Sometimes winter demands a salad. Here’s one with short ribs.

Sweet, smoky Koreanstyle ribs bring heat and umami to chicories

A friend of mine called me recently to rave about how “ravishing” San Francisco is, how refreshingly dense and walkable, and how the opportunities for him to find love are exponentially higher than where he lives in Los Angeles.

Of course, he’s right in many ways. But, for someone who’s from Northern California, I’ve been finding the Southern California pastures a little greener during this pandemic. My husband and I lived in Joshua Tree (San Bernardino County) for a couple of months, and now we’re staying in Los Angeles. The distant verdant oasis doesn’t have to be a physical place — maybe it’s your relationship, maybe it’s your job, or maybe it’s what you made for dinner.

That happened to me recently when I wasn’t completely happy with what I’d prepared for dinner.

The thing is, I have a lot of expectations for my cooking and recipes. If it’s too complicated, missing a certain wow factor or calling for toohardtoget ingredients (something I’m still working on), I’ll tinker and test it in different forms until things are just right.

This dinner started out with something that was going to be vegetarian. I planned to make a simple sweet potato dish where I braised them in a brothy tomato and butter mixture, but when that turned out too sweet, I decided to add beef short ribs for umami. That raised another issue: Sweet potatoes cook a lot faster than bonein short ribs, so if I wanted this to be an easy onepot braise, something had to give (again). A light turned on.

Koreanstyle (flankenstyle) ribs are thinner and would get to that falloffthebone texture at the same rate as the sweet potatoes. The problem is, they really did fall off the bone; I was left with a stewy braise, with loose bones among perfectly tender meat and sweet potatoes. It was also at this point, with my kitchen 80 degrees and me fully over braising, that I realized all I wanted was a salad. In came the idea to turn this braise into something totally different: a salad that’s equally warming and exciting.

So instead of braising the short ribs in this recipe, I seasoned them with freshly ground black pepper and gochugaru, a Korean redpepper powder that’s sweet, smoky and fruity and has a soft caress of heat unless you use a lot of it. (I use a lot of it, too, so if you’re already thinking of substituting a different chile pepper in your pantry, be careful — not all dried chile powders have the same heat.) After they get seasoned, I sear the short ribs quickly. They become a dark orange hue as the gochugaru fuses with the meat and its rendered fat. All the while I roast and caramelize the sweet potatoes in honeyed oil.

Roasting wedges of already sweet potatoes with a warm honey oil may seem like a twist of the knife, but it actually helps the wedges caramelize and crisp. I simply melt seasoned honey and olive oil to make a dressing for the potatoes before roasting. Adding honey also helps them be flavor spears that cut through the intense umami bomb of the short ribs and bitter chicories, my favorite salad greens, which are the leafy part of this salad.

Don’t get me wrong, I love other greens, but what other tender, leafy greens are as expressive as chicories? Escarole, which is a more widely available chicory and what I call for in this recipe, is a little bitter and a little creamy. Castelfranco, on the other hand, is usually more bulbous, light yellowy green, speckled and sturdy enough to hold up to the sweet potatoes and ribs.

At the market these days, I’m finding a lot of young onions, sometimes called spring onions. I’ve added them into this salad for an extra bite; they are more flavorful than scallions but as aggressive as the mature bulbs found at grocery stores.

I’m not going to promise this recipe is your verdant pasture or urban oasis, but it is a very good winter salad, objectively so: One that made me deeply satisfied with its complexity of flavors and textures. I was able to stop thinking of how to make it better and just enjoy the plate of food in front of me.

Sweet potatoes, ribs and greens, top, make an exciting winter meal. Season and sear Koreanstyle short ribs, above, and toss sweet potato spears in honeyed oil, left, which helps them caramelize during roasting.