha, I WISH that was an option in my town. So we went with normal dried rice noodles, rehydrated in boiling water for 10 minutes as usual.

We also chose to riff on the recipe, and add mushrooms and asparagus to the soup mixture once the lid came off the pot to be thickened. Does Asparagus go with anise flavors? I don’t know, and I wasn’t consulted. It’s almost certainly not traditional (well, the mushrooms are probably fine), but just add them in, as well as a cornstarch slurry (1 tbsp water mixed with 1 tbsp cornstarch), and simmer for 5ish minutes, to allow the cornstarch to thicken, and the veggies to cook through. Then drop some noodles in your bowl, and ladle the soup mixture over them.

This is more “roast” than ‘soup’, because in the ORIGINAL recipe, you actually make a bowl of noodles and chicken broth, so the ladled sauce can permeate the broth. A step my mother DID NOT explain, so we didn’t do it, and I only learned about it while watching the YouTube video to write this up.

The result is quite appealing, I mean, it’s salty, earthy, beef-stew-esque meat. It’s very much like a pot roast or other braised beef dish from the western canon. The sauce is thick and satisfying (though we probably could/should have skimmed off some more fat, almost purely for cosmetic/consistency issues: with the cool air outside of the pressure cooker, the beef fat re-solidified in, like, 30-40 minutes, leaving waxy deposits on the (by that point empty, but not washed) bowl) and the meat is fall-apart tender. The Mushrooms were a welcome addition, and while I’m not as crazy about asparagus as Nate or Mom, it was perfectly fine here. So if you’ve got a multicooker sitting around, either fresh as a 2021 gift, or hunkered down in some back closet because you haven’t had a reason to bust it out in a while, I definitely recommend it.

THURSDAY: WE MIGHT GO ISLAND HOPPING, OR I MIGHT FIND SOMETHING MORE COMPELLING. I DON’T KNOW.

MONDAY: MIGHT MAKE SOME BREAKFAST, MIGHT MAKE SOME CHICKEN, MIGHT DO SOMETHING NEW.

Recipe

Chu Hou Beef Brisket Noodle Soup

Serves 3-5

Ingredients

Stew

1.5 pounds beef brisket, cut into 1.5” cubes

2 ounces ginger, washed and sliced about 1/8th of an inch thick

5 cloves garlic, minced

2 whole star anise

1 stick (3”) cinnamon

1 tbsp sugar (rock by preference, but demerara or granulated is fine)

                Sauce

¼ cup shaoxing wine

3 tbsp soy sauce (or 2 tbsp soy, 1 tbsp dark soy, if you have it)

2 tbsp chu hou paste (substitute either Garlic Hoisin, or normal hoisin if that’s all you have)

1 tbsp Oyster sauce

                Finishing elements

8 ounces mushrooms, sliced

1 bunch asparagus, chopped into 1” pieces.

2-3 tbsp cornstarch slurry (made by combining equal parts cornstarch and cool water)

1 package rice noodles

Preparation

1. Place all of the stew ingredients into your multicooker/pressure cooker. Stir together sauce ingredients, and pour over the stew ingredients. Seal pressure cooker, set to 35 minutes cook time, walk away.

2. Prepare noodles according to package instructions. Release pressure from cooker, and open. Set to “sauté” to bring to a simmer. Skim excess fat if desired, then add mushrooms and asparagus. Simmer for 5-7 minutes to cook vegetables. Add cornstarch slurry, 1 tbsp at a time, and stirring for a minute or two between additions, until soup is desired thickness.

3. Divide noodles between bowls, ladle over soup mixture, and serve.