Taco Bell bibimbap

I like to call it Amexicorean food

Hi, clowns!

Hope you’re having a good week so far. We’ve barely managed to air out the apartment since my smelly nachos experiment (recipe’s here). But it’s more likely that this place just permanently smells like ass.

Speaking of good weeks, some of you are about to have a better one.

I’m doing my first-ever giveaway! And…I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to top this one if I do more in the future. I’ve teamed up with cooking hardware company, Made-In Cookware, and have three 10” carbon steel pans that I’ll be giving away over the next few weeks.

They’re worth $80 each. I’m currently seasoning a 12” one they sent me earlier this year to try out, and for carbon steel, these things are impressively lightweight. They’re also absolutely beautiful to look at and cook like a charm. Since a new carbon steel pan can be a little challenging to break in, I’ll be your pen pal and give tips to the winner, if you need any help along the way.

For the first pan I’m giving away, you’ll need to be on the paid subscriber list (yeah, yeah, I know). Those of you who have donated to charitable causes and were granted subscriptions are still eligible, so no worries there.

Later this week I’ll start a comment thread where you guys can come up with some ideas I can try for the newsletter, and if I end up picking yours, I’ll send you a pan. The link will come straight to your inbox just like the rest of the newsletter does.

Honestly, your chances are pretty good; my paid subscriber list isn’t that enormous, and based off the correspondence I’ve had with all of you, you’re all fuckin’ hilarious.

Don’t worry, if you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll still get a chance to grab one of these things in the coming weeks, since I have three total to dole out. I wouldn’t hose you like that. I wish I had 3,000 of them to give you, but I’m not Oprah Winfrey.

In the meantime, do me a favor and give Made-In Cookware a follow on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook to check out some of the cool stuff they’re doing. They are giving me cool stuff to send you, after all.

Onto the show.

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This week’s idea comes from Babe #1, Davida.

We were sitting around eating Taco Bell (which could potentially have been any day of the week), when Davida looked up from her Power Bowl and said, “Does this count as bibimbap?”

It took me a second to figure out what she meant by that. If you’ve never had one, Taco Bell’s Power Bowls are essentially rice bowls with meat and various ingredients on top. Which in turn, is sort of like one of Korea’s most popular dishes, bibimbap, which is a serving of rice topped with a bunch of side dishes known as banchan, which you’re then supposed to mix together. Who knew Taco Bell and Korean food were spiritually related?

I decided I’d unite the two main world powers, Taco Bell and Korea, under the guise of American fast food ingenuity, and create the best fusion genre ever known to man. I’d call it Amexicorean cuisine.

And of course, my maiden dish would be Taco Bell bibimbap.

I started by going to Taco Bell and picking up a steak Power Bowl.

Then I went to the Korean grocery store and picked up three popular ingredients for bibimbap, which are soybean sprouts, sautéed spinach, and prepared fernbrake.

A Power Bowl comes with rice, meat (chicken or steak), black beans, lettuce, tomatoes, shredded cheese, sour cream, avocado, and avocado ranch sauce.

I began by fucking around with some of the sauces.

My first sauce was a true fusion of cuisines.

I mixed Taco Bell’s Diablo sauce with Korean fermented red pepper paste, gochujang, to create a thinner spicy mixture to dress the finished bibimbap with later.

I then created a second sauce of guacamole, sour cream, and avocado ranch sauce blended together with some toasted sesame oil.

Like gochujang, sesame oil is also a finisher to bibimbap, so I felt it was necessary to marry all of this stuff together. I normally would not feel okay mixing guacamole, sour cream, avocado ranch, and sesame oil together (even listing those words in the same sentence makes me cringe), but in order to forge new ground, sometimes you must break some rules. Even if that meant I would be forever banned from the land of my heritage, which is the sovereign state of Taco Bell.

Then I began to build the base of this stunning matrimony by combining Korean sticky rice with Taco Bell’s seasoned rice.

Don’t the two rices look cozy together?

I then built the Taco Bell half of the bowl by carefully placing every constituent ingredient of the Power Bowl in neat little piles on top of the rice bed.

I continued by adding the Korean components, which were the spinach, the soybean sprouts, and the fernbrake.

There’s no hard and fast rules when it comes to traditional bibimbap toppings. You can make it vegan, vegetarian, meaty, practically whatever you want. That’s not to say there’s no rules; Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard shit the bed one time when she called some wildly not-Korean rice bowl dish bibimbap just because she could. That’s not cool. You’ve got to have at least some of the basic understanding down before you can slap the name bibimbap on a dish and make a bajillion dollars off of it as a celebrity chef.

Anyway, welcome to my new concept, Amexicorean Bibimbap Rice Bowl Mix Asian Moneygrabbing Truck.

As a capper to the Taco Bell bibimbap, I fried an egg (which is one of my favorite additions to bibimbap), plopped it on top, and added the Diablo gochujuang, the sesame oil seasoned guacaranchcream, and got to mixing.

Let’s recap all the ingredients in this fucked up bibimbap: Seasoned rice, sticky white rice, lettuce, tomatoes, black beans, shredded cheese, steak, soybean sprouts, spinach, fernbrake, a fried egg, Diablo gochujuang sauce, and the sesame oil seasoned guacaranchcream abomination.

Read that last sentence out loud. I fuckin’ dare you. Do that and you’ll summon a nameless beast from another dimension. AKA, me. Suddenly I’ll pop up out of nowhere smelling of stinky nacho cheese and cat food and you’ll probably have a heart attack.

Just as you may have suspected, this wasn’t just good, it was goddamn amazing. I usually get chided by you beautiful clowns when I make food that’s mildly appetizing (which delights me to no end), but today, that is not the point. Today is about feeling good, mixing up some of my favorite shit (food, not feces), and serving up a mouthful of traditional Korean dishes mixed with some of the best fast food around.

It was rich, creamy from the egg yolk, spicy from the sauce, lightened by the vegetables, and every now and then a signature Taco Bell flavor would peek through, either via a piece of mushy overprocessed steak or an errant black bean. It tasted 100% Korean, 100% like Taco Bell, and 100% stupid.

Just like this newsletter.

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What a ride. You know the drill. If you guys love the newsletter, do me a favor and share it on social media, because I could use the help! I’m almost at 3,000 readers strong (in fact, I only have 25 more to hit that arbitrarily cool number).

And if you want to be in the running to win one of those three gorgeous Made-In Cookware carbon steel pans, sign up for a paid subscription to the newsletter. You’ll get full access to everything I’ve written, including all previous paid content via the web at foodisstupid.substack.com.

Like I mentioned, I’ll start a commenting thread later this week for you all to suggest goofy ideas to the newsletter, and the winner’ll get one of these sick pans.

As always, I love you all so much, and I’ll hop into your inboxes soon. Thanks again to Made-In for sponsoring, give them a follow, and stay tuned for the next two giveaways. Ciao, clowns!