Top Chef ™
Baker:
Season:
Week:
Challenge Type:
Roasted Cabbage with Pork Belly
Shuai: "I don't necessarily want to make just a big bowl of soup, but I definitely want to make some kind of medicinal broth like my mom and my grandma cooked for me. Growing up, drinking these broths, you're just like, yuck, this is gross. Now, as I've gotten older, I constantly make broth with all these things. It's just so funny. As you get older, you realize what an idiot you were when you were a kid."
Shuai: "I got some rose hip berries. Just putting that in the stock and some lovage. It's going to be really nice as a garnish."
Shuai: "I'm going to cut some of these cabbage up and throw them on the grill. I don't want to just char the cabbage on its own. Of course it's going to be very dry and brittle. I want to add that stock and kind of reduce it in the stock so it just kind of glazes itself. My medicinal stock, it has rose hip berries, thistle roots, a little bit of juniper."
Shuai, talking to Tom while cooking : "I'm grilling some pork belly. which is more like a garnish. The main dish is mainly I want to do, like, a roasted cabbage. I'm going to cover it in, like, this sour cabbage stock. I found a good amount of sistal roots, and I'm gonna put that in the stock and gonna make almost like a spruce and poplar oil.
Shuai: "Sour cabbage sauce smells just like mama's house. Little tiny baby ants are crispy. Let's make sure everyone get enough ants on here. Feel pretty great about this dish. Whenever I feel like I cook out of memory and love, it always comes up pretty well, so I'm excited."
Presenting to Judges
Shuai: "Today I made a roasted cabbage with rosehip glazed pork belly lovage, and ant togarashi."
Judge: "What's the oil, you have this kind of tingly, spicy note on there?"
Shuai: "That oil is made from black spruce as well as poplar buds and just a tiny bit of Szechuan peppercorn."
Judge: "The sauce around the dish that is sort of translucent. What is that?"
Shuai: "So it's a stock. A lot of Asian stocks are made with medicinal things. Like the sisal reminded me of, like, ginseng, and the berries reminded me of goji berries. And then the ants are just for fun."
Judges
"Wow."
"Wow. Yeah, I got ant togarashi. Definitely a Top Chef first."
"Yeah. So smart. When it landed, I'm like, okay, cabbage. But it wasn't just cabbage. There was so much flavor into it, and I love that it wasn't, like, just burnt on the outside to get it, like, perfectly cooked on the inside."
"Literally charged."
"Yeah, it was nice. I was really caught up in all of the different flavors that played so nicely with each other. The sweeter side of the pork belly and then the vinegar side with the cabbage and the char. I found this a really exquisite dish."
"It was excellent. Like, I love that Shuai went into the woods yesterday and came out with this. I'm absolutely loving it. I love my job."
Judge: "Shuai, did your dish turn out how you wanted it to?"
Shuai: "Turned out, yeah, exactly how I wanted it to turn out. You know, yesterday when I ate that poplar bud, it just kind of numbed my whole mouth and was so spicy that it just reminded me of Szechuan peppercorns."
Judge: "There were so many flavors within the dish. I tasted the medicine, but I felt it more than anything just like great food."
"This was just absolutely beautiful. I was jealous that I didn't make this dish, but you could put that in a three star environment, and it would hold up.".
"It was just bizarrely wonderful."
