Author: internac

People don’t always understand our cold fried chicken at Ko Bar. Why serve leftovers, they ask? We do it because to it’s delicious. This dish has been on the menu since we first opened the bar, and despite the fact that the process to make it each day is incredibly labor-intensive, it’s here to stay.

We fry our cold fried chicken four times. We batter it, fry it, batter it again, fry it again, batter it a third time–you get it. Four times. It creates a crispy lattice-work that stays crispy, even when served cold.

The dry batter itself is very simple, just cornstarch and rice flour. We add beer for flavor and vodka because it evaporates more quickly than water and helps make the chicken crispier when it’s fried. After all the frying is finished, we dunk the chicken in a glaze of sugar, green tabasco, yuzu kosho, and white soy. It’s slightly sweet, slightly spicy. Then, it goes into the fridge until it comes out to your plate.

It’s like an ultimate late-night fridge raid that yields a perfect leftover fried chicken snack. Only, it isn’t leftovers―it’s made this way. We hope you enjoy.

To see their daily menu in the Bar, visit their website.

Jeremy Kessler was on a routine stop at St. Lawrence Market in Toronto when Anton Kozlick, original owner of Kozlick’s mustard, was closing his shop for the very last time. Kessler grew up eating Kozlick’s mustard like everyone else in Toronto―and he couldn’t let a good thing go. So he bought the business, including a book of 25 mustard recipes from Anton Kozlik, and hired his first unofficial employee: his nine year-old son, Noah.

Twenty years later, Noah Kessler heads the production facility and is responsible for sourcing the ingredients and updating the practices that have made Kozlik’s the forerunner of artisanal mustard. Noah shares some of his thoughts on his family’s business and his love of mustard.

We are proud to serve Kozlick’s at Kōjin.

What’s your history with mustard? Did you have it with family dinners growing up?
Growing up, for dinner, my mom was into the healthier side of things and my father was into the indulgent side of things. He’s South African, so a typical meal for him would include like eight different barbecued meats. We’d have lamb chops and boar and South African sausage and then steak and potatoes. There was always a huge variety of different meats on the table.

So, yes, we grew with a lot of meat and potatoes and definitely a lot of mustard, too.

Now, you make how many different kinds of mustard?
[Laughs] Thirty four.

What are some of the must-haves for any pantry?
Everybody needs a good sweet mustard. I really like to use the sweet ones in a glaze or mix it with butter over vegetables. Next, you need a good spicy mustard. My favourite that we make is the Horseradish Mustard. I use it with all kinds of beef and heavy starches. And then, it’s important to have a grainy Dijon mustard. It’s an all-purpose mustard. If a recipe calls for mustard, you’re safe with a grainy Dijon.

Do you think there’s one you would eat every day?
Probably, the Triple Crunch Mustard. It’s our grain mustard so I like to mix it in with my aiolis, tuna salad, egg salad, potato salad dressing, you name it. We joke that it’s the “poor man’s caviar.” It’s great on little canapes. Take, goat cheese and tomato―top it with a little Triple Crunch Mustard, and it’s perfect. I think it’s also my wife’s favourite as well. That probably has something to do with the reason why it’s always in our fridge.

What makes all these flavors distinctly Kozlik’s?
It’s our ingredients for sure. Canada grows 90 per cent of the world’s mustard, and I think we use a very unique blend of the mustard seeds. There’s a variety of seeds and there are about 15 or 16 different powders that are then milled. We find that most mustard manufacturers will use the yellow seed, some vinegar, some turmeric, and some salt. We probably use the widest variety of all the different milled seeds out there.

We wouldn’t have guessed Canada produces 90 percent of the world’s mustard.
We joke at our store that it’s very Canadian to do something well and not tell anyone about it. I do think that it’s changing now and Canadians are really starting to take pride in the good things that they do.

The first thing we do when people come by the shop is let them know we have an all-you-can-eat mustard policy. We also say: “no junk, no gunk.” You can pronounce everything on our labels. My father and I were dying laughing once when we were making a maple mustard and we were sent a sample of maple flavouring and we couldn’t even pronounce what was in there. We think it’s important to keep a product honest. We have a lot of great farmers and there are a lot of great products coming out of Canada, so why not use them?

It’s great you’re able feature farmers from Canada.
People are changing their eating habits and they really care about where it all comes from and how it’s made.

Over the years, it’s always been good to have my father’s influence because he kept us honest. Sometimes, we used to argue when I was younger coming out of economics class and looking at the marketplace that I would say how are we going to survive with a one year best before date? French’s has three years. You should add a three year best before date. But that didn’t matter to him, and it doesn’t matter to the people buying the mustard.

If you spend enough time foraging for wild apples in rural Vermont, you start to remember certain trees. Of the thousands of apples Shacksbury co-founder Colin Davis has tasted, there’s one tree he remembers specifically. It was big and old—too big to actually produce much fruit. There was a breeze that day, and he was downwind. “I was probably 100 feet away from it at least,” says Colin, “and you could just smell it from that far away: intense vanilla-cardamom.” The skin of the apples was extraordinarily thin, almost potato-like, which gave it soft tannins. It was mealy in the mouth, but the flavor was so pronounced and so unique that Colin knew he had to try making a cider from it.

Colin co-founded Shacksbury, a small-batch cidery in northern Vermont, because of moments like this—the search for lost apples. These apples, Colin believes, have the potential to make some of the most delicious cider on the market. Shacksbury currently makes two bottlings featuring these wild-foraged apples: Pet Nat in the spring and Lost and Found in the fall—and now, the Momofuku cider, available in our restaurants.

Wild apples sound rare. They’re not. In reality, there are too many nameless varieties of apples in rural Vermont to count. Most people don’t realize that seemingly identical seeds from a single apple don’t produce identical trees. (If you take the seeds from a Honeycrisp apple and plant them, none of the trees that grow up from those seeds will be Honeycrisp apple trees.) So, over time, this means all the trees across rural Vermont have become essentially one of a kind. The only way to propagate a single apple variety is to create a clone by grafting.

In their pursuit of wild apple trees, the Shacksbury team’s ultimate goal is to find the very best wild apples for cider and clone them into whole “superstar” orchards. The question is, which trees do you clone?

Most apple production in the United States has been focused on apples for grocery stores—ones that are juicy and sweet and shelf-stable. Those fruits are rarely considered good cider-making apples. For cider, you want drier apples. Less water means the flavor is more concentrated. You also want more tannins, which taste woody or bitter if eaten but add an important layer of complexity to the cider.

When the Shacksbury team is foraging, they typically only like 1 in 4 trees enough to pick their apples and blend them into a wild apple bottling. But, very occasionally, they’ll happen upon a tree, like the vanilla-cardamom one Colin remembers so clearly, that is special enough to test as a single-variety cider in the hope it might be worth cloning for their superstar collection.

Each year, Shacksbury tests anywhere from 10 to 30 of these single-variety ciders in 5-gallon carboys. After several months of fermenting, they may end up with nothing. But, sometimes, the cider will be just right—good enough to try making a clone. “Depending on what you’re looking for, it’s like 1 in a 1,000,” says Colin. “You try 999 trees before you find one that’s worth propagating.”

The big and old cardamom-vanilla tree didn’t end up making the cut—it’s not one of Colin’s superstars yet. The apples were too ripe, and the fermentation was off. They’re making plans to try it again, another year. But, as Shacksbury continues to grow, Colin and the rest of the team continue to forage and test making cider, both single-variety and blends, with these one-of-a-kind apples. As Colin says, “the end game is to have a whole orchard of the superstars.”

Momofuku Cider, version 2, is now available in all New York Momofuku restaurants, except Fuku. It features apples from Sunrise Orchards and wild apples, foraged by the Shacksbury team. The blend was created by our Beverage Director Jake Lewis and the Shacksbury team.

At Majordōmo, we’re proud to feature onggi, traditional Korean earthenware jars used for making fermented foods, such as kimchi, gochujang, and makgeolli. The history of onggi stretches back 5000 years—long before the days of glass and plastics, long before grocery store shelves and refrigeration, long before a time when people thought about moving into high-rise buildings, saving space, and simplifying life.

Nothing about making onggi is simple. Nine years years ago, when Adam Field, the potter who made our onggi, went to Korea to start an onggi apprenticeship under a sixth-generation master, the master had only one thing to say to him: “It’s going to be hard.” And it was hard. It was the most most physically and mentally challenging year of Adam’s life. Even now, he still does not consider himself a master.

But he’s found that making onggi still makes him feel a part of the tradition―of the long line of history and food history that stretches from thousands of years ago to today. Only today, tradition is a fading line. Adam chatted with us about his work at Majordōmo and about what’s happening to the art of onggi-making now that all these fermented foods are being produced by factories.

What is the perception of onggi in Korea?
To be quite frank, many people consider onggi the bottom rung on the ladder of all the pottery traditions. I don’t gain any favor with academically trained Korean potters by mentioning that I did this apprenticeship. They wonder why I wasted my time doing it.

Are you wasting your time?
[Laughs] Onggi-making is so tied to tradition, specifically food tradition that it’s important to me―to everyone. In Korea, food and all these peripheral traditions around it are a living museum. That history is so invaluable. I feel like Koreans tend to be fiercely nationalist, in the best sense of the word. They have such pride for Korean traditions.

But then when plastic and glass and metals came in, people thought―great, these are cheaper and easier than this old tradition. Let’s start fermenting in these. Of course, then, with that convenience they lost some of the functionality of the pots because that breathability actually encourages a very vibrant and healthy ferment. I’m not saying that you can’t ferment in those other materials.

It’s just not as good.
Right, and when people made the move to high-rise living in the 70s and 80s, onggi production really died off pretty heavily. But now, it’s finally started to come back around.

Now, it’s companies who are buying them. When I was in Korea, we used to make these 45 gallon vessels to sell to companies who would use them to ferment en masse and package for commercial resale. We’re talking about plastic containers on the shelves in the grocery stores that have a label that says that this product was made in a traditional handmade onggi jar.

So, that’s the new place for these jars. Instead of a small patio in a small village, they’re being rethought of as a pantry item.

You seem really interested in how pottery helps you interact with history.
To be frank, there’s no practical reason to make pottery by hand anymore. That game is over, like 100 years ago. So, I’ve been forced to think―why am I making pots by hand? There is something special about it, and there is something different about it. Sometimes the best path to a well functioning pot is the handmade route.

I’m hopelessly sentimental. When I see these objects, they remind me of these times in the past. I really kind of revel in that, whether that time is my lifetime or a lot further back than that.

How do you see your role in this history then?
I think about it this way. When I go to a museum, I look at an amphora―one of those old Greek or Roman jars with the two handles―that is thousands of years old. And when I peer down inside it, I can see this thing that goes on in the clay, when the neck gets squeezed from the outside as the pot is spinning. There’s a spiral that happens, and almost every potter knows that.

One individual made that pot thousands and thousands of years ago, and I think that gets somehow to the root of what is really exciting to me―continuation of lineage but also connection with individuals way back into the past. It’s like those handprints in caves in France. Somebody put their hand up there and spit a pigment, and that’s one person, however many thousands of years ago.

And pottery gets you closer to food as well, which I know is an interest of yours?
If I’m going to be making pots, there has to be this strong connection between something being made thoughtfully by hand with very specific intention for its use. Of course in the case of onggi, that was a perfect fit because not only is there an extremely specific use, but it is also a use that has been gradually evolving through the back and forth of a very small feedback loop in Korea.

You make the jar. Somebody makes kimchi in it the next week. Then, they say, oh it would be really nice if it was different in this way. Then, you make it again.

How does Momofuku fit in here?
I remember sitting in Noodle Bar five years ago with some friends. I was explaining to them how I was going to work with David Chang at some point. And I had nothing then―no “in” whatsoever, no plan.

I guess I think that David, more than a lot of other people, is taking vernacular and really highlighting the fact that it is actually something that is worth taking a really strong look at. It’s the same way that I looked at onggi―and noticed the people who looked down their noses at this ancient tradition.

There’s a lot of value in tradition, in history. There’s a lot to be learned from it. It hasn’t been around for thousands and thousands of years for no reason at all.