Food
Mother Sauce: Kogi Vinaigrette
Lesson time 07:36 min
Roy shares the secrets to making the famous Kogi vinaigrette.
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Topics include: Making Kogi Vinaigrette
Teaches Intuitive Cooking
Food truck “godfather” Roy Choi teaches you his signature recipes and mother sauces—then empowers you to make them your own.
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ANNOUNCER: Warning, this class contains some bad language. [MUSIC PLAYING] ROY CHOI: When we started Kogi, I really wanted to figure out how do I take everything that I grew up with eating tacos on the street, the feeling of what an LA street taco is but then also the Korean barbecue experience, and how can I put all of those things together in one bite so that it really felt like the town that I'm from? This mother source is called kogi vinaigrette. It's one of the sauces that was really instrumental in everything that happened within Kogi. When you sit down at Korean barbecue, the first thing that you get to eat when you sit down is this kind of scallion, lettuce, cabbage slaw that has this really, really pungent kind of acidic, sweet vinaigrette that comes along with it. So I thought that I wanted to kind of create my version of that vinaigrette, of that first salad, but then that mixed with the lime juice and the cilantro and onion would create a whole new identity. It defines everything that I am, you know. It defines my Korean heritage. It defines my upbringing in Los Angeles. It defines my life on the streets but also my life as a chef. It's just everything that I am all into one blender. So let's get started. It's very simple. This sauce had to be simple because it was made on the streets. It was made in the truck. Sometimes we had to pull over in gas stations and use the outlets at the gas stations if we ran out of the sauce. And it's funny because what I used to do is put everything into the blender and put the top on. And then, you know, my team would do a lookout, and then I take the blender. And I'd run over next to the bathroom and plug it in and the press-- basically press on, come back, take it out, and go back, and we hit the road. So this sauce starts with, again, Korean chili powder, gochugaru, black pepper, sugar, salt, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, oil, and scallions. Let's first put in our dry ingredients here-- salt, pepper, sugar, garlic, chili powder. All right, so now what we're going to do is we're going to add our scallions. So I'm just going to do a rough chop there. I left the ginger whole here because I want to show you how to peel ginger. You know, ginger can be a little bit intimidating I know, and it seems counterintuitive, right, because a spoon to peel. But hold the ginger on the cutting board and just scrape. I'm only doing one knob here but imagine you have 10 pounds of ginger to peel right. Goes so much faster. Look at this. Just taking a spoon, just scraping it. I can knock out five, 10 pounds in no time using this method, right. So here we go. So we have our ginger. We're just going to kind of do a small rough chop here. We want to cut this a little more than you would maybe think of because it is so dense and fibrous. We don't-- again, going back to the friction of the blender, you don't want to overwork th...
About the Instructor
Roy Choi wasn’t trying to start a revolution when he took tacos, kimchi, and more to the Los Angeles streets with the Kogi BBQ taco truck. He just wanted to make what he loved and knew by heart: immigrant-influenced all-American food. Now he’s teaching you his recipes, sauces, and techniques. Learn how to cook with your instincts using equipment you already have—and start adding your own twist to tried-and-true favorites.
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Roy Choi
Food truck “godfather” Roy Choi teaches you his signature recipes and mother sauces—then empowers you to make them your own.
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