636 recipes. Page 14 of 27
Everyday Korean side dish recipes
Mugwort pancakes have to be thin for the young spring herb to come through. A thick one traps steam in the middle, goes soggy and dulls the scent. Overloading the batter with mugwort makes it too stiff to spread thin in the first place.
Skate flesh is threaded with soft cartilage, which gives it a pleasant chew. It braises in a gochugaru and soy liquid over heat low enough that the surface barely moves, almost steaming.
Brine poured over whole green chilies just 5 minutes off the boil sears their skins, knocking the heat down a notch while the flesh inside stays crisp. Each bite brings salty soy savor first, then the pepper's clean sting.
The steamed eggplant is torn by hand rather than cut, because the ragged strands hold the soy sauce and sesame oil better than a clean knife edge. Once dressed it turns dark and glossy, and on warm rice it all but melts.
Salt is the only seasoning. The heat goes off when a strand of potato bends without snapping, which leaves a little crunch in the middle.
Heat makes crown daisy smell stronger rather than weaker, and its bitter, grassy scent rises straight through the thin batter. A little potato starch in the batter keeps the pancake crisp for a good while after it cools. It is cut into pieces and served with a soy-vinegar dip.
Mild Korean green peppers are halved and packed with a pork and tofu filling, the same idea as pan-fried stuffed peppers, but steamed instead of fried for a lighter result, with skins that turn just translucent. The thin dusting of flour inside each pepper is not decoration: it glues the filling to the pepper so nothing slides out during steaming. Leaving a short stem on gives each piece a handle.
Equal parts hot Cheongyang chili and mild, crunchy cucumber pepper, sliced into thin strips, balance heat against crunch in every bite. The brine is simply soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water in the same amounts, boiled and briefly cooled, so the result is sweet, sour and salty at once. Because the strips are only 2 to 3 mm thick, they take on the brine far faster than whole pickled peppers and are ready the next day to serve with grilled meat.
Hairtail is sliced thin, about 0.3 cm, and eaten wrapped in lettuce with raw garlic, green chili, and ssamjang or chojang. The silvery coating on the skin does not need to be scraped off.
This has been a fixture of Korean school lunches and staff cafeterias for decades. The potato is cut into thin, even matchsticks; when the widths vary, the thin strips break while the thick ones stay underdone.
Finely mashed tofu worked into the ground beef keeps these bite-size patties from turning dry. They belong on ancestral rite and holiday tables, and because they taste and feel much the same once cold, they also pack well in a lunch box.
Fat melting out of the mackerel mixes into the spicy broth and ends up in the potatoes. The potatoes simmer in the sauce first, and the fish joins them only when a chopstick slides halfway in; it needs just a short braise.
Pepper leaves, the tender greens picked from chili plants, have almost none of the fruit's heat; what they offer instead is a fresh, grassy flavor with a faint bitterness. Packed in a soy, vinegar and sugar brine with garlic and a Cheongyang chili, they become a summer side dish that needs 3 days of refrigeration before it is ready. Lay a single leaf over a spoonful of rice and fold it like a small wrap.
Thin, green gamtae seaweed is harvested in winter along Korea's southwest coast, including Garorim Bay near Seosan. This recipe uses plain dried gamtae, not fresh fronds or the kind seasoned with oil and salt. Because it softens fast once it meets liquid, the seaweed is torn into large pieces, the soy and vinegar dressing is scattered widely, and the mixing is a lift rather than a press, done right before eating.
The potatoes here are cubed, not shredded, at about 2 cm. Their corners are browned first; then a gochujang, soy and sugar sauce goes in and cooks down until almost nothing loose is left in the pan. What remains is a red, glossy coat on each cube rather than sauce on the plate.
Shredded cabbage and drained tuna are bound with an egg batter and fried as several small, thin rounds instead of one large pancake. Small rounds lose moisture quickly: the rims crisp fast, and they are easier to turn.
Two mackerel are cooked whole, with only the heads and innards removed. Deep scores along the back open up in the heat and let the spicy sauce run into the flesh instead of sitting on the skin.
A quick thirty-second blanch strips the raw bitterness from pepper leaves and wilts them enough for the chili seasoning, thickened with glutinous rice paste, to coat them evenly. Even under that spicy dressing they keep a green, almost herbal note that sets this kimchi apart from napa cabbage or young radish kimchi.
Soy sauce does not cook the crab in ganjang gejang, which is why only crab sold for raw consumption belongs in this Korean soy-marinated dish. The brine, simmered with apple, ginger, whole garlic, and scallion, has to be chilled to 4°C or below all the way through before it is poured over the crabs; warm liquid changes the texture of the raw meat.
There is no gochujang or soy sauce here, only salt and pepper, so what you taste is plain potato and sweet shrimp.
The holes of each lotus root slice show through a thin, crisp batter, so every piece comes out looking like lace. Biting in gives a clean crunch first, then a slightly sticky chew from the root. Slices cut 5 to 6 mm thick keep that crunch while still cooking through in the center.
Mackerel is oily and strong enough that a sauce built on both gochujang (Korean chili paste) and chili flakes does not bury it. A little ginger juice in the sauce takes the edge off its fishiness.
A good soak in salted water draws much of the harsh bitterness out of godeulppaegi greens. What stays in the finished kimchi is a gentle bitter undertone beneath the fermented tang. The roots stay chewy while the leaves turn soft, giving two textures in one stem. In parts of Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces it is traditionally made in autumn and eaten through the winter. After at least 2 days of ripening it goes to the table as a side for rice.
Broccoli stems are not wasted: peeled with a vegetable peeler and sliced 3 mm thick, they are cooked along with the florets. Soup soy sauce with a little lemon juice puts a light acidity under the sharp garlic, while the broccoli's mild bitterness stays in the background.