David Chang’s Unified Theory of Deliciousness

A few years ago I got really into experimenting with fermentation. Miso is made by fermenting soybeans, but I wanted to see what happens when you ferment nuts, seeds, and other legumes. It turns out you can get some really delicious flavors. I particularly loved the flavor I was able to get from fermenting chickpeas. I called the result a chickpea hozon, a word I invented because it wasn’t technically miso.

It proved to be a really versatile ingredient. I served it with sea urchin at my restaurant Ko, and we made a killer dish that used it on sardine toasts at Ssäm Bar. The more time I spent with it, the more I realized it had some of the umami of a soybean miso but a sweetness that reminded me of pecorino Romano.

That got me wondering if I could use it to create a new version of a classic dish, cacio e pepe. Everyone loves cacio e pepe. It’s simple: pasta with pepper, olive oil, and pecorino Romano cheese. There are only four ingredients, but with those ingredients you get this great interplay of saltiness, the chewiness of the noodles, a little prick of heat from the pepper, and the velvetiness of the fat. At heart, though, cacio e pepe is a vehicle for glutamic acid, which comes from the pecorino. It’s an umami bomb. So we made ceci e pepe (ceci is Italian for chickpeas), keeping the pepper and the pasta, using butter instead of oil, and replacing the pecorino Romano with chickpea hozon.

In and of itself, this kind of idea isn’t particularly unique. Lots of cooks strip a dish down to its component flavors and re-create them in different ways. That’s the whole concept behind deconstructed dishes. But where this gets really exciting is when you realize that many dishes from around the world share some of these base patterns, and by reverse-engineering one of these dishes you can actually tap into many of them at the same time.

This is easier to see in retrospect than to plan out in advance. For instance, I inadvertently stumbled on a hit again in 2006, after I hired Joshua McFadden from the Italian restaurant Lupa. (He has since gone on to greatness in Portland, Oregon, at Ava Gene’s.) Joshua told me he wanted to make a version of a Bolognese, the Italian meat sauce. I told him that was fine, but he had to use only Korean ingredients. I often set these kinds of limitations, because I’m a big believer that creativity comes from working within constraints. (And also, maybe it’s a form of payback; when I was a kid in northern Virginia, my mother had to make her Korean dishes using only ingredients she could find at the local Safeway.)

Anyway, that meant he would have to find a way of re-creating the sweetness, umami, and pungency of Bolognese without the onions, celery, carrot, tomato paste, or white wine. He ended up using scallions, red chiles, ground pork, and fermented bean paste. Instead of using milk to provide that silky mouthfeel, I encouraged him to add in some whipped tofu. And rather than pasta or gnocchi, he served it with rice cakes that looked like gnocchi. We called it Spicy Pork Sausage & Rice Cakes, and when most people taste it, it reminds them—even on a subconscious level—of a spicier version of Bolognese.

But here’s the thing. When I taste that dish, I don’t taste Bolognese—I taste mapo tofu, a spicy, flavorful Chinese dish made with soft tofu, Szechuan peppers, and ground pork. I’ve had way more mapo tofu than I’ve had Bolognese, so that resonates more for me. I’d never seen a connection between Bolognese and mapo tofu before, but Joshua had inadvertently discovered this overlap between them. We hit the middle of a Venn diagram, creating something that incorporated enough elements of both mapo tofu and Bolognese that it could evoke both of them, while being neither one precisely.