Chilled Soba Noodle Salad with Crispy Prosciutto di Parma
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00:00 Hi there, I'm chef instructor Bill Brewer here at the Culinary Institute of America,
00:05 and today I'm going to be cooking with a prosciutto di Parma.
00:08 This is a ham made in the Parma region of Italy that is denomination of origin protected.
00:14 It's a natural product that uses traditional methods, and when they cure this ham, the
00:19 only thing they add to it is sea salt.
00:22 By the time prosciutto di Parma is ready to be exported to the United States, it's been
00:26 aged for a minimum of 400 days.
00:28 If you look here, you can see the beautiful fat and the meat, but if I turn it over, what
00:34 you will notice is a little brand right here.
00:37 It's the Parma crown that identifies this as the real deal.
00:42 Now I've trimmed this a little bit.
00:44 I cut off the skin, and I cut off any discolored fat, and at this point, I'm ready to work
00:51 with this ham.
00:53 So I'm going to set this ham aside.
00:55 What might surprise you is that this quintessential Italian ham is going into a salad that is
01:04 every bit as Asian as this ham is Italian.
01:07 I'm going to make a soba noodle salad.
01:09 So to begin with, I need to make a dressing for the salad, and I've got the ingredients
01:14 laid out here.
01:15 First, I'm going to add some soy sauce and some sugar.
01:20 We'll give the sugar an opportunity to dissolve.
01:25 I'm going to add grated ginger.
01:31 Here is a little bit of rice wine vinegar, a little bit of toasted sesame oil, and then
01:40 finally mirin.
01:43 Now mirin is a sweetened sake.
01:46 It lends a viscosity to the dressing that you might ordinarily get from oil, and also
01:52 a sweet flavor.
01:54 The alcohol in the sake makes this dressing more aromatic, and consequently, it comes
01:59 across as more flavorful.
02:01 Anyhow, that's the dressing.
02:04 It's very, very simple to put together, and I'm going to use this dressing not just as
02:09 a dressing for the salad, but I'm going to also use it as a marinade.
02:13 So if you take a look, I've got some shiitake mushrooms here.
02:16 I'm going to soy and sesame roast these shiitake mushrooms by adding some of this dressing
02:22 as a marinade and tossing them, and then putting them into the oven to roast.
02:31 The balance will be the dressing for our salad.
02:35 So just toss these so that they absorb the flavor of the marinade.
02:41 I've got a pan in the oven already that should be nice and hot, and I'm going to take these
02:48 mushrooms and just add them to the pan.
02:59 And back into the oven.
03:02 You want them to get tender, and I would say they'll probably take maybe 10 minutes to
03:06 cook.
03:07 All right, so that's step one.
03:09 Now, let's talk about the soba noodles.
03:11 I have some soba noodles here that are already cooked.
03:15 You can find soba noodles in an Asian grocery.
03:17 I've got these right here.
03:19 These are relatively fine, but regardless of what brand you buy or what size they are,
03:25 they have a very specific set of instructions, and that is you bring a pot of water, salted
03:31 water to a boil.
03:33 You add the noodles.
03:34 When it returns to a boil, you add a cup of cold water.
03:37 And what that does is it stops the boiling so that the action in the pan is not too aggressive.
03:45 When it comes back to a boil, you add a cup of cold water.
03:49 Buckwheat noodles are delicate enough that if they boil hard, they will sort of break
03:53 apart in the action of boiling.
03:55 And so by adding cold water right up until you're ready to take them out of the water,
04:00 that gives you the perfect environment to cook them in.
04:04 All right, so these have been cooked already.
04:08 If they stick together a little bit, don't add oil to them.
04:11 Instead, just wait until you add the dressing because the dressing will make them loosen
04:16 and come apart.
04:17 Now, what are we going to put into this?
04:19 Well, I've got a couple of different things that I'm going to put in here.
04:23 The first I'd like to tell you about is hajiki.
04:26 Hajiki is a seaweed, and one of the things I love about it is the savory flavor of the
04:32 ocean that you get from it.
04:34 It comes to you dried, you rehydrate it in water.
04:37 But when you look at the label, what you're going to discover is a lot of fiber, about
04:42 eight grams of fiber per third of an ounce.
04:46 Forty percent of your daily requirement for iron goes in here, and there's no fat, no
04:51 carbohydrates.
04:52 So we're going to add the hajiki that's been rehydrated.
04:56 I've got some carrots here that have been first julienned and then blanched.
05:03 That's there for flavor and color.
05:06 This is edamame or fresh soy, and they lend nutrition and a pop of color.
05:15 Green onions.
05:18 I'm going to add this dressing right now so that the noodles can begin the process of
05:25 absorbing some of that really delicious dressing.
05:30 When you're dealing with slicing of prosciutto di parma, you may have slices that don't come
05:38 out perfect.
05:39 You may also have slices that are smaller because they come from closer to the shank
05:45 end of the ham.
05:47 And it would be a shame to waste those.
05:51 So my suggestion here, and I'll show you what I've got, is a couple of slices.
05:55 They don't have the fat on the outside that I was looking for in other applications.
06:00 So I'm going to take these and I'm going to fry them gently in olive oil until they crisp
06:05 up.
06:06 That way they're not lost to me.
06:08 Instead, they become a textural and a flavorful element of this salad right here.
06:16 If you don't like the idea of frying in olive oil as I'm doing here, you can also put them
06:21 onto a sheet pan between silicone mats and just bake them in the oven.
06:26 Maybe brush them with a little oil and they will crisp up just as well.
06:30 Keep your eye on it and as that bubbling begins to subside and you begin to see some browning
06:36 on the ham, that is enough cooking.
06:45 Here are some of our mushrooms all done.
06:50 Shiitakes are kind of an interesting mushroom in that most mushrooms are loaded with water.
06:56 Shiitakes tend to be a little bit drier and for that reason they cook a little bit quicker.
07:03 They don't bleed out a tremendous amount of moisture.
07:07 I think it's always a good idea to give them a little taste.
07:14 I can taste the soy and the sesame.
07:17 I'm going to add just a little bit of salt and then those are going to make their way
07:24 into the salad as well.
07:29 At this point, our ham has cooled enough and I'm going to bring it over.
07:38 You can see how crispy it's become.
07:41 Maybe I'll save one piece as a nice garnish but the balance I'm just going to cut into
07:56 pieces.
07:57 Now, if you want this to stay crispy, you need to be ready to serve this salad.
08:02 I'm going to commit to serving this salad very quickly here.
08:15 It's a beautiful salad actually as it comes together.
08:18 The pops of color that you get from carrot and edamame plus the red of the ham and the
08:23 dark color of the seaweed and the mushrooms.
08:31 Then I think a little piece of this crisp prosciutto might be a nice idea on the top
08:39 here.
08:40 I'm going to prop it up against a mushroom.
08:47 Then as you can see, I've got some beautiful slices of prosciutto di parma right here.
08:52 I would say these are the ones that you want to reserve for tenting alongside the dish
09:00 so that people can enjoy the prosciutto di parma in two distinct ways.
09:07 One crispy and the other shredded like that.
09:11 Now, for fun, I have some breadsticks right here.
09:18 The reality is that these might be served ordinarily with the prosciutto di parma.
09:24 If this were in Japan and we were having a soba noodle salad, this then would be chopsticks.
09:31 There's the dish, soba noodle salad with crispy prosciutto di parma, fresh prosciutto di parma
09:36 on the side, and a really wonderful vegetable garniture of sesame roasted mushrooms.
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