1880 Korean recipes. Page 48 of 79. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Korean Green Plum Pickles, Korean Aged Kimchi Mackerel Bibim Noodles.
Over 100 days buried in sugar, the hard sourness of unripe green plums softens into a sweet-tart pickle, and plums sinking into dissolved syrup with slowly shriveling flesh show it is on track. The liquid left once the plums come out is plum syrup in its own right, sealed and refrigerated separately.
Pan-fried mackerel and stir-fried mukeunji, kimchi aged until deeply sour, turn a bowl of spicy mixed noodles into something closer to a full meal. Salting the fish and blotting away the liquid it releases keeps the fishy smell down.
Warm, golden cubes of pan-seared tofu land on cold baby greens, and each bite moves between soft tofu and crunchy shredded red cabbage and carrot. Pressing the tofu first, then leaving each side alone until it firms, keeps the cubes from breaking apart. The tablespoon of sesame oil is split between pan and dressing, and only a small part of it goes into the searing. The dressing itself is just soy sauce, sesame oil and vinegar, which keeps the bowl light. Most of it is poured over the tofu rather than the leaves, since tender greens wilt fast once they sit in soy-based liquid.
Dried miyeok swells more than eightfold in a 20-minute soak, so adding extra because the dry pile looks small quickly turns one side dish into a big bowlful.
Shrimp, squid and mussel meat hit the hot pan first, followed by carrot, egg and cold rice in turn. Soy sauce and oyster sauce are measured in teaspoons, enough to season without covering the seafood. Sesame oil goes in only after the heat is off, for its aroma.
Bracken fern is first coated in perilla oil and then simmered briefly in soy-seasoned water, so it ends up tender and seasoned all the way through. That second stage is closer to braising than frying, and stopping while a little liquid remains keeps the ferns moist. Use bracken that has already been soaked and boiled; dried or raw fern should not go straight into this pan. Splitting the thick stems by hand evens out the seasoning.
Crushed instant noodles, fried crisp and tossed in a sticky gochujang, ketchup, and corn syrup glaze, taste like the snack sold outside Korean stationery shops near schools in the 1980s and 1990s. If deep-frying is a hassle, 5 minutes in a 180-degree air fryer does the job. Keep the seasoning packet aside and add a little if the glaze tastes flat.
Dried sambaekcho (Saururus chinensis) is not a strong herb, and as a tea it leaves only a light, grassy smell. Dried apple and scored jujubes simmer along with it, and once the heat is off, lemon slices go in for just 2 minutes before coming out again; left longer, the peel turns the tea bitter. Cooled and mixed one to one with soda water, it becomes a kind of herbal ade.
Mixed clams soak in salt water for over an hour, then go onto high heat in their shells. As each one opens, it gets a bit of butter, minced garlic and rice wine, and since the clams vary in size, they come off one by one as their butter melts. Any that never open are thrown away.
Blue crab in its spring or autumn season is halved and simmered in a radish broth with a little doenjang and chili flakes. The shells turn red well before the meat is cooked through. Crack the claws with the back of a knife beforehand and the meat comes out easily at the table.
Bite into a sea squirt and the little sac bursts, releasing a salty, briny juice. To keep that, the radish and zucchini are cooked through first and the sea squirts get only three or four minutes over high heat at the very end. In April and May, when they are in season and full of juice, the broth itself tastes different.
Each piece of mackerel gets a 20-second dip in hot water to set the outside white, then goes in a single layer over aged kimchi (mukeunji) lining the pot. By the end, the kimchi has soaked up the fish fat and turned glossy.
After three months or more in the brine, whole garlic cloves lose their raw bite and turn springy, salty, and sweet. Freshly packed cloves still taste sharp, because this long-keeping pickle, traditionally made with the new garlic of June, is meant to sit for months. The repeated cycle of draining, reboiling, and cooling the brine is what lets the jar keep that long, and the brine always goes in cold, since hot liquid partially cooks the cloves and dulls their texture. Eat them one at a time alongside fatty grilled pork belly or short ribs.
Sour aged kimchi and canned tuna share a gochujang, vinegar, and syrup dressing in this quick pantry noodle bowl. The kimchi is shaken free of its seasoning and chopped fine so the sourness spreads through the noodles instead of landing in one bite. Both the tuna and the noodles are drained well, since leftover can liquid or rinse water loosens the sauce. Half the scallions go into the mix and the rest on top for fresh color and bite.
Left with small lumps on purpose, the potato reads less like smooth mash and more like a chunky salad, with flakes of tuna tucked between pieces you can bite. A short salting first keeps the finely chopped cucumber, carrot and onion crunchy and stops them leaking water into the mayonnaise later. Whole-grain mustard adds a sharper edge and a few popping seeds, and the bowl is served cold from the fridge.
Miyeokgwi, the ruffled base of the sea mustard plant (sold as mekabu in Japan), is thicker and bumpier than the leaves and bounces back when you bite it. It is dressed sweet, sour, and hot with chili flakes, soy, vinegar, and sugar, then chilled for 10 minutes before serving.
As soon as the clams start giving up their liquid, the oyster sauce and soy go in, and thirty seconds later the cornstarch slurry. Cook it any longer and the squid toughens while the shrimp dry out. Thickened like this, the sauce sinks slowly into the rice instead of running straight to the bottom.
Briny fresh oysters go into the pan with minari (Korean water parsley), a strongly grassy herb, and are stir-fried with chili flakes and soup soy sauce for a little heat. The oysters are barely cooked, so they stay plump.
Water and milk make the base, with gochujang stirred in, and the rice cakes and fish cake simmer in it. Milk tends to split over high heat, so the pot stays at medium-low the whole time, and the mozzarella goes in just before the heat goes off to melt on what is left.
The tea uses pitted, dried cornelian cherry flesh: dark red-purple, deeply wrinkled and soft, not whole berries with the hard stone still inside. Even pitted fruit can hide the odd stone or stem, so it gets picked over before rinsing. Fifteen minutes on low with jujubes and ginger turns the water red.
Yellow croaker is set on ancestral rite tables, but most days it is just a side next to rice and soup. It gets salt, a thin dusting of flour, and a pan over medium heat. Fish usually break because they are turned too early; wait until the underside browns and lets go of the pan on its own, then flip it in one move with two wide spatulas.
A whole chicken takes the place of beef bones in this gomtang, and 20 g of ginger leaves a peppery edge on the clear, pale-yellow broth. Push the ginger much past that and it starts to taste bitter.
Only half a tablespoon of gochugaru goes in. The broth stays clear and tastes mostly of clams. Minari and a Cheongyang chili are added after the heat is turned down and cook for just a minute. With the clams purged ahead of time, the cooking itself takes about ten minutes.
The radish is half-cooked on its own beforehand, so it is seasoned all the way through in the short time the mackerel takes. With just half a tablespoon of gochujang, the soy sauce leads and the heat stays gentle.