Uijeongbu is the city where this stew took hold near US Army bases after the Korean War, and that is where the name comes from. The salt of Spam and cocktail sausages, the sourness of ripe kimchi and the sweetness of melted baked beans all end up in the same pot.
This stew comes from farm households that picked apple snails off the rice paddy banks and dropped them into their doenjang stew, and the ingredient list is still just snails, doenjang, tofu, zucchini and anchovy stock. Snail meat toughens with long boiling, so it goes in after the zucchini has had about three minutes, and the tofu follows at the very end for a minute or two.
Thin-sliced woosamgyeop, fatty beef brisket, is fried with garlic until its fat runs, and the chili flakes and soup soy sauce are toasted in that fat before any anchovy stock goes in. That is where the red, slick broth comes from. Two cheongyang chilies make it properly hot, and the bean sprouts go in last and come out still crunchy.
Summer yeolmu, young radish greens, leaves a faint bitterness at the end of each spoonful of doenjang broth. It is best while the stems still crunch, so it does not simmer for long.
No meat and no anchovy go into this stew, only vegetable stock. To give the broth some aroma, the onion and oyster mushrooms are fried in sesame oil first. The lotus root cooks just until a chopstick slides in, and the perilla powder goes in at the very end for a brief warm-through over low heat. Boiled for long, perilla turns chalky rather than nutty.
With no chili flakes and no doenjang, just beef stock seasoned with soup soy sauce and salt, the broth stays clear. The tofu is nudged in with a ladle and left unstirred for five minutes to soak up the stock; browning it lightly in a pan first keeps a toasty surface even in the broth.