Recipe creator Jona Won brings Chinese-Peruvian influence to “Give a Chef a Steak”
For the half-Colombian, half-Chinese content creator Jona Won, the flavors of chifa — “essentially the amalgamation of Peruvian spices and flavors in combination with a lot of Chinese ingredients,” he says — show up frequently in his cooking. So when it came time to Give a Chef a Steak, Won turns a T-bone steak into lomo saltado, a traditional Peruvian stir fry usually served with rice and potatoes.
Won has a few tricks up his sleeve to ensure “bold, beautiful, strong flavors” in the dish, as he says. First is to add a bit of homemade beef stock into the stir-fry: To create his version, Won adds scallions, aji amarillo peppers, red onion, garlic, and Roma tomatoes into a pan containing heated beef tallow, giving the ingredients a quick char with a blowtorch. Those aromatics then are added into a pot with beef stock, cilantro, soy sauce, oyster sauce, red wine vinegar, and the bone of the T-bone steak, from which he’d previously trimmed the meat. That pot is set to boil for an hour, to reduce the broth within.
Garlic ginger confit is another non-traditional addition for “taking it up another level,” Won says. To create this cooking paste that can last up to six months in the fridge, he blends whole garlic, ginger, and oil before sautéing it a hot pan for roughly 30 minutes — stirring every five. The process requires patiences, yes, but “what you’re left with is a very reduced, intensified flavor and this beautiful amber color.”
Armed with those two ingredients, Won turns to the stir fry. First, he adds beef tallow into a pan before adding the seasoned meat. Then, Won adds tomato, red onion, aji amarillo, the ginger puree, red wine vinegar, soy sauce, and the reduced beef stock. As it simmers all together, papas fritas are added into the pan before a corn starch and water slurry helps thicken the sauce.
And because “there’s no such thing as too much starch, especially when you’re talking to a Latino,” as Won says, the potatoes and rice get just as much attention. For the rice accompaniment, Won suggests sautéing the uncooked rice grains in beef tallow first to “intensify the beef flavor.” The completed dish — beef, rice, and papas fritas — are plated with a quick salsa criolla that provides a touch of acid.
“The lomo I grew up eating in my house was a bit less traditional — it had some ketchup in there as well,” Won says. “This one is a bit more upscale and refined, we took a lot of additional steps… That little bit of effort paid dividends in terms of the final dish.”
Watch the latest episode of Give a Chef to glean Won’s tips for bringing big beef flavor to lomo saltado.
