Spring sprouts and mother sauces
Soba noodle bowls with tofu and mung bean sprouts and a spicy Korean dressing
Serves: 2 adults
Preparation and cooking time: 25 minutes
Ingredients
Noodle bowls
1 block firm tofu or press your own
1 t sunflower oil
200 g soba noodles
1/2 green capsicum
small bunch French radishes with leaves
1/2 a ripe avocado
1 spring onion
small bunch parsley or coriander or other fresh herbs
1/2 c mung bean sprouts
Spicy Korean dressing
2 T Korean chili flakes (gochugaru)
3-4 spring onions (trimmed and clean)
2 T toasted sesame oil
2 T soya sauce
1 T tomato paste
1 T rice wine vinegar (the good stuff with no other additives)
juice of 1/2 lime
30 ml water
1 cm of ginger root
2 T black sesame seeds
Method
Heat sunflower oil in a frying pan. Chop up block of tofu into bouncy cubes. Cook on a medium heat until it is brown on all sides, using tongs to turn the tofu. This will take around ten minutes. Add a little soya sauce at the end.
Boil jug of water and cook the noodles according to instructions (around 5 minutes in boiling water should do it), then let them drain and cool slightly (or completely if you’d prefer to serve the salad cold).
Prepare the ingredients for the salad. Slice the capsicum, radishes, avocado and spring onions (cut diagonal slices). Finely chop radish leaves (if tender) and fresh herbs.
Make the spicy Korean dressing. Place all ingredients (except sesame seeds) into a blender and blend on high for around 1 minute until it is a thick liquid. Season to taste and add sesame seeds.
Prepare noodle bowls. Place noodles into two large bowls with a stir of the dressing. Top with the ingredients. Place a dollop of the dressing in the middle, garnish with herbs, a sprinkle of the chile flakes, additional sesame seeds and a slice of lime or a whole radish. Place any additional dressing on the table in a small bowl. This stuff tastes so good you’ll want to eat it with a spoon. Enjoy.
The story behind the recipe
The world is in transition, the seasons playing tag with each other. Spring is a shy new lamb taking its first, faltering steps forward. There are bluebell days, sunny skies, streets of cherry blossoms and magnolias in all their splendour. Soft, downy buds opening into fragile flowers. Then winter reasserts herself, a cold-snap, a flurry of snow for the first time all year. The markets are still selling winter vegetables even as we crave green, newness. The spring vegetables are coming, feeling the pull of spring as the days lengthen, but they are still new, fledgling shoots blinking against the bright sunlight as they push up out of the dark earth. In the forest near our house, the plants near the ground have started to go green, but the trees are still bare. Winter has not yet let go of her hold. We are back in hibernation, both stuck inside with Covid.
This week’s vegetable is sprouts. Okay, I am kind of cheating on the vegetable front since mung beans are a legume and sprouts can be made at any time of the year. But it feels appropriate to be making them in Spring, just as everything is sprouting. I have a wonderful Aunt who loves sprouts. A few years back we borrowed her rusty campervan to take a trip around the South Island of New Zealand and she sent us off with containers of sprouts to make sure we’d eat something fresh, alongside packets of pasta and tins of tomatoes. Her secret tip for making great sprouts? Rinsing them regularly. You can make sprouts with a bunch of different seeds and legumes, but my favourite are mung bean sprouts. Soak them in plenty of water overnight, then leave them on a windowsill and repeat the rinse-and-drain routine a couple of times a day for 2-3 days, until the mung beans have grown small white tails. Drain well, pop them into the fridge and eat within a couple of days. Sprouts are ideal to make at home as they don’t have a long shelf life. Don’t worry about buying any fancy sprouting paraphernalia, an ordinary, large glass jar has always worked for me.
I have been watching Ray Choi’s new Masterclass videos and was particularly taken with his idea of a mother sauce. That is, the core sauces that underpin a cuisine. The French mother sauces are: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise and tomato. But Choi makes the concept his own, presenting his Korean “mother sauces”. I loved his scallion dipping sauce, which he makes from scratch and I’ve used it as the inspiration for the dressing for this week’s noodle bowl. The key ingredient is Korean chili flakes (gochugaru), which are mild, sweet and a little smoky. They may not be easy to find, but my local Asian store sorted me out (though only in 500g bags, so if anyone in NL wants some, hit me up). While I wish I could tell you that you could use any kind of chili flake here, it just isn’t going to be the same. But if you can’t find gochugaru then go ahead and substitute another mild chili flake (particularly Aleppo chillies or chipotle) or some sriracha instead.
I’ve been thinking about mother sauces. While the roots of my cooking are firmly grounded in European cuisine, I am agnostic about allegiance to it, cooking across cultures rather than being confined by them. This makes defining my mother sauces difficult. Here’s what I came up with. Definitely a white sauce, invaluable for lasagne, mac n’ cheese. Its base - a roux - is the first thing I remember learning to cook in “home economics” at school when I was 11 years old. What else? An Italian tomato sauce, slow-cooked vine tomatoes with sundried tomatoes the way my mother-in-law makes it, for pizzas, pasta, as a base for shakshuka, tomato soup, in hearty lentil stews; a tahini sauce, mixed with cold water until it is the consistency I need, built upon as a dressing for vegetables or salads, with acid or without; a French dressing made with spicy mustard for green salads and asparagus and new potatoes; a bright green, herby sauce, like a salsa verde or a pesto; and now perhaps I would add this week’s spicy Korean dressing to the list. I can see myself making it again and again. Perfect for dumplings, for spring onion pancakes, for vegetarian poké bowls, and for this week’s noodle bowls. What are your mother sauces?
Thanks as always for reading and see you next week.
Amelia.