This cooked salad of blanched and chilled spinach in a very simple dressing makes for an alternative to traditional salads as a side dish.

Time: 2/5
A quick blanche and a mix

Effort: 2/5
Would have been a one, were it not for the cleanup

Just Chillin’

There’s this Korean BBQ place that my circle of friends like to visit. Besides the impression selection of meat, they also serve a variety of side dishes with unlimited refill. They’re called banchan in the Korean language, which is an umbrella term for foods to be served with rice. The various sorts of fermented vegetables that we call kimchi is itself a subgroup under the broader category of banchan.

The banchan were as much an event for me as the barbecue, with all the variation in colours, tastes and textures. A veritable parade of flavours laid out on the dinner table, made all the more enjoyable by pleasant company. It was perhaps the second or third visit when I had an epiphany with my mouth full – I could make a lot of these banchan too!

Since I predominantly cook Asian, my pantry covers a large swathe of culinary territory. From the Korean peninsula to the Gulf of Siam, the flavours of most of Southeast Asia stand at attention in the same overhead cupboard. All I needed was some spinach, and I would be well on my way to recreating that Korean dining out experience right at home. Maybe alongside some Korean Fried Chicken, or this recipe for Korean BBQ pork belly by Kodi over at Cooking to Entertain!

It’s a great way to add vegetables to my diet, too. Having grown up in a culture where something isn’t really food if it wasn’t cooked, I’m not much of a raw vegetable person. I doubt I will ever be enthusiastic about a prototypical Western salad of raw greens and dressing, but boy am I excited about having some chilled spinach salad in my fridge! I served some with the fish and XO sauce that I steamed right inside my rice cooker, but of course you can have this with whatever you want.

If you want to be super efficient, you could blanche several types of vegetables while you’re at it. For example, start with the spinach for this recipe, followed by some edamame to keep in the freezer, then round up the rear with some okra for Okra Ohitashi. Save the okra for last, because the mucilage could bother some people if it got into the other vegetables.

Dramatis Personae

Spinach

I got my fresh spinach from the market, which is often quite muddy. Rinse very well. I suppose you could save that step by getting pre-washed packages of baby spinach like those sold for salad, but those are pretty pricey. I’d rather do the work myself and keep the money myself.

I suppose one could take a shortcut by starting the recipe with pre-cooked, frozen whole leaf spinach. I’ve never tried that myself, but I imagine it would work.

Garlic

Mince as finely as you have the patience for. Because it’s raw and cut into very small pieces, you don’t need much of it at all.

Dressing

As far as my taste buds can tell, this is just soy sauce and sesame oil to taste. If you’re looking for something more bold and pungent, fish sauce in addition to (or instead of) soy sauce would give you that.

Be conservative. The aim is to have enough dressing to coat the spinach, but not so much that it pools in the bottom of the bowl. Spinach is a delicate vegetable that becomes very, very salty if left to sit in that much soy sauce overnight.

Garnish

I mix sesame seeds into the salad, and also sprinkle some on top. They give the spinach little tiny bits of crunch, and they echo the sesame oil in the dressing.

The spinach being green and the garlic being white, a bit of red coloured garnish would really pop. Perhaps thin slivers of fresh chili, or a dash of togarashi on top would look very nice.

Executive summary

1. Bring salted water to a boil. While waiting, wash spinach leaves well. Prepare ice water in a large bowl.
2. Very briefly blanche spinach in the boiling water, about 60 seconds at most.
3. Drain spinach into a colander. Shock in ice water, and drain well.
4. While the spinach drains, finely mince garlic and gather the dressing ingredients.
5. Mix dressing ingredients, garlic, sesame seeds and spinach in a large bowl.
6. Chill in the fridge for a few hours, or overnight. Serve with a sprinkle of sesame seeds on top.

Play by Play

Into the hot tub. Don’t walk away – give the spinach a swish with a pair of chopsticks or a spatula. The spinach will continue to cook as you drain them, so I would pull them almost before they turn fully green.

Don’t be like me, and either get a bigger bowl or a smaller colander. Shocking in an ice bath helps preserve the spinach’s vivid green colour. Salting the water also helps: salt keeps magnesium ions inside the plants cells’ chlorophyl, for complicated science reasons.

Into a mixing bowl. For once, I chose a bowl that was big enough for the task – maybe because I wasn’t trying to prep some insane amount of food. Lightly dress, and toss to coat thoroughly.

Serve chilled. This time, with fish and broccoli that was steamed right on top of the rice in a Tower of Doom.

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