Like many regulars here, I love Chef John. For those of you not familiar, he has a website, a YouTube channel, and many entries on allrecipes.com. Today, I present one of “his” recipes and a variation I adapted from a local restaurant.
The dish is loco moco, which is basically Hawaiian comfort food, originally created by/for college students. Rice, a beef patty, a fried egg, and sauce; it’s quick, easy, and cheap, all prerequisites for college students (not as quick, easy, or cheap as store-bought ramen, but it does have the advantage of being homemade and not full of chemicals). Here is Chef John’s video and recipe, which I have adapted a bit and present below.
LOCO MOCO (Chef John version)
(per serving)
1/2 c cooked white rice (original recipe calls for 1 c but that’s a lot of rice!)
1/4 pound ground beef
3/4 c beef broth
2 t soy sauce
1/2 t Worcestershire
1/8 t sesame oil
1 t ketchup
2 t cornstarch
1 t sugar
1 egg
1 T green onions, sliced diagonally
butter
Mix beef broth, soy sauce, Worcestershire, sesame oil, ketchup, cornstarch, sugar in a bowl. Let stand to let flavors blend.
Cook rice and keep warm.
Form ground beef into patties; season with salt, pepper, cayenne. Melt a bit of butter in a frying pan until it begins to brown. Cook patties over medium-high heat to create an outer crust. Add green onions to pan after flipping patties. When patties are cooked through, spoon green onions over patties and remove to a plate. Keep warm.
Add sauce to meat pan and deglaze over medium-high heat for 2-3 minutes. When sauce turns deep brown, reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally.
While sauce finishes, fry egg(s) sunny side up. Season with salt and cayenne.
Place rice on a plate. Top with patty (including juices), then sauce, then egg.
I confess that I was not familiar with loco moco for most of my life; I’d heard about it but had never looked into it. But then I encountered an upscale version of it at one of my favorite restaurants, a local brewpub. Their version replaces the white rice with bacon fried rice and the sauce with bacon gravy. It’s a little more complicated, but it is, in my opinion, totally worth it, if you’re of a mind to try it. The parts with the beef patties/green onions and the egg(s) are the same, so to save space and reading time, the recipe below covers only the fried rice and gravy—and the fact that this version has sliced avocado on top (yum!).
LOCO MOCO (ghost’s adaptation)
(per serving)
1 piece thick-cut bacon
Beef broth
1/2 c cooked white rice
1 t chicken broth
1 t soy sauce
1/2 t oyster sauce
1/4 t sesame oil
Half an avocado, sliced (optional)
Cook bacon and drain on paper towels. Keep fat in pan. Chop bacon when cool.
Turn on medium heat under bacon fat and add enough flour to create a roux—I suggest starting with 2 T flour, adding more if necessary. (If there’s too much fat, you can toss some before adding flour.) Stir until roux bubbles and begins to solidify. Turn heat to low and stir in beef broth (suggest starting with 1/2 c). Stir frequently, adding broth as needed, until gravy reaches desired consistency. Let simmer approximately 15 minutes.
While gravy simmers, fry rice in non-stick pan or wok. Add chicken broth, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, and bacon. Stir until well combined and heated through. Cover and keep warm.
Cook patties and egg(s). Place fried rice on a plate. Add patty, then gravy, fried egg, avocado.
Keep in mind that both recipes are given per serving, so maybe copy/paste/edit the second recipe in a Word doc, or write it on a big Post-it, or whatever you need to do to make sure you have the right measurements. (I may or may not have made a mistake along these lines in the past, with a different recipe. I blame antifa....)
I like to accompany either version with tropical fruit, fresh or canned, or even frozen and thawed, depending on the season. I also like to have a Lost Coast Tangerine Wheat beer, or agua fresca to drink with it. (My Cuban uncle used to drink Primo, a Hawaiian beer, which I would try, but I haven’t seen it anywhere local in decades.)
I wish I could give better directions on the gravy, but it’s A) dependent on how many servings/how much bacon fat you end up with, and 2) one of those things that you really have to learn by doing, not from a recipe. I made the bacon version for the fourth time this past Sunday (@#$%! I forgot to take pictures!) and it was the first time the lovely and talented Mrs. Spectre didn’t have to rescue the gravy from my bumbling hands. And if you do your gravy a different way, go for it!
If you prefer the standard version, you can always decide to jazz it up a bit, by adding a strip of bacon, or avocado, like the fancier version, or doing a different sauce, or whatever catches your fancy. Creativity is part of the beauty and joy of cooking—personalizing a recipe or playing around with ingredients to give a familiar dish a different flavor.
Mahalo and bon appétit, everyone! (Now there’s two phrases that you don’t see together often!)
P.S. If you don’t get the reference in the diary title, check the title of this song, which I grew up with (Mom was a big fan).