Think of soft tofu stew (sundubu jjigae) made with just a cup of broth and poured straight over rice. Pork belly is cooked first so gochugaru and garlic can bloom in its fat, which gives the small amount of broth its heat. An egg cracked into the center and cooked only until the white just sets adds a soft, rich finish.
Altang uses fresh, unsalted pollock roe. Make it with cured myeongran and the broth turns salty on the same amount of soy sauce, so check the label for unsalted when you shop.
Gochujang toasts in rendered pork fat before any broth goes in, and that spicy red oil gives the stew more body than simply boiling everything together. Zucchini half-moons simmer for 6 minutes, enough to take on seasoning without collapsing into mush.
This monkfish stew lands between a clear soup and a heavily seasoned jjigae, with a cloudier, bolder broth than either and large pieces of firm fish. A small spoonful of doenjang tames the fish's odor, and gelatin from under the monkfish skin melts into the pot and thickens the broth with no starch.
Mallow leaves turn this doenjang broth silky: their natural mucilage thickens the liquid so it clings to the spoon. Peeling the stringy stem skins and kneading out the green juice keeps the leaves from tasting grassy.
No doenjang or gochujang goes into this stew, and napa cabbage and anchovy stock do nearly all the work. That is why the anchovies lose their heads and dark guts first and steep for no more than 10 minutes before straining; any longer and they turn the broth bitter.
White kimchi, fermented without chili flakes, gives this stew a clear, pale broth with a gentle lactic tang instead of the red heat of regular kimchi stew. Skipping the usual frying in oil keeps it far lighter, and soft tofu and enoki fill out the pot.
Red chili and Cheongyang chili, both sliced on the bias, go into this clear clam broth, but not until two minutes before the heat goes off. The base is just radish simmered in water, and the rest of the flavor comes from the juices the clams release as they open.
The broth here comes from a generous 700 g of hard clams. Thick slabs of tofu go in only after the clams open and simmer for five minutes, long enough to soak up the clam juices that come out again when you bite. The shells bring their own salt; soup soy sauce is kept light.
Clams and seaweed go into a base broth of simmered radish, and with no meat in the pot, the clams carry the flavor. Their briny savoriness and the sea smell of the miyeok layer up in the same pot.
Shiitake stays chewy, oyster mushrooms go soft and silky, and enoki keeps a light crunch: three textures in one doenjang stew. The mushrooms go in equal amounts but not all at once. Shiitake and oyster simmer first to flavor the anchovy broth, and enoki joins near the end so it does not collapse. The doenjang is pressed through a sieve so the broth stays smooth rather than gritty.
A clear mushroom stew seasoned with kelp water and soup soy sauce, made without a drop of oil. To keep the broth from clouding, the foam is skimmed and, once the tofu is in, the pot is gently shaken instead of stirred. The mushrooms are rinsed quickly rather than soaked, since soaking washes out their scent.
Okara, the soybean pulp, drinks up the broth and cooks down almost to the thickness of porridge. Pork and sour kimchi are fried in perilla oil first, and salted shrimp seasons the pot at the end. Okara sinks and catches on the bottom; through the 20-plus minutes of gentle simmering, the pot needs frequent scraping.
With no chili, only soup soy sauce for seasoning, the broth stays clear and the clean taste of the puffer fish comes through. The garlic is kept to a minimum for the same reason. Use only professionally cleaned puffer fish from a verified supply chain.
Shredded chicken and pork, corn and butter beans cook down together in a tomato broth until the stew turns thick. Unlike gumbo, it has no long-cooked flour roux, and small cubes of potato break down to do the thickening while the corn keeps some pop. The recipe assumes fully cooked, unsauced meat: raw meat cannot simply be swapped in for the same time, and barbecue-sauced leftovers would throw off the sweetness and salt. Vinegar goes in at the very end to brighten the tomato.
Kimchi goes down first, then Spam, sausages, tofu and rice cakes are laid over it in neat rows by type, with the seasoning paste piled in the middle. The water is poured in around the edge rather than the center to keep those rows in place.
In this budae jjigae, a spoonful of baked beans sits in the middle of the pot with the gochujang paste on top. As it boils the beans break down, thickening the broth a little and leaving a faint sweetness. The liquid underneath is anchovy stock, not plain water.
Little rounds of brisket fat float on top, and the stew tastes nuttier and heavier than a vegetable-only doenjang jjigae. The sliced cheongyang chili is there because of that fat.
The brisket is seared first to render its fat, and the gochujang and chili flakes are fried in that fat to build the base of the broth. The minari, cut into 5 cm lengths, waits on the side until just before the heat goes off, then goes in only long enough to wilt.
The whole can of tuna, oil included, is tipped into the pot with water. No stock is made separately, and that oil is what the broth builds on. Some add ramen noodles to stretch it into a full meal.
A can of tuna and some sour kimchi, no meat to brown, and the stew is ready fast; most of the flavor comes from the kimchi's sourness. Pour in a little of the oil from the can and the broth gets noticeably deeper.
Turn on the range hood before the cheonggukjang goes in. The smell as it boils is strong, but the broth itself tastes deep and nutty, and because the soybeans are only briefly fermented, they keep a sticky, stringy texture. It is eaten hot, ladled over rice and mixed in.
Two cheongyang chilies go into the water whole, uncut, and simmer for eight minutes to make a spicy stock. Before that, the anchovies are toasted for about a minute in a dry pot; the water has to go in as soon as they smell nutty, or bitterness creeps into the broth. Seeding the chilies first takes the heat down.
Chonggak kimchi, made from small whole radishes with their greens, replaces the usual napa cabbage kimchi, so the stew has chunks of radish with real bite instead of soft leaves. Keeping the pot at a gentle bubble stops the radish from turning mushy.