Saturday, April 23, 2011

Chong's Sesame Oil

My discovery of the year is Chong's Sesame Oil. Made fresh in a tiny little storefront in L.A.'s Koreatown, the oil is absolutely fantastic! I had no idea fresh sesame oil could taste so alive. No hint of rancidity at all. Available in a variety of sizes, Chong's comes in both light and dark.  The small 16 ounce bottle of light is $10, which is a bargain.

I've heard that you can get Chong's to mail the oils to you, but I haven't tried it. If you're in L.A., just go to their store in Koreatown, although finding the store is a bit tricky because the store is on the phantom 8th street. Phantom 8th street, you ask? Yes. Because, it turns out that there are two 8th streets: the main 8th street and a tiny side street that parallels it for about a hundred feet which is also called 8th street. Chong's is on that parallel side street.

Chong's Grocery
3560 W 8th Street
LA 90005
213 387 0651

BTW, according to the Korean spelling, the store should really be called Jeong's Grocery. Just saying.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Goguma (Korean Sweet Potato) Cake


Goguma cake is something you often see at Korean cafes but I've never seen a recipe for it. (Of course, I've only been searching English language sites—there must be some very good ones on the Korean language ones.) Undeterred, I decided to MacGyver up a recipe. I mean, how hard could it be? After all, gogumas, or Korean sweet potatoes, aren't too far off from bananas, so wouldn't a banana cake recipe work just as well? After some research, I had a hunch that the most workable banana cake recipe would be Martha Adams's version in Cooking From Quilt Country. It uses cake flour and turns out a very light, wonderful cake.

Of course, I ended up having to substitute more than just the bananas—I didn't have buttermilk. But lack of buttermilk is never a deal-breaker. I've always found that a combo of yogurt and half-and-half does a pretty good job as a buttermilk sub, and those two things were luckily in the fridge. Now the only difficulty in making this cake is that you have to have precooked gogumas. I had some leftover from a couple of days before, and really, it was trying to figure out what to do with it that led me to making this cake.

In case you've never eaten a Korean (or Japanese) sweet potato, let me warn you that it is very different from American red sweet potatoes (sometimes called yams). A goguma's flesh is light golden and its sweetness is more delicate, less in-your-face. And there's a natural buttery richness so that if you simply roast one, you can eat it plain. Fantastic as part of a tempura platter too.

Another warning: this cake recipe is a bit more involved than a banana cake recipe because you need to put the cooked goguma through a sieve (chinoise) otherwise you just end up with too much fiber in the cake.

So, here we go!

Adapted from Cooking From Quilt Country by Marcia Adams

Goguma Cake

2/3 cup of butter
1 cup sugar
3 eggs at room temperature
2 1/4 cups of sifted cake flour
1 1/4 teaspoons of baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons of baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoons of salt
2/3 cup of buttermilk at room temperature (or a combination of plain yogurt and milk or half-and-half)
1 1/4 cups goguma, cooked, mashed, and sieved
2/3 cup of chopped walnuts

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Cream the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well. Sift the dry ingredients together. Add a third to the butter mixture and beat. Then add a third of the buttermilk (or sub) and beat. Then a third of the dry, then a third of the wet, etc. Add walnuts, mix, put in a pan (I used a brownie pan but you can use two cake pans) and bake.

In a brownie pan, the cake should take about thirty minutes, depending on your oven. You want to keep the cake pretty light and tender, so check after twenty. I always use a cake tester. Of course, you are perfectly free to frost the cake if you wish (any type of frosting will do), but I like mine with just a dusting of powdered sugar.