[Wōdnes-dæg] Jook - Korean Luxury Porridge?

Hearing about porridge might send people's minds to the food of monks, rural old school farmers, or hermits. But maybe the fault of these foods' reputation should fall on the oats fro which its usually made rather than the porridge itself. Rice porridge is a completely different animal.

Asian rice porridge, jook, is a dish that I first encountered over in South Korea (also known as "congee" on Chinese menus). Making rice porridge is relatively easy. Though where there's less effort there's more time. This is what the recipe (modified from this one) entails.

You'll need five things: 1/3 cup of regular long grain rice, approximately 1 cup of water, 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil, one egg, a small pot. Everything else is up to your own personal taste.

For the jook in the photo below I fried up some mushrooms and sardines, added both shredded ginger and horseradish (on opposing sides), and sprinkled toasted sesame seeds over it. I added some soy sauce to it in the last few spoonfuls, but it made the dish far too salty.

Making jook is just as simple as the necessary items list. Optionally, you can let your rice soak in water for an hour or two before cooking it. If you choose to do so, your rice will cook a little bit faster since it will already be saturated with water.

After you've soaked your rice (if you've done so), toss it into your pot and put it on medium high heat. Add your sesame oil to the rice and mix the two together. Sauté the rice for a few minutes.

Once you're satisfied that the rice is nicely coated in the oil, add the water to the pot and turn the burner up to the max. As the water boils wildly turn the burner down to medium low (3, on a scale of "Warm to 6") and tilt the pot lid so that the smallest crack possible is left.

Let the rice simmer until all visible signs of water are gone (between 30 and 45 minutes). But. Also, stir the rice regularly throughout its simmering. The goal here is to let the water evaporate, while also keeping the rice moist so that by the time most of the water is gone the rice has a paste-like consistency. That might turn your mind back to ideas of porridge and blandness, but bear with me.

When the rice is finished, take your pot from the heat and bring out the egg. Crack that egg, and put the yolk and white into the pot with the rice. Mix thoroughly with a spoon. Make sure that you mix your egg in while your rice is still white hot - the idea is to cook the egg with the heat of the rice, which makes it warm more gradually and all over at once so that it works with the little water left in the pot to give your porridge a creamy base.

Now that the rice is ready, put it into a bowl if that's how you roll, and then add your extras. If you need to cook them, I recommend doing so while the rice is simmering since it's important to have all of the elements of jook together while still hot. And, enjoy!

One last thing to consider is the necessity of toasted sesame oil. This is something that might be hard to find, (I know it is here in Small Town, Ontario) but from my experiments with an alternative, I'm confident that I've come across a substitute. As long as you can get sesame seeds of one stripe or another, anyway.

For the oil used in my last jook I mixed one tablespoon of olive oil and one tablespoon of toasted sesame seeds. In lieu of mortar and pestle, I used the bottom of my spoon to crush as many of the seeds into the oil (or vice versa) as possible. The olive taste of the oil remained, but it was tempered by a mild sesame taste. This came out nicely in cooking, since, even before I added the extra sesame seeds on top, I could make out the sesame flavour in the rice. In the future, however, I will try the same with lighter oils in the hopes that I can get more of the sesame seed sensation into my jook.

Alright. If you have any questions about jook, want to suggest something for this recipe, or just want to drop me a line, toss it in the comments. And stay tuned - I'll be trying to redeem "Jonah Hex" in Friday's entry!