689 recipes. Page 26 of 29
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Doenjang, not gochujang, seasons this crab stew, so it tastes nutty and savory before it tastes hot, with the chili flakes and Cheongyang pepper staying in the background.
Blue crabs in spring are packed with meat and taste noticeably sweet. Here they are halved and simmered in their shells with chili flakes and Cheongyang peppers, and the closer to live the crabs are when they go in, the more of that sweetness comes through.
Once the bean sprouts are in, the lid goes on and stays shut for seven minutes. Koreans have long held that this keeps the beany smell away, and with those seven minutes included, the soup goes from prep to bowl in about 15 minutes.
Bean sprouts go into a milky broth made from toasted dried pollack, and it is the soup many Koreans make the morning after drinking. The sprouts cook briefly with the lid off, so their stems stay crisp.
The kimchi decides almost everything here. Well-fermented, sour kimchi goes in with plenty of its brine, which turns the broth a deep brick red; if yours is not sour yet, a little vinegar makes up the difference.
Maesaengi, a winter seaweed, grows in strands as fine as thread, and once it is loosened with chopsticks in anchovy stock the whole pot turns deep green within minutes. Its aroma fades with long cooking, so three to four minutes is all it gets.
The flavor of this broth comes from the innards packed in the crab's top shell. That is why the shells go into the pot with the radish before the bodies, so the innards can be stirred loose into the gochujang broth. It sits on a tabletop burner, and as it cooks down, a little water goes in so everyone can keep eating to the bottom.
Cod and pollock are soft-fleshed fish, so once the pieces are in the pot they are never turned; the spicy broth is just spooned over them. That is how the pieces stay whole all the way to the table. Swap in clams or shrimp and it becomes a seafood maeuntang.
There is no chili flake or gochujang anywhere in this pot. Big dumplings cook in a clear anchovy and kelp stock flavored by shiitake, oyster mushrooms and napa cabbage, and any seasoning still needed at the end comes from salt alone so the broth stays pale. Some people finish the leftover broth with a scoop of rice.
Napa cabbage lines the bottom of the pot, and kimchi, blanched beef, tofu, enoki and frozen dumplings are arranged around it in separate blocks of color before anchovy stock with gochujang is poured over. A drop of perilla oil goes on just before it reaches the table.
Store-bought frozen dumplings go straight into boiling anchovy stock without thawing, and in about five minutes they float. Many Korean families make this instead of tteokguk at Lunar New Year, and adding rice cakes turns it into tteok-manduguk.
Pieces of catfish simmer in a gochujang broth, and thin pinches of flour dough go in partway through, so fish and sujebi dumplings come out of the same pot. Before cutting, the catfish is rubbed well with salt to strip off its slippery coating, which otherwise leaves a muddy taste in the broth.
Butterbur stems, peeled of their stringy outer skin, simmer in doenjang broth until they bend limply under a chopstick. Their sharp, acrid taste is the main hurdle: unless the stems are blanched and soaked in cold water first, that harshness spreads through the whole pot.
Mideodeok, a small sea squirt, holds a pocket of briny liquid inside its tough skin, and it bursts in your mouth when you bite down. To keep that liquid in, the stems are left uncut and the sea squirts get only three minutes in the pot, and the doenjang is dissolved in rice-rinsing water rather than anchovy stock. Around Tongyeong and Geoje on Korea's south coast, it is everyday home cooking.
Pinch two corners of a square of wheat dough together and it takes the shape of a mi, a winnowing basket. In Jikkoku, in Fujikawa, Yamanashi, that shape is said to scoop up good fortune, which is why the soup appears on New Year's morning and at celebrations. The dough goes straight into the broth with the root vegetables instead of being boiled separately, and the flour on its surface gives the soup a light body.
Brisket simmered for about 25 minutes gives a clear, light brown broth. The cooked beef can be torn along the grain and returned to the soup, or lifted out and dipped in a seasoned soy sauce.
White miso makes a mild, slightly sweet soup and red miso a darker, saltier one. Either way, once the miso is in, the pot does not boil again: the heat is turned off, and only then are the wakame and green onion added.
No meat and no stock, just plain water. Seaweed fried in sesame oil and doenjang (Korean soybean paste) give the broth its flavor, and tofu takes the place the beef would usually hold. It is lighter than beef seaweed soup, and the doenjang leaves the broth slightly thick.
In Jeju, pork backbone and belly simmer for an hour and a half, and gulfweed goes into that broth along with buckwheat flour to thicken it. It keeps thickening as it cools, and the heat goes off while it still runs slowly off a spoon.
Radish greens dried in autumn used to come out through the winter for soups like this one. Rubbed with doenjang first and then simmered with five spoonfuls of perilla seed powder, they end up in a broth thick enough to spoon over rice and mix in.
There is no separate stock here. Seven hundred grams of mussels open in boiling water and their liquor becomes the broth, with doenjang seeping out of the radish greens that were rubbed with it beforehand. Between bites of plump mussel, the greens stay a little fibrous.
Add beef and this becomes beef radish soup; add dried pollack and it becomes pollack radish soup. This is the plain version underneath both, and the one thing that takes care is cutting the radish a little thicker than usual so it does not fall apart in the long simmer. Winter radish makes a noticeably sweeter broth, and the radish is softer still when the soup is reheated the next day.
Mulmegi is caught off Korea's east coast from December to February, and its flesh is so soft that it nearly dissolves into the pot once cooked. Even in this clear soup that gives the broth some body, enough that it sets almost like jelly as it cools. Once the fish is in, shake the pot rather than stirring it.
Several beef offal cuts with very different chews, such as small intestine and omasum, go into one pot of milky bone broth. Chili flakes and garlic make it spicy, and half a spoonful of doenjang mixed into the seasoning paste tamps down any remaining offal smell. It is a hot pot for the drinking table, alongside soju.