The Mind of a Chef (2012) s01e03 Episode Script
Memory Lane
This episode is about the flavors and experiences of Chef Chang's past.
We have all types of genre of ramen.
How they influence his present "And a whole bunch of don't worry about it" it has it right here.
Inspire him It hits that magical spot.
Motivate him And when it's summertime, it's all I want to eat.
And sometimes annoy the hell out of him.
We're gonna keep on hitting until we get a nice one.
Oh! Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Anyone see where my ball went? Events of the past could sometimes be a hindrance.
I don't know what's hot anymore.
Food trends change, you know? But often times, past experiences are sources for inspiration and passion, drive and conviction.
Either way, our present is a collection of these experiences and make us who were are.
These are a few of David Chang's.
Before Chang made his name in New York, he found his calling working here in Tokyo, Japan.
Somewhere from here to where that blue building is down there was the homeless shelter that I lived in.
Chang's pal Peter Meehan joins him on a trip down memory Lane in the neighborhood where he cut his teeth in the world of ramen noodles.
I would come here a lot.
This neighborhood.
What's strange is this is all, like, that's a curry house, but this is like a Chinese ramen shop.
Oh, check this out.
So we have all type of genre of ramen and mapo tofu ramen, and obviously this is the chahan.
So what did you do in this neighborhood? Did you ever hit up the pachinko on races? I never played pachinko.
I had no money to gamble.
It's so loud.
You wanna see how loud? Ready? I don't understand it.
How can that possibly be appealing on any level? Japan, the land of many vices.
I'm beating you 21 to ten.
Eat it.
Has your ability to eat ramen declined over the years? I can't eat Anymore.
And now I feel like I'm gonna die.
Death by ramen I mean, it's kind of a distinguished way to go.
This is where I used to come.
This is the same location, so I'm freaking out a little bit.
So when you lived here this was like the hot ramen? Yeah, there was a line all the time.
There's, like, the Chinese style, there's the chicken broth shio style, there's Miso.
Just like barbecue, you know? Like mustard, vinegar, all the styles.
Right.
And at the time this was the cool new thing.
So what was it about the style of this place? It was the first one to really sort of introduce, like, the heavy seafood element into the broth.
I thought it was delicious.
The double dip method.
That was a revolutionary technique in the world of ramen.
What's the double dip method? One to two One was fish, one was soy.
The double dip.
It's the double dip, ah.
I'd never had flavors like that before and at the time this was, like, the cool new thing, and I knew, though, as delicious as it was I didn't think it would fly in America.
I have no intention of waiting for you to get your noodles.
Go, go! Am I gonna burn myself on this? You have to.
So hot.
You have to burn and you have to leave here sweating.
Super delicious.
Why's your broth so much different than my broth? That's not the same broth, though.
No, it's a little bit more vinegar, it's a little more tart.
So you can tell it's it's a little bit more intense.
Yeah, totally wow.
It's like soba.
I'm losing.
That's how it works in this family, isn't it? I'm sorry I'm not talking.
You should figure out a way to make a living from eating noodles instead of cooking noodles.
It's not about digestion.
It's just about eating.
It's about basically, yeah.
Awesome.
So should we go get more? Like I don't want to go next door? Arigato.
Chang has had much success in life, but some plans don't work out as intended.
Growing up in Virginia, northern Virginia, I'd invite some friends that didn't grow up on kimchi.
To a Western kid a round eye it smells like something rotten.
It has a very unique odor, but it's an acquired taste.
It's spicy, it's funky, it's garlicky it's got a lot things that you're not normally accustomed to eating.
This is a pechu kimchi, which is traditionally made with napa cabbage.
So basically we take napa cabbage, salt it, cure it, and then we add a bunch of spice mix, garlic, salted shrimp and we basically just let it rot.
The fermentation process is all about preserving this-this beautiful cabbage that is harvested at the peak of summer and something that we're gonna be able to eat in the darkest of winter.
You can eat kimchi fresh and you can take it to the point where it's so fermented it's like drinking a soda.
I was doing an event a few years back, we were garnishing oysters with kimchi 'cause we had to serve like 400 people.
Let's just put it in the in the food processor.
This is what came out of it.
I kept on looking at it and Joaquin Baca, who was my partner back then, he now owns Brooklyn star, I was like, "qino" you know, he's Mexican "what do you think this looks like? And he's like, "salsa.
" I was like, "yeah, dude, and it tastes like salsa.
" Because of this, I was thinking about salsa, I was like, "let's open a restaurant that just serves burritos, Korean burritos.
" It sounded like Kevin Costner in field of dreams we're gonna change the world with this Korean burrito, we're gonna call it the SSAM.
Almost all the ingredients you put in a burrito, we have a parallel at least in Korean culture.
I was like, "well, obviously we're gonna add hoisin sauce.
" Then we have rice.
You got your beans, pickled cucumbers, what we got here is pork butt.
It's carnitas, right? So, but before I put the pork, I'm gonna forget the mo one of the most important ingredients that I learned about making burritos was aluminum foil.
I thought Korean/Mexican was gonna take over the world.
That's just still kills me.
I put the kimchi puree on again because whenever you go to a burrito bar, the last thing they put on is the salsa.
I was just trying to get people to eat kimchi.
I think it was because I got made fun of so much about how kimchi smelled as a kid, I wanted to make sure that it was in every American household and I failed.
It's really good.
There are some things in life will never change.
We're here at Edward Lee's joint, 610 magnolia, thank you for having us.
Cheers, man.
But we also have Julian van winkle here, and Sean Brock, and if you can show us how to make the recipe for one of the most spectacular drinks I had the past year.
This is the only drink I can make besides bourbon on the rocks.
Here we go.
Orange is very important, and you want to trim it to the right size.
Perfect, then you take a little raw sugar cube and this is orange bitters.
Orange bitters is really the secret to this thing.
Just a few drops, and you can see what the napkin is doing is soaking up the excess so you get just the right amount in the cube.
Here we go.
Bar spoon, very important.
Why can we not do it without that spoon? But this is just the right size 'cause what you don't wanna do is muddle he pit of the orange peel, because, you know, a pit is very bitter, so you muddle just the fruit of the orange, and you can hear that good crunch.
And this takes time.
It's a five- or eight-minute cocktail.
It's a great show if you're at a bar and people will be mesmerized.
So you take a few ice cubes, a good, clear, cold ice cube is better 'cause it doesn't melt as fast.
Oh this is a fifteen year pappy van winkle.
You always wanna smell the cork because bourbon can get corked just like wine and it will absolutely ruin it.
So you put just a splash in there to kind of wet things down.
For some reason, right at 15 years, it just the nuances of a perfect bourbon, it really does.
It just hits that magical spot.
So you kind of build it.
Add a little more ice, put a little more bourbon in there.
It does dissolve the ice.
Did you ever envision your bourbon ever being made in an old fashioned? Not really.
I'm a purist, my grandfather's was a purist, my dad was a purist, but he did like a good Manhattan.
So we're not adverse to putting our bourbon in a cocktail.
The better the bourbon, the better the cocktail.
And you can see the color's looking really good in that, it's kind of fogged up very nicely.
It smells amazing.
Oh, I can smell it from here.
How long is it gonna be for the second one? And the third one.
But why is that so good? It's something that's so simple but it takes a lot of love and a decade and a half.
Julian, you're the man.
Cheers to you guys.
Yep, good job.
Be careful, 'cause it is 175 whiskey.
I know, I think it's a genius.
And now for some memories of summers in Virginia, blue crab style.
The earliest memory I have is I asked for a blue crab party when I was five years old.
We'd go to the bay area and go blue crab fishing.
You can do it with a chicken drumstick, just sit in the water, and these crabs would just bite onto it and you would bring it back up.
Everyone knows, again, how to eat crab cakes, all that stuff, but no one really knows how to eat crab itself or cook crab.
And it's very simple.
I'm gonna show you the three staples for what I think you need.
You don't have to get anything fancier than this.
Blue crabs, beer, and old bay, probably the greatest seasoning America's ever produced.
Celery salt, spices, and a "whole bunch of don't worry about it" it has it right here.
Get a pot going.
I find that American beer works really well.
When I think American beer, I'm saying stuff that is not a microbrew.
So about four beers with, uh, I don't know, a handful of old bay.
Throw these guys in.
You want your shellfish live and kicking, looking like they're pissed that they're out of their environment.
Dead shellfish is not a good thing.
These guys are still kicking but they're not trying to escape their inevitable fate.
It's very important that you're cooking them alive.
So when you get in at about half way you want to cover it in some old bay.
And put the rest in.
Put some more old bay on top.
It seems like we're using a lot of old bay, and we are, but we're trying to season the meat, season the inside, so I'm just gonna stir them up so they cook evenly.
Cook them for about eight minutes, not even.
Now I'd much rather eat blue crab than lobster.
Everyone loves lobster, not hating on lobster, but I love blue crab more.
It's just, I think, underrated.
So the crabs are pretty much cooked through.
You're looking for obviously just turned red.
These are small guys and if they were larger, we'd I'd probably cook them in batches.
And this is how I actually like to eat it, get a bunch, and then, like an assembly line, just motor through.
This is how you open up a crab.
You take this thing that I can never remember what it's called.
Break it in half, and you're breaking them in half like this.
You have the back fin, and the back fin is traditionally where you get most of the meat.
This is your lump crab meat.
And I always pretend that it's almost like a lollipop, that you just gotta you gotta just peel the shell around on the back end, and that's your crab.
Delicious.
Whether you do it at a restaurant or you do it on the dock with your friends, for me, at least, it's one of the few things in life that truly gives me pleasure is eating blue crabs in the summertime.
Dave Chang is a golfer or was a golfer at one time destined, it was said, to be a champion.
He essentially retired as a competitor at age 13.
Still, it's a factor in figuring out the man.
Thanks for having me at Callaway.
Thanks for coming in.
We'll have some fun today, we'll get you dialed in.
Cool.
We'll get you into a new set of clubs, we'll show you what we do for a club fitting.
It's been a long time.
What we have is all of our latest and greatest in terms of technology.
We'll start with irons, we'll fit you there and then get into the woods and driver.
Okay.
Okay? This is our Callaway performance analysis system, it's the same exact system our tour pros usually get fit on.
Okay, what you need to do is set the golf balls up right on top of the silver dot.
And after you hit a shot, what we'll do is we'll look on this screen and see exactly what the shot would've looked like if we were outside.
Look at this, right out of the gate.
Beautiful.
Great swing.
Your head speed at 94 Miles per hour, that's well above tour average.
Okay, that's a lot of club hits.
And somehow, I mean, I feel this, in my head, I can relate this to cooking, but if you have an entire generation of people working on high technology golf clubs, does that make them less of a player than, say, Ben hogan's era when they're hitting all of forge in the sweet spot was probably like the size of a dot.
Right.
Small dot, and this is what probably the size of a quarter on this one.
Right.
So much technology now is coming into the culinary world.
Where cooks maybe not have to be as talented or work as hard because technology is allowing them to be better cooks than they normally might be.
The main thing that we want or that I want for golfers that come in is for the game to be more enjoyable.
That-that is a foreign concept to me.
Right.
Where'd that land? It's only about 20 years of rust.
It has been several years since Chang has swung a club.
In fact, the last time he played, the entire set of golf clubs ended up in the pond.
Did you guys see where my ball went? Oh, whoa.
All right, we're gonna keep on hitting until we get a nice one.
I think this outfit is too handsome for me.
I don't think I can play in this.
You just gotta live up to the outfit.
I don't think I can play in such an outfit.
Boom.
Cheers, Dan.
Cheers.
Wonderful round of playing gold, handsome boy style.
It's all positive, but at the same time, you know, you gotta work on the, you know, the matching the sweater with the pants.
You gotta coordinate.
You gotta look good to play good, you know? One of the weird things about golf is what you eat on the golf course.
There seems to be hot dogs in America, but in Korea, eating naeng myun mul naeng myun which is this chilled, pickled broth, noodles, and you eat that before your turn on the back nine.
And when it's summertime, it's all I want to eat, it's literally all I think about eating 'cause that's what I ate as a kid with my dad.
So we'd play golf, either go to a restaurant that served naeng myun or, you know, my mom would make it.
And it's north Korean by origin.
This is a variation of how my mom would make it.
And it's made out of buckwheat, a very hard wheat.
They're gonna take a long time to cook.
Buckwheat grows in abundance in north Korea.
I'd love to show you photos of the buckwheat fields but there are no photos of that.
So we made a broth out of brisket.
I've never made a broth out of brisket for naeng myun.
In fact, this is first time I've ever made mul naeng myun before.
It's all sort of from memory of me watching my mom make this stuff.
You never see naeng myun with rib eye or porterhouse or really expensive cuts of beef.
They're usually off cuts.
But that broth is usually relatively weak, so you augment that with pickle juice from the kimchi.
You add 7-up or sprite to your pickling liquid, and it has effervescence, which is what you want anyway when it's properly fermented kimchi.
It sounds crazy but it's not that crazy.
We're gonna add this pickling juice.
This is quite concentrated.
I'm gonna add 16 ounces of sprite.
And it was probably about six ounces of pickling liquid from the white kimchi.
So that, for the most part, is the naeng myun broth.
So I'm gonna check on these noodles real quick.
Naeng myun, in the summertime, you wanna keep cold, so I'm just gonna keep these on ice.
While they cool down, I'm gonna finish the rest of the dish.
So here we have the beef broth, we have some top round and we just cooked it through.
So it's not really a beef broth, it's just the water that we cooked the beef in.
We have an Asian pear.
So we're gonna start assembling this dish now.
Take some of these noodles, as you can see they're extraordinarily long.
I'd order naeng myun with my dad and they'd always ask you if you'd like your noodles cut and my dad would take huge offense.
And if someone tried to cut his noodles, he would be pissed.
So they do that 'cause you can die, literally die, 'cause those noodles they just don't end and they're so chewy you can't bite through the noodles.
Anyway, put in the broth on top, some of the brisket sliced, some of the Asian pear, just a small tangle of the white kimchi.
So we out a soft-boiled egg instead of a hard boiled egg just because that's just personal preference.
I didn't skim it as much as it should be 'cause I want some fat in there 'cause I believe there's flavor in fat.
But that is my version of mul naeng myun, reminded by all my childhood memories of playing golf.
So, weirdly, I made mul naeng myun.
What is it that leads a person to become a chef? I think it was because I got made fun of so much about how kimchi smelled as a kid, I wanted to make sure that it was in every American household.
Is it a random act? It's like dance, dance revolution but with these cray drums.
Or does a certain combination of events need to happen to a person before he decides to settle in the heat of the kitchen? You gotta coordinate.
The bug bit Chang at some point and the world of food is probably the better for it.
We have all types of genre of ramen.
How they influence his present "And a whole bunch of don't worry about it" it has it right here.
Inspire him It hits that magical spot.
Motivate him And when it's summertime, it's all I want to eat.
And sometimes annoy the hell out of him.
We're gonna keep on hitting until we get a nice one.
Oh! Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Anyone see where my ball went? Events of the past could sometimes be a hindrance.
I don't know what's hot anymore.
Food trends change, you know? But often times, past experiences are sources for inspiration and passion, drive and conviction.
Either way, our present is a collection of these experiences and make us who were are.
These are a few of David Chang's.
Before Chang made his name in New York, he found his calling working here in Tokyo, Japan.
Somewhere from here to where that blue building is down there was the homeless shelter that I lived in.
Chang's pal Peter Meehan joins him on a trip down memory Lane in the neighborhood where he cut his teeth in the world of ramen noodles.
I would come here a lot.
This neighborhood.
What's strange is this is all, like, that's a curry house, but this is like a Chinese ramen shop.
Oh, check this out.
So we have all type of genre of ramen and mapo tofu ramen, and obviously this is the chahan.
So what did you do in this neighborhood? Did you ever hit up the pachinko on races? I never played pachinko.
I had no money to gamble.
It's so loud.
You wanna see how loud? Ready? I don't understand it.
How can that possibly be appealing on any level? Japan, the land of many vices.
I'm beating you 21 to ten.
Eat it.
Has your ability to eat ramen declined over the years? I can't eat Anymore.
And now I feel like I'm gonna die.
Death by ramen I mean, it's kind of a distinguished way to go.
This is where I used to come.
This is the same location, so I'm freaking out a little bit.
So when you lived here this was like the hot ramen? Yeah, there was a line all the time.
There's, like, the Chinese style, there's the chicken broth shio style, there's Miso.
Just like barbecue, you know? Like mustard, vinegar, all the styles.
Right.
And at the time this was the cool new thing.
So what was it about the style of this place? It was the first one to really sort of introduce, like, the heavy seafood element into the broth.
I thought it was delicious.
The double dip method.
That was a revolutionary technique in the world of ramen.
What's the double dip method? One to two One was fish, one was soy.
The double dip.
It's the double dip, ah.
I'd never had flavors like that before and at the time this was, like, the cool new thing, and I knew, though, as delicious as it was I didn't think it would fly in America.
I have no intention of waiting for you to get your noodles.
Go, go! Am I gonna burn myself on this? You have to.
So hot.
You have to burn and you have to leave here sweating.
Super delicious.
Why's your broth so much different than my broth? That's not the same broth, though.
No, it's a little bit more vinegar, it's a little more tart.
So you can tell it's it's a little bit more intense.
Yeah, totally wow.
It's like soba.
I'm losing.
That's how it works in this family, isn't it? I'm sorry I'm not talking.
You should figure out a way to make a living from eating noodles instead of cooking noodles.
It's not about digestion.
It's just about eating.
It's about basically, yeah.
Awesome.
So should we go get more? Like I don't want to go next door? Arigato.
Chang has had much success in life, but some plans don't work out as intended.
Growing up in Virginia, northern Virginia, I'd invite some friends that didn't grow up on kimchi.
To a Western kid a round eye it smells like something rotten.
It has a very unique odor, but it's an acquired taste.
It's spicy, it's funky, it's garlicky it's got a lot things that you're not normally accustomed to eating.
This is a pechu kimchi, which is traditionally made with napa cabbage.
So basically we take napa cabbage, salt it, cure it, and then we add a bunch of spice mix, garlic, salted shrimp and we basically just let it rot.
The fermentation process is all about preserving this-this beautiful cabbage that is harvested at the peak of summer and something that we're gonna be able to eat in the darkest of winter.
You can eat kimchi fresh and you can take it to the point where it's so fermented it's like drinking a soda.
I was doing an event a few years back, we were garnishing oysters with kimchi 'cause we had to serve like 400 people.
Let's just put it in the in the food processor.
This is what came out of it.
I kept on looking at it and Joaquin Baca, who was my partner back then, he now owns Brooklyn star, I was like, "qino" you know, he's Mexican "what do you think this looks like? And he's like, "salsa.
" I was like, "yeah, dude, and it tastes like salsa.
" Because of this, I was thinking about salsa, I was like, "let's open a restaurant that just serves burritos, Korean burritos.
" It sounded like Kevin Costner in field of dreams we're gonna change the world with this Korean burrito, we're gonna call it the SSAM.
Almost all the ingredients you put in a burrito, we have a parallel at least in Korean culture.
I was like, "well, obviously we're gonna add hoisin sauce.
" Then we have rice.
You got your beans, pickled cucumbers, what we got here is pork butt.
It's carnitas, right? So, but before I put the pork, I'm gonna forget the mo one of the most important ingredients that I learned about making burritos was aluminum foil.
I thought Korean/Mexican was gonna take over the world.
That's just still kills me.
I put the kimchi puree on again because whenever you go to a burrito bar, the last thing they put on is the salsa.
I was just trying to get people to eat kimchi.
I think it was because I got made fun of so much about how kimchi smelled as a kid, I wanted to make sure that it was in every American household and I failed.
It's really good.
There are some things in life will never change.
We're here at Edward Lee's joint, 610 magnolia, thank you for having us.
Cheers, man.
But we also have Julian van winkle here, and Sean Brock, and if you can show us how to make the recipe for one of the most spectacular drinks I had the past year.
This is the only drink I can make besides bourbon on the rocks.
Here we go.
Orange is very important, and you want to trim it to the right size.
Perfect, then you take a little raw sugar cube and this is orange bitters.
Orange bitters is really the secret to this thing.
Just a few drops, and you can see what the napkin is doing is soaking up the excess so you get just the right amount in the cube.
Here we go.
Bar spoon, very important.
Why can we not do it without that spoon? But this is just the right size 'cause what you don't wanna do is muddle he pit of the orange peel, because, you know, a pit is very bitter, so you muddle just the fruit of the orange, and you can hear that good crunch.
And this takes time.
It's a five- or eight-minute cocktail.
It's a great show if you're at a bar and people will be mesmerized.
So you take a few ice cubes, a good, clear, cold ice cube is better 'cause it doesn't melt as fast.
Oh this is a fifteen year pappy van winkle.
You always wanna smell the cork because bourbon can get corked just like wine and it will absolutely ruin it.
So you put just a splash in there to kind of wet things down.
For some reason, right at 15 years, it just the nuances of a perfect bourbon, it really does.
It just hits that magical spot.
So you kind of build it.
Add a little more ice, put a little more bourbon in there.
It does dissolve the ice.
Did you ever envision your bourbon ever being made in an old fashioned? Not really.
I'm a purist, my grandfather's was a purist, my dad was a purist, but he did like a good Manhattan.
So we're not adverse to putting our bourbon in a cocktail.
The better the bourbon, the better the cocktail.
And you can see the color's looking really good in that, it's kind of fogged up very nicely.
It smells amazing.
Oh, I can smell it from here.
How long is it gonna be for the second one? And the third one.
But why is that so good? It's something that's so simple but it takes a lot of love and a decade and a half.
Julian, you're the man.
Cheers to you guys.
Yep, good job.
Be careful, 'cause it is 175 whiskey.
I know, I think it's a genius.
And now for some memories of summers in Virginia, blue crab style.
The earliest memory I have is I asked for a blue crab party when I was five years old.
We'd go to the bay area and go blue crab fishing.
You can do it with a chicken drumstick, just sit in the water, and these crabs would just bite onto it and you would bring it back up.
Everyone knows, again, how to eat crab cakes, all that stuff, but no one really knows how to eat crab itself or cook crab.
And it's very simple.
I'm gonna show you the three staples for what I think you need.
You don't have to get anything fancier than this.
Blue crabs, beer, and old bay, probably the greatest seasoning America's ever produced.
Celery salt, spices, and a "whole bunch of don't worry about it" it has it right here.
Get a pot going.
I find that American beer works really well.
When I think American beer, I'm saying stuff that is not a microbrew.
So about four beers with, uh, I don't know, a handful of old bay.
Throw these guys in.
You want your shellfish live and kicking, looking like they're pissed that they're out of their environment.
Dead shellfish is not a good thing.
These guys are still kicking but they're not trying to escape their inevitable fate.
It's very important that you're cooking them alive.
So when you get in at about half way you want to cover it in some old bay.
And put the rest in.
Put some more old bay on top.
It seems like we're using a lot of old bay, and we are, but we're trying to season the meat, season the inside, so I'm just gonna stir them up so they cook evenly.
Cook them for about eight minutes, not even.
Now I'd much rather eat blue crab than lobster.
Everyone loves lobster, not hating on lobster, but I love blue crab more.
It's just, I think, underrated.
So the crabs are pretty much cooked through.
You're looking for obviously just turned red.
These are small guys and if they were larger, we'd I'd probably cook them in batches.
And this is how I actually like to eat it, get a bunch, and then, like an assembly line, just motor through.
This is how you open up a crab.
You take this thing that I can never remember what it's called.
Break it in half, and you're breaking them in half like this.
You have the back fin, and the back fin is traditionally where you get most of the meat.
This is your lump crab meat.
And I always pretend that it's almost like a lollipop, that you just gotta you gotta just peel the shell around on the back end, and that's your crab.
Delicious.
Whether you do it at a restaurant or you do it on the dock with your friends, for me, at least, it's one of the few things in life that truly gives me pleasure is eating blue crabs in the summertime.
Dave Chang is a golfer or was a golfer at one time destined, it was said, to be a champion.
He essentially retired as a competitor at age 13.
Still, it's a factor in figuring out the man.
Thanks for having me at Callaway.
Thanks for coming in.
We'll have some fun today, we'll get you dialed in.
Cool.
We'll get you into a new set of clubs, we'll show you what we do for a club fitting.
It's been a long time.
What we have is all of our latest and greatest in terms of technology.
We'll start with irons, we'll fit you there and then get into the woods and driver.
Okay.
Okay? This is our Callaway performance analysis system, it's the same exact system our tour pros usually get fit on.
Okay, what you need to do is set the golf balls up right on top of the silver dot.
And after you hit a shot, what we'll do is we'll look on this screen and see exactly what the shot would've looked like if we were outside.
Look at this, right out of the gate.
Beautiful.
Great swing.
Your head speed at 94 Miles per hour, that's well above tour average.
Okay, that's a lot of club hits.
And somehow, I mean, I feel this, in my head, I can relate this to cooking, but if you have an entire generation of people working on high technology golf clubs, does that make them less of a player than, say, Ben hogan's era when they're hitting all of forge in the sweet spot was probably like the size of a dot.
Right.
Small dot, and this is what probably the size of a quarter on this one.
Right.
So much technology now is coming into the culinary world.
Where cooks maybe not have to be as talented or work as hard because technology is allowing them to be better cooks than they normally might be.
The main thing that we want or that I want for golfers that come in is for the game to be more enjoyable.
That-that is a foreign concept to me.
Right.
Where'd that land? It's only about 20 years of rust.
It has been several years since Chang has swung a club.
In fact, the last time he played, the entire set of golf clubs ended up in the pond.
Did you guys see where my ball went? Oh, whoa.
All right, we're gonna keep on hitting until we get a nice one.
I think this outfit is too handsome for me.
I don't think I can play in this.
You just gotta live up to the outfit.
I don't think I can play in such an outfit.
Boom.
Cheers, Dan.
Cheers.
Wonderful round of playing gold, handsome boy style.
It's all positive, but at the same time, you know, you gotta work on the, you know, the matching the sweater with the pants.
You gotta coordinate.
You gotta look good to play good, you know? One of the weird things about golf is what you eat on the golf course.
There seems to be hot dogs in America, but in Korea, eating naeng myun mul naeng myun which is this chilled, pickled broth, noodles, and you eat that before your turn on the back nine.
And when it's summertime, it's all I want to eat, it's literally all I think about eating 'cause that's what I ate as a kid with my dad.
So we'd play golf, either go to a restaurant that served naeng myun or, you know, my mom would make it.
And it's north Korean by origin.
This is a variation of how my mom would make it.
And it's made out of buckwheat, a very hard wheat.
They're gonna take a long time to cook.
Buckwheat grows in abundance in north Korea.
I'd love to show you photos of the buckwheat fields but there are no photos of that.
So we made a broth out of brisket.
I've never made a broth out of brisket for naeng myun.
In fact, this is first time I've ever made mul naeng myun before.
It's all sort of from memory of me watching my mom make this stuff.
You never see naeng myun with rib eye or porterhouse or really expensive cuts of beef.
They're usually off cuts.
But that broth is usually relatively weak, so you augment that with pickle juice from the kimchi.
You add 7-up or sprite to your pickling liquid, and it has effervescence, which is what you want anyway when it's properly fermented kimchi.
It sounds crazy but it's not that crazy.
We're gonna add this pickling juice.
This is quite concentrated.
I'm gonna add 16 ounces of sprite.
And it was probably about six ounces of pickling liquid from the white kimchi.
So that, for the most part, is the naeng myun broth.
So I'm gonna check on these noodles real quick.
Naeng myun, in the summertime, you wanna keep cold, so I'm just gonna keep these on ice.
While they cool down, I'm gonna finish the rest of the dish.
So here we have the beef broth, we have some top round and we just cooked it through.
So it's not really a beef broth, it's just the water that we cooked the beef in.
We have an Asian pear.
So we're gonna start assembling this dish now.
Take some of these noodles, as you can see they're extraordinarily long.
I'd order naeng myun with my dad and they'd always ask you if you'd like your noodles cut and my dad would take huge offense.
And if someone tried to cut his noodles, he would be pissed.
So they do that 'cause you can die, literally die, 'cause those noodles they just don't end and they're so chewy you can't bite through the noodles.
Anyway, put in the broth on top, some of the brisket sliced, some of the Asian pear, just a small tangle of the white kimchi.
So we out a soft-boiled egg instead of a hard boiled egg just because that's just personal preference.
I didn't skim it as much as it should be 'cause I want some fat in there 'cause I believe there's flavor in fat.
But that is my version of mul naeng myun, reminded by all my childhood memories of playing golf.
So, weirdly, I made mul naeng myun.
What is it that leads a person to become a chef? I think it was because I got made fun of so much about how kimchi smelled as a kid, I wanted to make sure that it was in every American household.
Is it a random act? It's like dance, dance revolution but with these cray drums.
Or does a certain combination of events need to happen to a person before he decides to settle in the heat of the kitchen? You gotta coordinate.
The bug bit Chang at some point and the world of food is probably the better for it.