Lomo Saltado Fried Rice
Prep:
Thinly slice your red onions and chili. Smash and coarsely chop garlic. Mince cilantro. Mix together the sauces. Salt and pepper the meat.
Ingredients (2 ppl)
1 tomato or 1 tbsp of tomato paste
1/2 red onion
3 tbps oil
6 cloves of garlic
2 Thai chili (optional)
Japanese Soy Sauce
Balsamic Vinegar
a bunch of cilantro
1 cup cooked rice
100 - 200 g meat depending on your appetite
1 tbsp of ground white pepper (black is fine too)
Vegetarian version: REMOVE MEAT or step 1.
STEPS:
In a hot pan, pour 1 tbps oil and sear the meat. Make sure you caramelized the top part so it's crispy and dark - achieved by leaving one side on the pan for at least 1 minute on high heat. Once the meat is partially cooked (red still) turn off heat and set aside the meat.
In the same pan, add 1 tbps of oil and sautee red onion, tomato, and garlic (and chili). The secret here is to let the red onion caramelized and the process could take up to 40 minutes. The aim for this step is to have the red onion slightly charred in order to give out its sweet taste.
Add meat and pour the sauce on high heat so the sauce becomes a less liquid.
Stir fry for 30 seconds and add rice and 1 tbsp of pepper. Stir frying rice should be on high heat and you should stir fry for at least 2 - 3 minutes or until thoroughly mixed.
Sprinkle in cilantro and stir fry it a bit more!
For extra crunchiness, leave the rice in the pan (hopefully non-stick) so that the heat can slowly help the rice become crispy! Serve when you feel like it!
Sauce Ratio
The ratio for soy sauce to balsamic vinegar is 2 parts of soy sauce to 1 parts of balsamic vinegar. You can also play around with the mixture as well. For a cup of rice I recommend filing up a 3/4 cup container worth of the sauce.
A good friend of mine told me that Gaston Acurio does 1 parts soy sauce, 0.75 parts oyster sauce, 1 part white wine vinegar.
Pre-made Sauce
To pre-make the sauce so that you won’t have to go through the trouble of making it over and over, you would have to stir fry just follow only steps 2 and 3. You can substitute the beef jus by adding bone broth or beef broth! The sauce can be kept up to 1 week in the normal fridge. For freezer, I don’t know but you can push your luck.
I typically make sauces out of 2 red onions, 3 tbsp of tomato paste, 1 bulb of garlic, and 3 dried arbol chili. For the sauce I would go for 1/3 cup of balsamic vinegar and 2/3 cups of soy sauce. Some times I will add a bit more of the soy sauce to offset the acidity that will form from storing the sauce itself.
What Meat?
You have a selection of meat to go through!
Beef: chuck, short rib, flanken style ribs, rib eye, sirloin
Pork: bacon, pork belly (acorn fed are the best!)
Vegetarian: Firm tofu or tofu skin
My most favorite cuts are chuck and short ribs because it gives a good meaty aroma and are fatty enough to give you a nice layer of concentrated beef jus.
Tips
The secret to a great fried rice is a ton of oil. Of course you’ll get the sense of what if there’s too much oil! There’s never too much oil in fried rice if you want to have a great time. Minimum is 3 table spoon for this recipe!
Story time:
How did this dish came about? I am a HUGE fan of Peruvian cuisine, coming from a tropical country myself. Throughout my 3 weeks travel in South America, I stumbled across a Peruvian chef at IK Restaurante and had a wonderful conversation about the different cuisines in the world. We both agreed, having lived in Thailand for some time, that there is a huge overlap between Thai and Peruvian ingredients.
I thought to myself, huh, that is such an interesting observations. Apparently, there’s a lot of exotic fruits that gives out a similar taste to Thai fruits in the Amazonian jungle! Who would have known. With this new discovery in mind, I took to myself to explore what were the possible combinations of Peruvian and Thai cuisine. Just to preface, I do not have a lot of experience tasting Peruvian food so my own experiments in this adventure is poor to start with but I am not going to give up! (Ceviche is my fav meal still - up close to my #1 love for pasta.)
Then along came Lomo Saltado. All my friends KNOW that I am very crazy about this dish. Who would’ve thought you could put sour taste (vinegar) into meat! Wow! AMAZING STUFF. One thing I realize as I consume this dish was that I tend to mix the Lomo juice with the rice.
Then it hit me like a truck.
You can MAKE IT AS A FRIED RICE. Oh my god what an amazing idea, I thought to myself. THEN YOU PUT FRIES NEXT TO THE FRIED RICE. Peruvian cuisine is amazing to the nth degree. But I am not going to stop here at all! The other day I was having a conversation with a friend about CAB event that Kellogg School of Management encourage students to donate their own events every year. We all suspected that Mim’s Table tasting menu will go for a lot and I knew I was going to have to deliver on expectations of a $100 meals (possibly).
My friends and I brainstormed on how we can glam up this particular Lomo dish. I fell silent for a bit as I went through my brain, thinking about presentation and how dishes could often be displayed and GUESS THE HELL WHAT MY AMIGOS!! I am going to put this beautiful lomo fried rice into a BIBIMBAP HOT STONE BOWL. IMAGINE the crusty fried rice bowl tastes! It is going to be gorgeous. I will update this recipe post again once I have attempted the hot stone bowl fusion. I cannot explain to you how EXCITED I am of this little thought!!!