Sometimes we make mistakes at the restaurant. They’re not big mistakes. The fry station will sometimes make too many of an item. Or really, they make a few extra onion rings or fries just in case a couple don’t turn out. The extras we dump into a bowl as the evening progresses. If we end up with a good amount by the close of business, we like to cover it in chili and call it a “Dump Truck,” enjoying it with that post-shift beer.

I’m telling you this because one night, I delved into the Dump Truck and noshed on a multi-hour old onion ring. It was still light and crispy. Not greasy. It came from our new little experiment that we’ve implemented at OK Burger on the Cheonggyecheon.

Let me share it with you.

There are so many ways to make onions rings. The thing is, they’re temperamental. It’s hard to get them just right, and when you do, they deteriorate quickly. A lot of foreign bars in Seoul use beer batter, and it works just fine. We were using beer batter here. It’s classic. The thinking is that the bubbles in the beer help lighten the batter as it fries, making light onion rings. But as we all know, anything with carbonation goes flat. So really, you end up with flat beer batter. It flavors them just fine, but they can feel heavy after a while. One thing that living in Korea has opened my eyes to is how heavy fried foods can make you feel. Being on a diet of non-fried foods has made me more sensitive to onion rings, fish and chips, and my old favorites.

The challenge is that I wanted to make them lighter. Maybe more of a tempura style. One way I had known in the past was to use club soda. That’s how some Japanese tempura chefs do it. Like the beer, though, you need to use it right away. Then I heard about some places in America that were trying something new–vodka. The science is that vodka has a lower boiling point than water. It evaporates more quickly, and frying is basically just rapidly drying out foods. So foods fried in a vodka based batter come out lighter. Now, vodka is still quite pricey in Korea. But we have one very affordable substitute.

SOJU.

It was under our noses all along. It took a few experiments, and we had staff and customer volunteers try them. They couldn’t taste the soju, but they liked the crispier texture. The trick was getting the right ratio of frying powder and soju. Doing it like you normally make beer batter made them too much like tempura. That’s a good thing if you want tempura. It’s mesmerizing watching the batter hit the hot oil, bloom out, and crystallize like crispy snowflakes. When they’re that delicate, they’re difficult to season. The crust just disintegrates and falls off, and you’re left with naked onions. You want something more akin to a thick pancake batter. And really, it works!

At OK Burger we serve them with our housemade smoky ketchup, and they’re addictive. We’ve noted that plates that go out with onion rings on them come back empty.

[box type=”info”] UPDATE: OK Burger on the Cheonggyecheon is now closed, but you can still do this at home.[/box]

Korea has gotten much better for finding foreign products than when I started this blog. But some stuff is still difficult to find. One thing I have never made in Korea is lasagna. That already requires a good bit of work even if you do have ingredients on hand. What got me started was finding lasagna noodles at Home Plus. They’re partnered with Tesco in the UK, so they have lately become the best bet for finding western products at a decent price.

So I had the pasta. I also have an oven, which admittedly, isn’t as common as you’d think in Korea. One of the best investments I’ve ever made. Since ovens aren’t common, oven accessories aren’t that common either. It wasn’t until I decided to make lasagna that I realized how hard it was to find something like a Pyrex dish. I looked in Home Plus, E-Mart, and New Core Department Store. No luck. We went on G-Market (like Amazon). It took some searching, but we found Pyrex dishes. I bought one that would suit my purposes.

The following is not a recipe. It’s a journal entry of what I did. Here goes.

I first had to make the ricotta. You can get ricotta at the supermarket now–for around W10,000 for a tiny tub. I didn’t want to spend W75,000 to make this lasagna, so I got some heavy cream and made my own. (recipe here)

There we go!

Next I made some Italian sausage. Why use plain old hamburger beef when you can do sausage? Besides, pork is much cheaper than beef in Korea. I based mine on this recipe. If you have any fennel around, which you can find at the foreign markets in bulk, you can make Italian sausage with ground pork from the Korean butcher. I just replaced the paprika with gochugaru.

While the flavors were getting to know each other in the sausage, I roasted some peppers for the sauce.

This is the easiest way to make tomato sauce. I threw the roasted and peeled peppers in a food processor with a couple canned tomatoes, garlic, and onion. Gave that a whir.

Browned the sausage. House started smelling good at this point.

Added the tomato sauce and some oregano. Seasoned it, and let is simmer for an hour or so.

While that was simmering, I whipped up a simple bechamel (brown some olive oil and flour, add milk, salt, and a little nutmeg, whisk constantly on medium heat until it bubbles and turn it off).

Grated some Romano I found at the supermarket.

Gave the noodles a boil.

Then I layered all the bits together.

Added a few packets of “pizza cheese.” Then I put it in the oven for 45 minutes.

And here it is.

A little for me.

And Jian liked it, too.

If you really want to know, the whole thing took five hours from start to tummy.