I had this recipe bookmarked since receiving the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook. I ooed and ahhed and reminded myself I will do it one day. As time pass the only thing that turned me off was the instructions, they were written purely for someone with a stand mixer. Sadly I don’t have a stand mixer , I realise this shouldn’t stop me I will make do it with no stand mixer! Now what is this magical thing called a bagel bomb? It’s supposedly a bagel and the inside is a “plug mixture” mostly consisting of cream cheese and bacon. I’m too sold on calling it a bagel but then again I’m not American so what would I know all I know it is indeed delicious

I did I had a problem with the dough part of the recipe it didn’t seem to rise at all. After 1.5 hours nothing was happening, it seem it grew a tiny bit but definitely not much.  There was only an image in the momofuku milk bar book of the bagel bombs and it looked much larger. I googled and it seems like a few other bloggers bagel bombs turned out quite small so my faith got restored. I continued just using the dough as it and I simply love the end result!

I follow a lot of the recipe to a tee but use my hands to knead the dough and made adjustments here and there to suit the Australian Kitchen and my taste. What  annoyed me the most is that what is required is “200 grams cream cheese” because cream cheese comes in packets 250grams! Who else gets annoyed by these things? What am I’m suppose to do with the extra 50 grams? Oh wells more into the recipe I guess . The recipe itself is in a few parts but don’t be alarmed it’s a bit lengthy but not hard at all!

Recipe Adapted From Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

Bacon, Spring Onion & cream cheese plug:

50-100 grams of smoked bacon*
250 grams of a block of cream cheese
half a stalk of a spring onion thinly sliced
1 teaspoon of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of kosher or sea salt flakes
*use normal bacon if you can’t find, original recipe states 50 grams personally I used 85 grams. If using smoked bacon buy actual “smoked bacon” – I had a few times when people try to sell me smoked bacon but it’s not truly smoked, you can tell by the smell & aroma.

Half of a Mother Dough recipe:

225 grams of plain flour
1.5 teaspoons of kosher salt or sea salt flakes
1/4 a packet of active dry yeast
7/8 cups of room temperature water
a neutral oil

Bagel Mix:

1 teaspoon of kosher salt or sea salt flakes
1.5 tablespoon of white sesame seeds
1.5 tablespoon of poppy seeds

Bagel Bomb

everything above
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon of water

For the Plug:
1. Heat oil in a pan Cook bacon in a pain over medium heat until well browned. Chopped bacon into pieces. Keep the bacon oil
2. Cream the cream cheese in a bowl by use a hand mixer – mixing on medium speed, add the bacon oil while mixing.
3. Now add the spring onions, sugar & salt and use a spoon to combine the mixture together.
4. Divide mixture into 8 portions on a plate and cover with cling wrap. Place in freezer until frozen solid about 1-3 hours

For the Mother Dough:
5. Sift flour in a bowl and add yeast & salt. Use a spoon to well combine.
6. Place on a clean bench and start kneading the dough quite a number of times until it’s smooth.
7. Brush oil in the bowl and place dough inside to rest for 90 minutes. My dough did not double it turned out fine

For the Bagel mix:
8. Mix everything together, can be kept for 6 months

The Bagel Bomb
9. Pre-heat the oven to 165 degrees
10. Flour a clean bench a little and slightly knead the dough, then divide into 8 portions.
11. Roll each portion flat into pieces about 5-8cms circle
12. Place plug in the middle of the circle. Wrap the dough around the plug until it’s well covered. It should be slightly round with a bit of a flat base.
13. Arrange bagels on a baking tray with baking paper, making sure there is a few cms between each one
14. Mix egg and water together and coat bagels with egg wash.
15. Sprinkle bagel mix on top of the bagels.
16. Place bagels in the oven for 20-30 minutes. Don’t be alarmed if cream cheese splits out, this is normal and happen to all my bagels
17. Serve bagels warm or can be keep for 3 days. Please sure to warm them up in an oven before eating! My husband brought a few to work, we wrapped in foil and he placed it in the toaster press! This works too!

Inside the bagel bomb. Yum!

April 18, 2013 Julie American, Momofuku, Momofuku Milk Bar 22 comments

Mr Himself was hosting a pot luck party and I decided to make Momofuku’s grilled lemongrass pork sausage Ssam. In a way, it is kinda a twist on nem nuong. The pork is served with picked carrot and daikon radish, herbs, rice and fish sauce. I decided to leave out the herbs part out which consists of mint and coriander and the rice. I also stuck with using Luke Nguyen’s fish sauce recipe since I found Chang’s version ratio a bit strange, but I should give it a go one day and compare.

The pork requires cooking twice. The pork is placed in the oven to cooked the pork most of the way then grilled afterwards. I found the pork really dry afterwards but once pair with the carrot, daikon, butter lettuce and fish sauce you can barely feel the dryness of the pork. It was a bit fussy having people combine 5 components of it to make the ssam, is one part of the outcome I didn’t like. I figured that you probably combine everything and make a salad of it . The recipe is overall very simple and I would recommend it to make this recipe if you have the cookbook.

January 18, 2011 Julie Cookbooks, Momofuku, Vietnamese 5 comments

There is a lot of bookmarks in my momofuku cookbook. I been wanting to find an opportunity to make the pork buns for a while. When the food bloggers spring picnic event pop up, it sprang to mind that the pork buns can feed enough people as the recipe makes 50 buns.

I did decide to break down the recipe over two nights as there is no way I could cook everything on Saturday morning as I definitely want to reserve my mornings for sleep. (I generally would sleep until 2pm given that I have free time shhhh)

Recipes used in momofuku:
Pork belly recipe
Quick pickles recipe
steamed buns recipe

Also to tie everything together the Momofuku Pork bun recipe which is basically how to prep your bun.

The steamed buns is very much like a mantou. A problem occur with my dough, it didn’t double in size so I suspected it was to do with how cold my kitchen was. In the end the result was about 32 buns.

Mr Chang tells us to get the pork belly without the skin or to simply buy pork belly with skin, but to cut it off. I am sorry Mr Chang but I can’t do pork belly without the lovely crackling of pork skin, pork skin stays okay? The sound of Pork crackling in the oven is music to my ears mmm.

I wouldn’t say the recipe took very “long”. It just felt very long because there is time intervals involved i.e leave dough to rise for 1.5 hours etc then *insert step* leave for another *insert time*. I love this recipe! I would say its my 2nd favourite after the ramen. If I didn’t love ramen and noodles so much it would definitely top the list.

Pork belly straight out of the oven.

End result – steamed bun, pork belly, hoisin sauce, quick pickled cucumbers and spring onions. Didnt look as pretty as I want it to be but oh wells! (Picture re-stolen from suze due to her better colouring of my photo )

Thinking of making your own?
The recipe can be found on gourmet traveller here and here. There is a few other parts but google can help with that

P.S. It was lovely to meet everyone from the Food bloggers spring picnic. Will be blogging about it soon need to go through many photos! Also thanks for polishing off my pork buns!

October 9, 2010 Julie Cookbooks, Cooking, events, Momofuku 17 comments