https://www.youtube.com/embed/liYKQlhJ-CM
♪♪ -Hey, what's up, everyone? I'm J.J. Johnson. I'm the chef and founder of Fieldtrip in Harlem. I'm making West African peanut sauce with some udon noodles. It's gonna be super delicious and you're gonna want to cook it for everybody you know. I'm going to make the peanut sauce. Small dice on the onion. I'm going to use half of this onion. So, listen, there's five mother sauces right now. Tomato, bechamel, veloute, espagnole, hollandaise. And that's how you learn the cuisines of those regions of the world, through the mother sauces, in culinary school; I want culinary schools to add the West African peanut sauce and then culinary schools from around the world will be learning what West African food is all about.
And that's where it starts, right with the mother sauces. I don't like to peel my carrot. I like to taste a carrot before I peel it. If it tastes nice and sweet with the skin on, it's great. I'm going to small dice these carrots too. And the flavor here is gonna be a little bit spicy, a little bit sweet. You don't need them to be the perfect size because you're gonna blend this all up at the end. So, some oil. Onions -- have my pan at a medium heat. And add some salt just cause I don't want to get any color on my onions. Sweat those out for thirty seconds. I'm gonna throw my carrots in. I'm gonna add salt again. I'm gonna let these go. -Smash my garlic. Gonna small-dice this here too. Normally I would add garlic in first, but I want the garlic just a little bit of heat because I want the spiciness in the garlic.
When you talk about mother sauces, they come from a specific region in the world. And none of the mother sauces include Africa, which is one of the largest continents in the world. You learn cuisine through mother sauces so if there's no mother sauce that is taking us through West Africa, then how can you understand the food? So a little bit of celery, gonna sweat this down, and add a little bit more oil, a little bit more of salt. I love seasoning in layer, so everything is getting seasoned evenly. So I seasoned my carrots, my celery, my onions. Nobody's being disrespected in the pan. Tomato. Again, another medium dice, or small dice. I want the seeds and the guts. I want everything from the tomato in there for that flavor. Plum tomatoes are good, good balance of water and sweet flavor.
And then add some cumin, not powdered cumin, cumin seeds. I went this cumin, the seeds to pop, and you get all that nice flavor from that fresh cumin when it hits the oil. This is really smelling amazing. So good. So a couple of keys here. I'm going to add in the tomato paste first and I'm going to pincage this, and you know pincaging means separating the oil in the fat, but really cooking the paste to ignite the flavor so it doesn't taste like canned tomato paste.
I'm gonna let that cook for a couple minutes. I'm gonna get my peanut butter ready. Unsweetened peanut butter. And it's okay if the oil separates on the top. That's some good peanut butter. If your peanut butter doesn't separate, you should question the peanut butter maker, because peanut has oil in it and it should separate because it's... ...it's a liquid. Now, I'm going to add in my peanut butter. My history with the sauce is I cooked in Ghana in 2011. That's where my inspiration has always come from. I look through food to the West African lens everywhere I go when I travel. The next largest population of West Africans in the world is Brazil. And in this certain region in Brazil, the Japanese and the West Africans live together and they eat stewy meets with pasta or noodles.
So this was my inspiration of, you know, doing research and really seeing that these cultures really have an influence from West Africa from a food perspective. And that's what I celebrate. So you can start to see the peanut butter and the oil starting to separate. That's really good stuff. I'm going to turn this down so we don't burn the peanut butter. I'm going to add in the tomatoes and add in a little bit of my stock. I'm gonna stir this up, bring it to a simmer, as you can see. I'm gonna add the rest of the stock, or a little bit more stock just to see when it reduces. Gonna add a bay leaf. I'm gonna cut this bird's eye chili in half for some spice, with the seeds and the stem, because the stem is the spiciest part of the pepper in any pepper -- I learned that from a grandmother in her kitchen in Ghana when they were making their hot sauce.
And when she would add the stems in and blend it up, the fragrance and the aroma and the spice would just be at another level, so... Okay, let me add in the cilantro. Give it this nice, herbaceous flavor. I don't like to take the stems off. I think a lot of us remove the stems from our herbs and the stems have really great flavor. I'm gonna add that in. Gonna bring it to a hard simmer. Let it go for about 10 to 15 minutes. I'm going to make the udon noodles now, or the base for the udon noodles. So this time I'm using a yellow onion. And a little more oil here; salt. Okay, carrots. The food past of West African food around the world doesn't come from a celebrated moment in life.
There was West African slaves, they were taken around the world. When they didn't want to do the work, then there was other cultures that came in -- so you had the migrant Chinese workers, you had the migrant Vietnamese workers, the migrant Japanese workers that filled in to do the work because West African slaves refused to do it. I researched those places and I figure out how to make super crave-able amazing food around it. Let me check this West African peanut sauce. Ooh, yeah, look at that. It's coming together nice. I'm going to blend this sauce. I'm gonna blanch off my udon noodles. So you'll just drop them into some hot simmering water, doesn't need to be like a hard boil, for about two minutes. At a young age my grandmother injected DNA -- like, food DNA into me, like, I didn't watch cartoons at a young age, I was, like, in the kitchen with her.
I don't know if I was really cooking. I was there peeling carrots and onions, supposedly. My kids, they're in the kitchen with me all the time. I believe that if you cook with your kids in the kitchen, they will eat better because they feel like they're involved. You're able to teach your children the world through food. So, some udon noodles here, some peanut sauce. Ooh! Look at that! Little salt... Black pepper. The final touches -- some edamame. ♪♪ Just going to add a little bit of fresh lemon juice here.
Brighten it up. All right. Let's plate this up. A little bit of these edamame on top. ♪♪ Some Thai basil, little bit of mint, a little bit of basil flavor. It's going to be creamy. It's going to be like, goodness. Good. Great nutty flavor. You get a little bit of the cumin, a little heat from the bird's eye chili. And the basil goes so good with the peanut butter, get a little bit of that mint flavor, a little bit of the -- that nice sweetness. So good that you need to click the recipe below and come uptown to Fieldtrip between 115th and 116th on Malcolm X Boulevard, right in front of the 2 and the 3 train, and you can see me there.
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https://howtoplaythedjembedrums.com/west-african-peanut-sauce-with-udon-noodles-how-to/
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