L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade convened for the seventh time at UCLA’s Royce Quad on September 10, gathering dozens of the country’s leading culinary stars to benefit a charity that has raised over $100 million to date across the country. This year, more chefs and a constraint from the Fire Marshal led to having more than one chef in each booth, resulting in some epic collaborations. Jeremy Fox from Rustic Canyon Winebar and Seasonal Kitchen and Bryant Ng from Cassia, who both fall under The Rustic Canyon Family of Restaurants, collaborated on the event’s greatest dish, J&B sausage with mushroom sticky rice.

Jeremy Fox recalls, “I just got this sausage stuffer, so I said, I’ll do sausage. Bryant said, ‘I’ll do rice.’…We had to submit it months and months ahead of time and in the meantime figure out what it is. Until then, that sounds good to me…The sausage was a pork sausage that had our sorrel kimchi, fish sauce, yuzu, white soy, a lot of intense ingredients in the grind. I wanted the sausage to taste good on its own and knew whatever Bryant would do, would be great as well. Knowing Bryant’s palate, I knew that sausage would pair well with what he was doing.”

Bryant Ng created mushroom sticky rice by folding sweet glutinous rice with crab paste, shallots, dried shrimp, ground pork, dried porcini, braised shiitake mushrooms, pickled cabbage, soy sauce, fish sauce, and sesame, all steamed in lotus leaves for three hours, yielding an umami-rich base for Fox’s savory, snappy sausage that crisped on the grill.

Fox said, “I went over and saw the rice marinating before it was cooked and tried it raw; it was good raw, and I knew we would be in good hands. Until we got to the event and grilled up the sausage, we hadn’t tried it together.” This collaboration reinforces that two culinary masters with decades of kitchen experience between them can (and should) trust their instincts.

Dose of Vitamin P spotlights my favorite pork dish from the previous week.