Red-Cooked Short Ribs

choi

Sam Sifton, Authentically American Red-Cooked Short Ribs, by Way of Taiwan. New York Times Magazine, May 16, 2021 (in the column "Eat" written by all sorts of writers, about a certain dish and some background).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/ ... -taiwan-recipe.html

Note: Try to first read this article -- before consulting this notation.

(a) My quarrel with this writing is that the article mentions three persons with the last name Dobbertin: father, mother and daughter. Still the article referred to the daughter by the last name throughout, AFTER broaching names of father and mother. In comparison, court decisions will mention them, having introduced their names, by first names, or as "father," "mother" or "daughter."

(b) "When Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin was small, she roamed her parents' restaurant on Fredericksburg Road in San Antonio, Texas * * * Her mom, Nancy Collet, was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the city on the arm of an American serviceman she later divorced. Collet cooked in the kitchen of Golden Wok, one of San Antonio's oldest Chinese restaurants, before taking a job as a cocktail waitress and marrying a restaurant manager, Jim Dobbertin, Jennifer's dad. In the 1980s, the couple opened an American-style diner, the Conglomeration. The menu ran to burgers, fried catfish, hush puppies. Collet offered blackened redfish for $9.50, fried okra for $1.50. 'It was a disaster,' Dobbertin told me recently. 'She could have been making Chinese food.'  She did at home, Dobbertin said: Taiwanese beef noodle soup; pork loin marinated in Shaoxing wine or bourbon, then sliced into matchsticks and stir-fried with smoked tofu and pickled radish."
(i) Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin was born in 1983 (now age 37).
(ii) Name of Jennifer's mother, Nancy Collet, suggests Nancy's first husband was surnamed Collet. Indeed that is the case.
(A) Gerald William Collet. Published in San Antonio Express-News on Aug. 20, 2014.
https://www.legacy.com/obituarie ... 75697&fhid=8900
(B) Gerald William Collet: October 9, 1961 - August 19, 2014.

Presumably Mr Collet went to Taiwan as a young man, and married young (like in his late teens). Obviously Mr Collet did not remarry after divorcing Nancy, whose name was the first to sign on his guest book (on Sept 19, 2014)!

Or more likely "Nancy, his wife of 20 years" (in the obituary) is untrue -- perhaps large part of the 20 years were in divorce.
(iii) "Collet cooked in the kitchen of Golden Wok"

"Cooked" does not necessarily mean she owned the restaurant. And she did not.

Golden Wok, San Antonio (that is what "sa" is in the URL), undated
https://goldenwoksa.com
(this home page has "About Us" at lower left corner: "In 1972, Connie Andrews dreamed of owning her own small Chinese restaurant. It didn’t matter that she was not Asian, had no cooking experience and had never cooked on a Chinese stove before")
does not have a Chinese name, despite a logo of a dragon head.
(iv) "smoked tofu"?
(A) New Bacon: Smoked Tofu. Food Republic (2010- ), Mar 23, 2012.
https://www.foodrepublic.com/2012/03/23/new-bacon-smoked-tofu/

Read title ONLY; no need to read text.
(B) Tyler Fox, Smoked Tofu Burnt Ends a Healthy, Vegan Alternative to Traditional KC Barbecue. Kansas City Star, Sept 1, 2014.
https://www.kansascity.com/livin ... article1341531.html

two consecutive paragraphs:

"When developing these vegan burnt ends, I looked at the high volume of water in tofu like I would the collagen and connective tissues of a meat like brisket, using low and slow heat to draw the moisture out, thus gradually infusing the tofu with weaving layers of flavor and texture from the dry rub and smoking process.

"As it slowly smokes, the tofu gets basted with a sauce that will caramelize as it cooks down, creating the delicious 'barbecue bark' effect that is unique to burnt ends. For meatless cooking, getting this texture is one of the keys to achieving the wholly satisfying, meaty succulence of classic barbecue that is lacking in many vegan and vegetarian preparations.

• Search images.google.com with barbecue bark (no quotation marks is needed), and you will see what it is.
• burnt ends: "US   small pieces of meat from the ends of a piece of brisket (= meat from the chest of a cow) cooked on a barbecue and with a pleasant smoky flavor"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/burnt-ends
(v) raddish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radish
(" The large, mild, and white East Asian form was developed in China, though it is mostly associated in the West with the Japanese daikon [大根], owing to Japanese agricultural development and larger exports. * * * While the Japanese name daikon has been adopted in English, it is also sometimes called the Japanese radish, Chinese radish, Oriental radish or mooli (in India and South Asia). Daikon commonly have elongated white roots, although many varieties [or shapes of root] of daikon exist")


(c) bovine anatomy:
(i)
(A) Brisket (in cow) is equivalent to, in humans, a pair (right and left) of  
• pectoralis major
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pectoralis_major
• pectoralis minor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pectoralis_minor
(underneath pectoralis major)
• In bovines, these are instead called pectoralis superficialis and pectoralis profundus (meaning deep), respectively.
(B) Latin-English dictionary:
* pectus (noun neuter): "chest, breast"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pectus
(ii) short rib
(A) Christine Gallary, What's the Difference Between Flanken and English Cut Short Ribs?  Kitchn, Jan 23, 2015
https://www.thekitchn.com/whats- ... ord-of-mouth-215313
("In the flanken style of short rib, this thin cut, which is about 1/2-inch thick, goes across the bones so that each slice contains a few pieces of [rib] bone. * * * Unless you’re shopping at an Asian grocery store, you most likely have to ask your butcher to cut these to order for you. * * * Boneless short ribs can sometimes be found, which mean that the meat is cut off the bones of an English-cut short rib")
(B) Neither Oxford nor Cambridge online dictionary has the word flanken.  Collinsdictionary.com says this word is American English.
(C) flanken (n; First Known Use 1950; etymology: "Yiddish, plural of [Yiddish noun] flank, literally, flank, ultimately from Old French flanc")
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flanken


(d) "in San Antonio  * * * she met, worked with, married, divorced and continues to work with her business partner, the chef Quealy Watson, with whom she has started several ventures, including Tenko Ramen and Hot Joy, where the food was as much South Texan as Asian."
(i) Tenko Ramen  天狐
https://www.tenkoramen.com

The kanji 狐 has ko as Chinese pronunciation and kitsune as Japanese pronunciation.
(ii) I have not heard of 天狐, but googling it finds its origin in ancient China.
(iii) Japanese-English dictionary:
* tenko 天狐 【てんこ】 (n): "(See 九尾の狐) high ranking kitsune (fox spirit)"
* 九尾の狐 【きゅうびのきつね】 (n): "(See 天狐) nine-tailed kitsune (fox spirit, kitsune are said to be more powerful the more tails they have)"
   ^ Kanji 尾 jas bi and o as Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, respectively.

(e) "In November 2020, amid the pandemic, the partners opened Best Quality Daughter, an 88-seat space in the former Pearl brewery that Dobbertin calls her pipe-dream Chinese-American restaurant."

Nina Rangel, Anticipated Asian-American eatery Best Quality Daughter Will Open at San Antonio's Pearl on Friday. San Antonio Current, Nov 10, 2020https://www.sacurrent.com/Flavor ... ios-pearl-on-friday
(photo: Best Quality Daughter 極品女兒 / 亞美餐廳 Asian American Cuisine)

choi

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When Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin was small, she roamed her parents’ restaurant on Fredericksburg Road in San Antonio, Texas, cadging French fries from the diners. Her mom, Nancy Collet, was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the city on the arm of an American serviceman she later divorced. Collet cooked in the kitchen of Golden Wok, one of San Antonio’s oldest Chinese restaurants, before taking a job as a cocktail waitress and marrying a restaurant manager, Jim Dobbertin, Jennifer’s dad. In the 1980s, the couple opened an American-style diner, the Conglomeration. The menu ran to burgers, fried catfish, hush puppies. Collet offered blackened redfish for $9.50, fried okra for $1.50. “It was a disaster,” Dobbertin told me recently. “She could have been making Chinese food.”

She did at home, Dobbertin said: Taiwanese beef noodle soup; pork loin marinated in Shaoxing wine or bourbon, then sliced into matchsticks and stir-fried with smoked tofu and pickled radish. Cooking was in Collet’s blood. Her parents, staff to a family close to Chiang Kai-shek, fled mainland China in 1949 and eventually opened a breakfast restaurant in Taiwan. Collet’s brother would come to operate a stall there selling dumplings and soup. Her mom took Dobbertin to visit him every summer of her childhood. “We’d be in this restaurant in San Antonio for 10 hours a day every day,” Dobbertin said, “and then we’d be in this restaurant in Taiwan for 10 hours a day every day. I hated it.”

Still, it stuck. Dobbertin went to college, moved to Thailand, planned on a career in nonprofits. But by 2011 she was back in San Antonio and, soon enough, deep in the restaurant game, where she met, worked with, married, divorced and continues to work with her business partner, the chef Quealy Watson, with whom she has started several ventures, including Tenko Ramen and Hot Joy, where the food was as much South Texan as Asian.

In November 2020, amid the pandemic, the partners opened Best Quality Daughter, an 88-seat space in the former Pearl brewery that Dobbertin calls her pipe-dream Chinese-American restaurant. “I grew up in an American diner, eating Chinese food at home and spending my summers in Taiwan,” she said. “I wanted Best Quality Daughter to honor that, my Chinese heritage, my Chinese mom, the authenticity of what I’ve lived.”

Central to that desire is a family-style dish on the menu, with Bibb-lettuce wraps, pickles and condiments: red-cooked beef short ribs coated in a fiery glaze. “It reminds me of the food I grew up with,” Dobbertin told me, “food my mom made but didn’t sell.”

Reminds, but does not replicate. Traditional red-cooked dishes — they take their name from the mahogany color the sauce imparts to the meat — are simple braises of rice wine, light and dark soy sauces, with some sugar and aromatics. Best Quality Daughter’s multiple sweeteners — molasses and brown sugar to go with the dark soy sauce — add an almost smoky complexity to the braise, which is extravagantly spiced. Dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorns bring tingle, and star anise and cinnamon provide warmth. There’s a whisper of orange, a bite of ginger. Tomato paste and doubanjiang, a fermented chile bean paste, confer depth.

Traditional red-cooked dishes also don’t get the treatment Watson gives them. He uses some of the braising liquid from the beef as the base for a vibrant finishing glaze enlivened by a bite of onion, thick and glossy as demi-glace. I took a shortcut with the recipe a few times to see if omitting this step makes a difference. It does. The extra effort is worth it. Just fold the cooked ribs into aluminum foil, and wrap some dish towels around them while you’re making the sauce. (Or make the ribs a day early, save the excess braising liquid and use it to reheat the meat when you’re ready to serve. That works beautifully.)

As for the lettuce, which calls to mind Korean ssams, the meat wrapped in leafy vegetables and dipped into sauce? Dobbertin thinks this is simply the best way to eat the dish. She is in no way concerned with serving something authentic, she said, but something delicious. “It’s authentic to America,” she said. “It’s authentic to me.”