Coffee, Flour, and Peanuts
The challenge, set this time by Crissy, brought instantly to Kristina’s mind Asian flavors - spice, sweetness, and umami.
Kristina chose a Vietnamese-style shrimpcake with a coffee-peanut sauce overtop rice noodles. Chris took his sweet time deciding what he would make. Therefore Chris and Kristina made their dishes as separate meals this time around.
Chris finally came up with his idea, marinated skirt steak with homemade bao and peanut sauce.
“Oh! That seems relatively easy and fun!” — Kristina’s reaction about 5 seconds after ingredients announced
Menu:
Kristina:
Crispy Vietnamese-style shrimpcake with a coffee-peanut sauce overtop rice noodles
Side salad
Chris:
Taiwanese bao with coffee, soy marinated skirt steak, asian slaw, and peanut sauce
Asian slaw
The shrimpcake combined little mini shrimp, lemongrass, green onions, white flour, green peppers, garlic, lime, and fresh cilantro from our garden. A simple mix but powerful flavor.
The cakes were patted with cornstarch and fried in peanut oil.
Rice noodles (rice flour already formed!) were steamed for 2 minutes, then placed in the leftover oil to finish cooking over heat. The cakes were served atop these noodles, with fresh cilantro and green onions scattered on top.
Coffee, peanut oil, red wine vinegar, soy sauce, lime juice, sugar, sea salt and black pepper were mixed into a light sauce for drizzling over the cakes, and also served as the dressing for the side salad.
Even tho the dressing had a bit too much vinegar, the dish was most enjoyable.
Chris actually started prep for this meal a few days early making homemade peanut butter for the peanut sauce. It took a lot of self control from Kristina and Chris to keep enough of that peanut butter around until meal day.
On the day of the meal, Chris starts early in the day getting the skirt steak marinated.
The marinade included coffee, soy sauce, rice vinegar, Worchestershire sauce, onions, and more!
Chris and Kristina's mouths were watering already.
Chris decided to make a Taiwanese style bao. These are more like buns than the more traditional dumpling-like bao.
Chris, not being much of a baker, was able to pull these bao off with reasonable ease. He did wish he and Kristina had a bamboo steamer but the metal did ok.
The steak was cooked perfectly. A beautiful medium rare that was hard to not dig into right when it was cut.
The peanut sauce was delicious. Ginger, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sriracha, peanut butter and more. So good!
The slaw rounded the whole meal off.
Some more shots of the prep work for the meals...
“Asian food is very easy to like because it hits your mouth very differently... You have that distinct flavor that is usually working in Asian food.” — Tom Colicchio
Thank you for reading! We had a great time and are looking forward to doing it again. We hope you all enjoyed your meals as much as we did.