Previously, on tastingmenu.wordpress.com –
* https://tastingmenu.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/vegetable-marinated-fish-nobu-style/
So this weekend, I wanted to make my take on Nobu’s umami chicken wings. In preparation to make that dish, I saved up all my vegetable scraps, peels and trimmings to make his umami marinade. And into that marinade went about 1.5 lbs of chicken wings. However, I observed that a number of the Nobu branches
were offering those “umami wings” with gochujang sauce and ranch dressing. As of this writing, I still haven’t found a ‘safe’ gochujang sauce given the concerns to which my wife had alerted me, so that was out of the question. The Nobu ranch dressing recipe didn’t appear to be anywhere on the web. And then, if memory serves, I realized that perhaps Iron Chef Morimoto might have a version (especially given that he was exec chef at Nobu NY all those years ago). And sure enough, I found his version of ranch dressing which was associated with his Rock Shrimp Tempura recipe in Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking (p. 109)
The original recipe from the book made 1 cup of dressing which I found to be a bit much and so I scaled it down for 1 person. That ingredient list ended up looking like:
2 T buttermilk
2 T sour cream
3/4 t minced dill
3/4 t white wine vinegar (I had champagne vinegar on hand)
3/4 t lemon juice (here I would use yuzu juice)
1/4 t garlic powder
1/8 t salt
The ranch dressing looked pretty straightforward. The real effort would be to clean and mince the fresh dill (in case anyone’s interested, they could look here about cleaning/prepare the dill: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-chop-dill ).
So it would appear that I would need about 1g of dill going forward for a microbatch/single portion. So now it was just a matter of assembling all of the ranch dressing ingredients. So I would proceed with
placing the 1/4 t of garlic powder in to my ceramic ramekin followed in turn by sea salt (I thought it
would have more flavor than kosher salt), then the dill, yuzu juice, white wine/champagne vinegar, sour cream (wonder how it would taste
with creme fraiche?), and finally the buttermilk. Then I would just need to mix it well to get it well
blended to an even consistency. I did take note that the dressing was a little bit on the liquid side which I hadn’t quite expected. But then, of course, the author was an Iron Chef and so I thought maybe I should have a bit more faith on the outcome.
Once Iron Chef Morimoto’s ranch dressing was evenly mixed, I got it into the refridgerator to chill while I cooked up the marinated wings.
So like the vegetable marinated fish project, I lined my oven tray with non-stick foil and proceed to wipe the marinade off the wings and lined them up, single layer, onto the tray for cooking. And into a 400
degree F preheated oven went the tray of wings to cook for about 35 minutes. Once they were done, I switched modes on my countertop oven to broil and let the cook for about 5 minutes more.
While I was waiting for the wings to finish cooking, I decided to chiffonade a little cabbage to sautee with thinly sliced garlic and a dash of 4:1 salt/pepper mix. When it came time to plate dinner, the cabbage went into a nice little “sides” bowl. Seven of the wings were then loaded onto a sushi/sashimi plate with a small sauce dipping cup filled with about 3 tablepoons of Iron Chef Morimoto’s ranch dressing.
So various Nobu umami wings pictures across the web suggested the number of wings between 4 to 7 seemed about right.
The initial tasting of the wings provided an intensely flavored slightly salty savory bite. A followup tasting of the wings with the ranch dressing convinced me that the ranch dressing was pretty close to the ‘Hidden Valley Ranch’ flavor that I remembered from over the years. It was a good thing I made that dressing with its dairy components. By the time I got through the third wing, the chili that was in the marinade began to make its presence known on my palate. (Recall that the official marinade recipe had about a tablespoon of chili (15g) for a pound of pureed vegetable scraps). My initial tasting didn’t pick up on the spice – so this was something that a cumulative effect. While I did have bites of the cabbage and the rice, I’m really glad I had the ranch dressing to tame some of the spiciness which had penetrated the wings. I am now REALLY curious if I had chosen to go with the dry miso umami marinade version whether that would be the use case to provide a dipping sauce cup of gochujang or shichimi togarashi?
In case anyone was wondering, the chili I used for the marinade happened to be the new Lakehouse Farms Korean gochugaru that I recently purchased through Amazon.
In any event, I thought Iron Chef Morimoto’s ranch dressing was a great complement to the Nobu (chili) umami wings (given that I didn’t have the recipe for the Nobu version of the ranch dressing). I think 7 of the wings was a really generous portion for dinner. If I were to present this as an appetizer/starter or as a tasting menu course item, I think 2 or at most 3 would be more than enough.
tastingmenu 