Sunday, June 21, 2020

21 Jun 20 (Sun) - Stir-fry Kimchi Pork Belly

Watched this episode from "I Live Alone" featuring Song Seung-heon where he cooked for his friends when he was filming on Jeju Island. One of the dishes was stir-fry kimchi pork belly and he seemed to just really cooked with just the kimchi with pork belly and no other seasoning. It looked easy enough and I thought of trying it out myself. It was a few weeks ago and I finally got the chance to try the dish out today.

Bought a slab of pork belly from the market and sliced it myself. My knife-work needs more polishing. Tried my best to cut as thin as possible but still not thin enough I think.

Googled a bit about the dish and most recipes called for the pork belly to be marinated with light soy sauce and rice wine. In addition to marinating the pork belly, some recipes called for gochujang (Korean chili paste) and gochujang (Korean chili powder) to be added while stir-frying the dish. As I have neither the gochujang nor the gochujang, I just marinated the pork belly with light soy sauce and rice wine.

The cooking steps were simple. Just add in the pork belly to stir-fry for awhile till half-cooked and then add in the kimchi to cook till the meat is done. Taste-wise, I think the marinate overpowered the kimchi taste. Maybe next round I will not marinate the pork belly and also to use the shabu-shabu sliced pork instead. Nevertheless, it is still a taste of Korea. Hahaha...


After I was done with that, I went on to make the castella sponge cake again. This time round, I made them as cupcakes instead but forgot to lower the temperature some more compared to the previous round and hence, they became wrinkled again. Will need more practice.

Saturday, June 13, 2020

13 Jun 20 (Sat) - Castella Sponge Cake

There has been a lot of posts on castella sponge cake lately on the Facebook group "Home-cooked Delights 家常便饭" page. My sis also makes quite a mean castella sponge cake using her airfryer. So follow their footsteps to try and make one. Found this recipe that bakes the cake in a rice cooker and gave it a try last week.

Unfortunately my cheap rice cooker wasn't able to bake the cake well. It kept jumping from the cook function to the keep-warm function. In the end, the edge of the cake rose well but the middle didn't. The fortunate thing was that at least it wasn't too dense in the middle either.

Not satisfy with the result and gave it another attempt today. This time I only played with one egg portion and baked in an oven. I tried baking it at 150 degree Celsius for 18 mins. As usual, the cake rose while in the oven and sank after it cooled down resulting in wrinkles. I guess I should have baked them as cupcakes instead because the cake turned out to be very short.

Wonder if it would be better if I bake it at 140 degree Celsius for longer time say maybe 20-25 mins. Shall try again.

 Whole cake
One slice