To a hot wok sizzling with oil, I add a handful of sliced onions, chef Roy Choi at my side. In my left hand, I’m holding a large ladle-like spatula, and my instinct is to move the onions around. Choi stops me.
“The most important thing,” he scolds me, “is not to be impatient. You have to let things happen.”
I set the ladle-spatula down, but Choi isn’t finished.
“You have to let go of all the fucking bullshit,” he continues as the onions soften. “You have to feel what’s going on.”
He leans toward the wok. “I can feel everything about this wok right now,” he says. “I can hear it. I can feel the heat.”
Is it time to move the onions? Choi says, “The biggest thing for a home cook to learn is: we haven’t touched this pan once. We’re allowing it to happen.” He gives me a knowing glance. “You probably would’ve touched them to the point of molestation.”
Choi, the chef behind L.A.’s super-popular Kogi Truck and Chego, the rice-bowl restaurant where we meet, is an intense guy, and his intensity has a history. Earlier in the day, before stepping into the kitchen, he had talked about growing up extremely poor. “This shit really happened,” he told me. “I remember sewing an alligator onto my Le Tigre shirt. I remember wearing my shoes inside out.”
As his parents filed for bankruptcy again and again and moved Choi and his sister from place to place—Englewood, West L.A., Koreatown, La Cienega, Norwalk, Anaheim, Mission Viejo—Choi didn’t realize how poor they really were because he was always so well fed.
“Every day my mom would wake up at four a.m. and cook a feast like Americans cook for Thanksgiving. But she would do it every day.”
Choi would regularly wake up to the smells of stews simmering, fish frying, and cabbages fermenting. When I ask if he got teased for taking smelly food to school, Choi says, “The people who poke fun at that kind of food were probably eating shit. The food my mom made was full of vitamins and protein and love and care.”
Love and care are precisely what matters most to Choi when cooking in his own kitchen. As we coax the onions out of the wok (we’re cooking Chego’s Chicken Henhouse Bowl in stages because a home stove doesn’t get hot enough), Choi watches me add the greens and, finally, the rice.
“Does rice play a prominent part in your cooking?” I ask.
“Um,” he replies, “this is a rice-bowl restaurant.”
Rice, it turns out, isn’t just a prominent part of Choi’s cooking, it’s a central component to an entire way of life. “You have to wash your rice thoroughly five times,” he tells me.
“Why?”
“To get rid of the starch, to clean it, and because of the spirituality of it. You won’t understand it, because you didn’t grow up with it like me, but rice is everything to our existence. It’s like a temple. That’s why we wash it five times.”
Choi cooks with his heart on his sleeve and with a deep spiritual connection to his food. He may have been poor, but he never went hungry, and the significance of that fact has never left him. Food is more than just a meal. It makes us who we are; it builds us up as people.
Which is why, in Choi’s kitchen, you respect your rice and you don’t fuck with your onions. These things matter.
“You have to fall in love with the process.”
Serves 2 people or 1 greedy bastard
During my time with Choi, I asked him about something I had read in Food and Wine: he loves milk shakes. “It’s true,” he said. “I do.” So I asked him for his favorite milk shake recipe and this is what he dictated. After making this at home, I can see why it’s his favorite. It all comes down to one unexpected ingredient: a handful of crushed ice. Usually milk shakes are so heavy and dense, you nearly rupture a blood vessel sucking them up through a straw. The crushed ice here lightens the mixture and makes the shake refreshing rather than heavy. Make sure the banana is dark, though; an unripe banana won’t have nearly as much flavor.
Vanilla ice cream (Häagen-Dazs or another quality brand)
Cold whole milk
A handful of crushed ice
2 teaspoons sugar
1 very ripe banana
A squeeze of honey or a squeeze of lemon juice or both
Place a few scoops of vanilla ice cream in a blender. You want to go heavy on the ice cream.
Add the milk so it comes up halfway to the level of the ice cream. Add the ice, sugar, banana, and honey and/or lemon juice.
Blend the mixture and try to find a perfect balance between thick and thin, creamy and viscous. You may need to add more milk to thin it out. Taste a spoonful and adjust the honey and lemon juice.
Pour into tall glasses and serve with straws.
Makes 4 to 6 cups
This is a fantastic sauce and the key ingredient to Choi’s Stir-Fried Chicken Henhouse Bowl. Without this sauce, the Henhouse Bowl would be a sad stir-fry of vegetables, chicken, and rice. With this sauce, it skyrockets into the stratosphere. But this very spicy, slightly sweet sauce works wonders for anything: chicken, fish, scallops, shrimp, even just a plain bowl of rice. You don’t need to incorporate all these ingredients to make it work. The key ingredients are the chili sauce, citrus, herbs, onion, garlic, and ginger. Everything else just makes it that much more intense.
1 (10-ounce) bottle Mae Ploy sweet chili sauce*
⅔ cup loosely packed Thai basil leaves
⅔ cup loosely packed cilantro leaves
½ cup freshly squeezed lime juice (from about 5 medium limes)
⅓ cup freshly squeezed orange juice (from 1 medium orange)
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and coarsely chopped
½ bunch scallions (white and light green parts), coarsely chopped
8 medium cloves garlic, peeled and slightly chopped (to get them started; the blender will do the rest)
3 tablespoons sriracha hot sauce (see Resources)
2 tablespoons Korean crushed red pepper (see Resources)
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds (also called geh; see Resources)
2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 dried Anaheim chili, stemmed and coarsely chopped (optional)
1 serrano chili, stemmed and coarsely chopped (optional)
4 teaspoons kosher salt
4 teaspoons Korean chili paste (see Resources; optional)
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Add all of the ingredients to a blender.
Blend for about 1 minute, until you have a smooth puree. Taste to adjust for citrus, heat, and salt. Use immediately or refrigerate in a jar for later use. The sauce will last about a week in the refrigerator.
Serves 2
A wok is such a good tool to have (see Grace Young), especially if the thought of spending hours on making dinner after a hard day of work fills you with angst. This dinner, which is as simple as stir-frying some chicken, onions, and rice and adding a sauce, can be ready in a jiffy if you have the ingredients ready to go. The herbs and fried shallots amp up the flavor, but if you’re tired, skip them. The point is: you can make a hot, satisfying dinner in a matter of minutes.
Canola oil
½ yellow onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1 cup cooked chicken*, diced
½ cup cleaned and sliced Chinese broccoli or whole spinach leaves or a combination
2 cups cooked white rice*
½ cup Sweet Chili Sauce, plus more to taste
A big handful of cilantro leaves, plus more for later
A big handful of Thai basil leaves, plus more for later
1 or 2 red Fresno chilies, thinly sliced
A few tablespoons of toasted sesame seeds (also called geh; see Resources)
A three-finger pinch of fried shallots (see Kitchen Know-How)
2 fried eggs (optional)
Set a wok on high heat. Swirl about 3 tablespoons canola oil along the rim, and when it’s good and hot, add the onions. Lower the heat a bit and wait for the onions to develop some flavor. When they just start to brown, scrape them into a bowl and set them aside.
Swirl in a little more oil and add the chicken. Stir the chicken a bit, and when it’s warm, scrape into the same bowl with the onions.
Now add another squirt of oil—make sure the wok is still hot—and add the greens. Stir, allow them to wilt slightly, and then scrape into the bowl with the onions and the chicken.
Add another squirt of oil and then add all the rice at once, flattening it like a pancake. Allow it to sit for a bit, lower the heat, and after it’s sizzled for a minute, start moving it around, scraping the bottom of the wok. You don’t want a film on the bottom; you want the rice to be in direct contact with the heat. Slowly cook and warm the rice, without adding color. When it’s ready, return the onions, chicken, and greens to the wok and stir.
Turn up the heat and add the chili sauce. Stir and taste: it will probably need more sauce, so add more until it tastes great. When it does, add the cilantro, the Thai basil, some of the Fresno chilies, some of the toasted sesame seeds, and some of the fried shallots.
Spoon the stir-fry into bowls and top with more herbs, chilies, sesame seeds, fried shallots, and, if you’re up for it, a fried egg. Eat it hot.
