Momofuku

by David Chang and Peter Meehan

[nannah]

So I became a fan of David Chang after watching Ugly Delicious on Netflix. I loved his outlook on food, his general attitude, and basically all the food he made and featured. Reading his cookbook was a given.

Like he says at one point in this massive autobiographical cookbook-type thing, Momofuku is less a cookbook and more a way of getting all of what happened throughout Noodle Bar and Ko and etc. written down somewhere. So what we have here is a bunch of notes about food, passages about the wild things that happened to him while trying to open his restaurants, and the recipes he makes in his restaurants (the failed and successful). It sounds messy, but it actually works.

But, as he had said, it’s kind of less of a functional cookbook than it is a “this is how we make everything and how we did everything” kind of log. Of course, because it’s not actually designed for the home cook in mind, most of the recipes included aren’t actually doable for the average person. In an average kitchen … the “48-hour Short Rib” comes to mind, with its need for a water circulator and constant tending. To his credit, though, David Chang makes a mention of the fact that it’s probably not going to work in a home kitchen.

There are also hard-to-find or expensive ingredients in the recipes, things like meat glue, alkaline salts, and Allan Benton’s bacon (he’s very specific about this one). However, at the very end of the book, he has a page about where to find each ingredient. Doesn’t help with the price, though!

So while many of these recipes are beyond my ability and price range, they were still interesting. And I definitely enjoyed reading about how David Chang’s restaurants began and reading about the interesting events and the massive amount of luck that got him to where he is today.