 This vinaigrette is a riff on a sauce common to many of the side dishes that are found all throughout South Korea. Side dishes, or banchan, are staples for every and any Korean meal. Even a cheap ramen shop will offer a small tray of kimchi and daikon pickle.
Gochu, or Korean chile is responsible for the ubiquitous red color found throughout the dishes of the peninsula. It’s a medium spicy chile and you should feel empowered to add more or less depending on your heat preference.
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 Chocolate mousse is a decadent dessert typically made with egg whites and heavy cream. My version is vegan and uses agar agar to help firm the mixture up instead of eggs and dairy. Are you familiar with agar agar? It’s a red algae that is used to thicken and firm up a host of Asian desserts. I think of it as vegan gelatin. Don’t worry… it’s flavorless!
In general I prefer to keep dairy out of my chocolate when I can. Don’t get me wrong, I think that milk chocolate is absolutely delicious and is definitely a nostalgic childhood flavor for me. However, milk has a protein called casein that binds to many of the antioxidants in the chocolate rendering them unusable to our bodies. I don’t make a point of eating chocolate because of the antioxidants but I do consider it to be a big bonus. Selecting dairy free chocolate is a simple and easy way to upgrade my diet.  This salad is a wonderful way to use up a late summer glut of tomatoes. Here I call for one of my favorite varieties, the Early Girl. Early girls have thicker skins and are often dry farmed in Northern California. This results in wedges that are less likely to fall apart in salads and a more concentrated tomato flavor that will uplift any recipe.
This dish should really only be made in the summer and early fall when the tomatoes are in season and taste as tomatoes should: tangy, sweet and just a hint of richness. It’s also a terrific way of using up bread that has been lingering in your pantry too long and has gone stale. If you don’t have stale bread simply toast the bread cubes in the oven until they crisp up.  Heat waves are not very common in the San Francisco Bay Area but when they strike we don’t tend to handle them very well. I was lucky enough to time one with a farmer’s market purchase of 25 pounds of dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes (a little over 11 kg). I’d never had this variety before coming to California but now it is my go-to tomato. The dry-farming allows the flavors to concentrate more which results in some of the most flavorsome tomatoes I’ve ever had.
Since we are relying on fresh, raw vegetables we must also heavily rely on our palates and judgement to guide us. Think of the recipe below as a template, a guide to the final outcome. This soup will really require you to discern whether or not to add more salt, or bread or vinegar… or not! Perhaps you grabbed a very bitter cucumber? Maybe you couldn’t track down Early Girls and used a different variety that is a bit sour? Was the bell pepper not as sweet as you were hoping? I recommend that you taste all the individual produce components of this soup separately before chucking them into the blender.  I like to make this soup in late summer when pepper season has just begun to crest and you know that autumn is right around the corner. There is a certain smell in the air and the way the sunlight falls causes the middle part of the day to appear fuller and richer. I think that I make this golden broth to imitate the Northern Californian sun dappled afternoons.
This is a simple but decadent soup that allows the key flavors of roasted pepper and saffron to shine. There aren’t many moving pieces to it and I find that it can be easily assembled while you are chatting distractedly or attending to a more complicated dish. Serve with a crust piece of sourdough and a simple green salad to round out your repast. |
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