So, the Steemit Iron-Chef theme ingredient this week is lettuce. That's a toughie. I mean, anyone can throw some veggies with lettuce and make a good salad, but how do I stretch my legs a little while keeping it a primary ingredient in the dish? I don't know about cooking lettuce (though some of the entries before mine have shown that maybe I was wrong to discount it...). How about wraps? So I started thinking about lettuce-wraps and doing some research. One thing we do at home is use lettuce leaves instead of bread-buns when having veggie-burgers (who needs all the mediocre starch?), which is kind of a wrap. And in doing my research, I found in Korean cuisine, ssam are lettuce wraps and ssambap are lettuce wrapped around rice (and maybe a little bit of other stuff). And since I have several kimchis brewing -- including my oi sobagi from last week, Korean sounded fun. But I want to say up front, I was entirely comfortable taking all kinds of non-traditional variations. This is maybe ssam-inspired more than "real" ssam.
So I read the Wikipedia article on ssam and followed some links, and read what restaurants do for ssam bars. The wrap is the central element and it seems from my reading that lettuce is broader concept there than I normally think with. They use all kinds of big leaves. So I started with green and red leaf lettuce and also added some Napa and collards, blanched and chilled. Some of the prettiest ssam that I saw pictures of were made with two kinds of leaves, so I wanted variety of texture and color.
It seems to be a pretty meaty dish in its native environment and we don't do that, so I made up a couple of vegan meat-substitutes -- tofu sauteed in five-spice and another in curry. and then started thinking about other fillers. I put out some of the above-mentioned oi sobagi, and a Napa kimchi. Brown rice, pickled ginger, and sliced tomatoes joined the spread. At the last minute, my wife suggested scrambled eggs, so we added that! And then I wanted a variety of sauces. I included the vegan fish-sauce substitute I made last week, tamari, chili-garlic sauce, sriracha, and gochujang. So I put this spread out on our table:
And then my wife, daughter, and I sat down and rolled our own rolls up, using whatever leaves and ingredients we happened to fancy in the moment. My daughter surprised me by especially liking the blanched Napa -- I think it was because it was the least bitter of the wraps. And while we used a bunch of the rice, I think we all sort of preferred the wraps with not very much of it -- all the other filling were better. The oi sobago was particularly good in the wraps, even by itself, but it ended up more spicy than I'd expected when I put it together.
Here are some of the individual wraps or bites:
And at one point, after we were already eating, I realized I hadn't made a "proof" pictures, so I quickly scribbled up a post-it with my info and snapped this one:
- Sorry it's messy even by my standards! ;-)