Dolsot cooking adventure continues - cooking in a Korean stone pot

We have enjoyed lunch cooked in our new stone pot almost every day this week.  I love how easy it is to cook rice from scratch in the pot.  It's almost as easy as my electric rice cooker.

Clockwise from the top: Leeks lightly fried then cooked in sake, chard namuru, bacon fried with chard stems and carrots, nuka pickles cucumber, carrots and daikon, and dry fried canned tuna.

Hiding underneath all this is a bed of chestnut rice.   I actually found the toppings to be a bit of a draw back as they hid the delicious taste of the rice, so the next day I made...

Much simpler toppings today: leftover shio koji chicken breast  and carrots fried with bacon (because everything is better with bacon), all on top of chestnut rice.

These are also perfect flavours for the changing season.  There is a cold nip in the air, fall is approaching  the body wants to eat more fats and root veg.  I think I need to dig up the last of the gobo tomorrow and make something extra special for myself.



Here are some things I've learned about cooking with stone:

• It's surprisingly easy to burn food in this dish.  Medium heat is the absolute maximum temperature needed for this.
• Scrubbing the pot with coarse salt takes very little effort to get the burnt crap off the bottom of the pot.
• This is a very low fuss way to make rice.  It's right on par with my electric rice cooker for ease of making - so long as I keep the temperature low.  It isn't as fussy with the amount of liquid or cooking time as my electric cooker and I find myself experimenting more by adding different stuff to the rice.  But when it comes to cooking simple old white rice, the electric cooker wins hands down.
• It gets hot enough to burn through one cotton heat pad, and to heat up one cork ceramic trivet enough to damage the table underneath!