Food
Panchan: Blanched Vegetables
Lesson time 05:44 min
Panchan are delightful bites that come at the beginning of a meal and show what the chef is made of. Roy shares his blanching and shocking techniques, which can be used for broccoli or just about any other vegetable.
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Topics include: Panchan Blanched Vegetables
Preview
ROY CHOI: Warning this class contains some bad language. [MUSIC PLAYING] I love panchan, the tasty little bites that come before any Korean meal, because they offer such a variety of flavors, textures, and techniques. This panchan is made by blanching broccoli or just about any other vegetable you can find in the fridge. [MUSIC PLAYING] These are really, really simple, simple panchans. They're called namul in Korean, N-A-M-U-L, namul. So there's kimchi and namul. Usually when you sit down at a restaurant, at a Korean restaurant, if you remember, you'll have different red items, which are the kimchis. But then you'll have all these other things that don't look spicy, like a boiled potato, or mushrooms, or bean sprouts, spinach, broccoli, all these things. And that's what's called namul. And these are all panchan. I'm going to show you how to make it. So we have boiling water, just like you're making pasta. You add some salt to it here. You can use this method for any vegetable. This could be cauliflower, spinach. It could be bean sprouts. It could be bok choy. It could be whatever you want it to be, okay? We can put a pasta strainer in here, but we could also just go straight in, like this. I like to go straight in because I like to-- especially with green vegetables, you want to give them room to move around. If you crowd green vegetables too much inside of a boiling pot, it's going to, one, cook it unevenly, but it's also going to trap and hurt the chlorophyll within the vegetable, and you're going to get it very, very muddy. So I'm going to put that in there. And blanching means that you're-- you know you know what blanching is? You know, swimming is swimming, right? Blanching is like putting your hands on the pool and throwing water on your body, right? That's blanching. So all we're going to do here is put them into that boiling pot. And when the water comes right back to a boil is pretty much when they're done, or even before that. And you can see here how beautiful the color is. And we're going to shock it so that we preserve this color. There's something going on scientifically here, where the hot water, the salts, the boiling water, and the green vegetable are all reacting to each other at the same moment. And there's a certain time period where that shit's going to change. This window is very short. You see how bright it is? And this is done. This is a spider that I'm using. If you could ever invest in any piece of equipment and you're going to do a lot of blanching, a spider is your friend. But you could do it a the strainer as well. A lot of people understand that if you leave stuff in boiling water too long, that it's going to overcook it, or turn it gray, or whatever the case may be. But people don't think that about iced water. So sometimes I see a lot of cooks, or young cooks, in the kitchen, and they're blanching all these vegetables. And then they have all of 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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