Boreal Jook
A true fusion dish! This meal is total comfort food, and blends boreal ingredients with my favourite Asian dish. Jook, or “congee” is a popular Asian breakfast food. It’s a slow cooked savoury rice porridge, often flavoured with ginger. What I love about it is that you can top it with whatever you want, which is what I feel gave me some creative freedom.
I decided to flavour this Jook with ginger and juniper. Juniper is a beautiful boreal ingredient. I also used wild mushrooms and duck. The combination is definitely rich, but super comforting.
Ingredients for the rice porridge:
1 cup brown rice
8 cups stock (chicken is best)
2 inch piece of ginger sliced into rounds
3-4 juniper berries, crushed
1 tsp salt
Pepper to taste
2 eggs
Place all ingredients in a pot and bring to a simmer. Allow to simmer for 1-1.5 hours, until the rice has completely broken down in the stock. Beat the eggs and add them, stirring until they’re incorporated. Your Jook is now ready to eat.
For the toppings, I used pre-made duck confit, but you could use anything. Chicken, duck breast, whatever you have around. I find duck is best for this recipe. My pre-made duck confit legs only required me to re-heat them in the oven for 15 minutes at 350. This was a great hack for saving time. If you have duck confit legs available at a local shop, then go for it.
In addition to the duck, I sautéed about 3/4 of a package of some wild mushrooms (2 cups dry and sliced) in a pan with 1 tbsp of duck fat and a generous sprinkle of salt and pepper. These are all things I was able to prepare pretty lazily while the Jook was cooking away. Finally, I did a quick pickle of some red beet by slicing the beet into matchstick size pieces and submerging them for 20 minutes in a mixture that was 1/2 cup water, 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar, and a 1/2 tsp each of salt and maple syrup. I added a few juniper berries to that too, for consistency of flavour.
To garnish, I added some cured spruce tips (totally boreal, but super hard to find - leave it out if you don’t have this) and some scallions and cilantro for brightness.
I got good feedback on this recipe from my resident taste tester, Marc, but if you have comments then I’m totally interested in how to improve this dish!
Makes 2 servings, plus leftover Jook for you to eat how and when you like. I froze mine to save for a day when I’m under the weather.
Enjoy!
