Introduction to Cooking

It was 11am on a Sunday in the summer of 2017, and I wanted eggs benedict. I had just wrapped my sophomore year at USC, and I was living alone near campus. No parents to cook for me. No dining hall. No roommates to steal from.

The craving for eggs benedict was deeply rooted in memories of The Original Pancake House in Torrance that I’d visit with my parents as a kid. But now, if I wanted poached eggs and crisp ham on an English muffin, smothered in Hollandaise, I’d have to figure it out for myself.

I’d never had any interest in cooking, or any need to do so. I liked eating, though, and I was hungry. I typed “Gordon Ramsay eggs benedict” into YouTube. Why Gordon Ramsay? Because I knew who he was, and I figured if anyone could instruct me on a proper eggs Benedict, it would be him.

I watched the video a few times, then went for it. At the last, crucial moment, when I went to taste the Hollandaise that crowns the Benedict, what I got was an oily, broken mess with bits of scrambled egg. This was not the Hollandaise I remembered from OHOP. I dumped the whole thing in the trash, and considered my next move.

What would you have done if you were me? Cut your losses and eat the eggs without Hollandaise? Abandon the whole debacle and go out for a late brunch? Be honest. It’s not as though eggs Benedict are hard to come by. There was a diner around the corner that could have scratched the itch for me. I only needed to concede defeat.

But I’m not one for shortcuts. Plus, I’d already dedicated my morning and part of the afternoon to this project. I’d invested the time, effort, and money into shopping for the ingredients. I’d poached eggs, crisped prosciutto, toasted muffins. To come all this way and not eat eggs Benedict the way they’re meant to be eaten—I couldn’t do it. So I started from scratch. I rewatched the video a couple more times, and noted how Ramsay slowly streamed the butter into a saucepan set over a double boiler. I had no idea what an emulsion was, or the mechanics of keeping one together, but this time around, I whisked the butter into the Hollandaise slowly, off the heat, and it worked. It took two tries and several hours of labor, but I’d made myself breakfast.

Later that week, I parlayed this small victory into another. I invited a friend over to try my now famous eggs Benedict. He didn’t eat pork, so technically I made him eggs Norwegian, with smoked salmon. I even took the time to put together a nice little chive garnish. It was the first time I’d ever cooked for someone else. He loved it, and I felt incredible.

This moment couldn’t have come at a better time. The prior semester, I’d dropped out of the pre-med program—a path I’d been on since high school. My parents had always wanted me to be a doctor, and I wanted to make them happy. This is going to sound like I’m talking to my therapist, but getting praise for something other than my academic achievement was huge for me. I have no problem admitting that feeding my ego is a huge reason why I continue to cook.

After that first foray into eggs Benedict, I started cooking on the regular. I made breakfast every morning, and cooked dinner two or three times a week. ChefSteps became my bible for any recipe I wanted or any questions I had. The way they detail their recipes and explain the how’s and why’s of cooking appealed to my aborted attempt at studying pre-med. At the end of the year, I got a sous-vide water circulator, and began vacuum-sealing and circulating whatever I could get my hands on. If I look back now, it was all probably garbage, but I was pretty happy with the results at the time. Besides, I find that being pleased with yourself is essential to getting better…

...which explains why I quit making sous-vide short ribs.

I’d come across this recipe on ChefSteps for 72-hour sous-vide short ribs. They promised to be super melt-in-your-mouth tender and perfect, and blah blah blah. Sous-vide was very much in the zeitgeist, and I felt like I had a good hand on the process.

I procured a bunch of massive short ribs, invited some friends over for dinner, and set off on a three-day journey of slow-cooked meat. On the big night, I served the short ribs with pomme puree, and while my friends were nice about it, the prevailing sentiment was that my short ribs were not good. They were bland and mushy. They tasted like they’d been tortured for 72 hours, and I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know to sear the meat before putting it in the bag, or that I needed to season aggressively with such big pieces of meat. I only knew that I’d embarrassed myself. Screwing up Hollandaise was one thing, but I’d spent a lot of money on these short ribs. It was such a long project for such a letdown. I really never wanted to try again. I put the circulator way after that.

At some point in that first year of cooking, I watched an art-house documentary called Paladar, about two USC students who’d started a supper club in their college apartment. Neither had any formal training. They charged $15 for three courses, and were mostly flying blind. I was inspired. During the last year of college, I started hosting small dinners out of my apartment with a friend, Ryan Hosey. It was purely for fun—I only asked friends to pay for the cost of ingredients. It was a senior-year fling, but I found that I really loved putting on events, and I threw a few concerts, too, along with the dinner parties.

After graduating in the spring of 2019, I struggled to sort out what to do next. I decided to stage at Kato under Jon Yao for 2 weeks (June 2019). I learned a lot (to be explained later) but Yao opened my eyes to the world and operations of fine-dining restaurants. I traveled that summer to Korea, and I returned to LA and landed a job with celebrity wedding planner Kevin Lee. I was still cooking a lot, but I didn’t think about it as a career path.

But then a few friends and I stumbled into an opportunity: a fully outfitted commercial kitchen where we could host our own supper clubs. That was it. We hired a few other students to help us with the front of house, and set the goal of breaking even.

Owen Han, one of my two co-chefs, had been cooking since long before me, so I deferred to him on the menu. For the first couple dinners, we were cooking strictly Italian food, but after that, I began to incorporate my Korean tastes into the mix. We started to get into a rhythm, figuring out how to prep and time services. The Maru Supper Club became a bi-weekly event, with five pairs of guests all sat at a communal table. It had start-up energy, fueled entirely by our passion and naiveté. We scrambled to print menus and collect Venmos, fold napkins and straighten chair legs with books. In the kitchen, we prepped while our friends looked on, drinking beers. It was semi-organized chaos.

Around the fifth or sixth time out, we were still struggling with our main-course proteins. One dinner, we were serving duck breast and by the time we were done slicing the tenth breast, the first one was basically dead on the plate. I know it’s a problem that every restaurant in the world has to figure out, but we weren’t chefs. We were figuring it out as we went.

What we needed was a protein that we could cook to the correct temperature, and keep warm while we plated ten portions. It sounded a lot like a job for sous vide. And so, we turned to my nemesis: the sous-vide short rib. I was apprehensive about how we could overcome the disaster I’d encountered before. Had we all been professional chefs, maybe I could have talked it out with Owen or Ryan. But neither of them had more experience with sous vide than me, or, frankly, much interest in the science of cooking. This is one of the limitations of trying to learn to cook outside of a professional environment.

Fortunately, a random visit to a relative’s house provided an answer, in the form of my aunt’s copy of the Momofuku cookbook. Therein was David Chang’s recipe for 72-hour beef short ribs, based on the flavors of his mom’s galbijjim. The recipe struck me as magic. It turned an ordinary piece of prime-grade beef into something as meltingly tender as wagyu. And yet, it still looked and cut like a steak. Suddenly I loved sous vide again.

The version we served was way more simple—just salt, pepper, and some aromatics in the bag with the ribs. We served the beef on a potato puree (that was too gummy because I’d use a blender to make it) and a faux Bordelaise sauce we made by reducing store-bought beef stock and mounting it with butter. For garnish, fried black rice, garlic chips, dehydrated green onion powder, Maldon sea salt, and Japanese peanuts.

I always feel a compulsion to put my own spin on a recipe, but I can always trace the lineage of any dish I make. I’m very aware when people switch one ingredient in a recipe and claim it as their own. I’m also aware that some people would call it stealing either way. I understand that feeling completely. When I first started posting cooking videos in December 2020, I can confidently say nobody else was doing it in the style I did. The quick, rhythmic cuts, the graphic inserts—these have become the dominant style of short-form culinary content. It crushes my ego to see other people doing my style and getting more views than me (don't worry, i've matured since and still don't feel this way).

Naturally, everyone wants to feel ownership and pride over their work. That includes every home cook who puts hours or days into cooking a recipe out of a cookbook. I think it’s perfectly natural to feel that way when you’ve spent money on a book, shopped for ingredients, then spent time to cook a meal. If you were to recreate a dish from Corey Lee’s Benu cookbook, you would never claim to have invented the recipe. But what about the knowledge and experience you’ve gained? What about the actual food? Those are yours, aren’t they? Isn’t that the promise of a cookbook? That we’re sharing knowledge that’s been passed to us, that we’ve put our spin on, and that you can do the same going forward?

Anyway, this is how I make sous-vide short ribs. It’s a technique that was pioneered by the Troisgros brothers, and popularized by Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal . I learned it from ChefSteps, improved it after reading David Chang’s Mofuku cookbook, and tinkered with it until it looks like this.