Korean Tuna Kimchi Stew
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.
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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.
Butterfish is so tender that it is never turned in the pot; instead the broth is spooned over every two or three minutes to cook the top. The soy broth carries ginger and only a little chili flake; the heat is barely there.
Dakgaejang swaps the beef in yukgaejang, Korea's fiery shredded-beef soup, for chicken thigh, and this version adds knife-cut noodles to the red, garlicky broth. Fernbrake (gosari) gives a chewy, earthy bite and bean sprouts a crisp one, both soaking up the heat. Because the base is a clean chicken stock, the spice stays sharp without turning muddy. It is a common choice on cold days or the morning after drinking.
The name says mochi, but these Gunma griddle cakes are wheat: flour and baking soda mixed with scallion and shiso, then kneaded with miso dissolved in water. They reflect the prefecture's strong wheat culture, built on wheat growing and double cropping, and similar cakes are called oyaki or jiriyaki in some areas. Farm households made them for koju-han, a hearty break between stretches of fieldwork, and also ate them with tea or carried them into the mountains.
Swiss chard leaves are thicker and tougher than spinach, so they don't go limp even after sitting in their dressing for a while. The dressing is doenjang (Korean soybean paste), finished with ground perilla seed and perilla oil for a thick, nutty coating.
The tofu is browned on both sides before it ever meets the sauce, then set on a bed of thinly sliced onion and simmered in soy. By the time the sauce has reduced, the onion has all but melted away. Sliced cheongyang chili and scallion go on top for the last minute.
No oil goes in the pan. Well-aged, sour kimchi is fried in the fat that melts out of thin-sliced brisket (chadolbagi), and comes out tasting of beef.
The goal is the school-gate snack-stand kind: soft, puffy wheat rice cakes seasoned sweet and hot all the way through. Wheat cakes swell easily, so they soak in cold water for 10 minutes first to rinse off surface starch. A pinch of black pepper at the end pushes it closer to market-stall tteokbokki.
Halved and scored in a grid, the eggplant cooks cut side down under a lid, and the trapped steam turns the inside creamy while the skin keeps a little bite. The soy and garlic sauce is spooned into the cuts while the eggplant is still hot.
A generous handful of minari, Korean water parsley, goes into this clam broth, and its fresh green smell reaches you before the spoon does. There is no separate stock: the clams and sliced garlic simply start in cold water.
Lotus root stays crisp even when fully cooked, and here a thin layer of seasoned ground beef is pressed onto each slice, giving one bite two very different textures. The slices go into the pan beef side down first, letting the meat set onto the root.
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.
The cod is patted thoroughly dry first so the sauce clings instead of sliding off. It cooks covered on a bed of radish and onion and gets turned just once, gently, at the end so the underside picks up the sauce too.
Think of a pan of dakgalbi with udon added. Gochujang-marinated chicken thigh, cabbage and thin slices of sweet potato cook first, and the thick udon then takes on a heavy coat of that sauce.
Thin slices of pork loin get a thick potato-starch coat and two rounds of frying, which puff the crust into a hard, glassy shell that cracks when you bite. The sauce is just vinegar, sugar, and soy, so it is paler and sharper than the ketchup-red versions common in Korean Chinese restaurants. That tangier style traces back to late-Qing Harbin, where the dish was created to suit Russian guests.
Gondeure, a thistle-family mountain green from the Jeongseon and Taebaek highlands of Gangwon Province, is better known as the base of gondeure-bap, a rice dish cooked with the greens. Dressed with perilla oil, soy sauce, and garlic, it has a soft herbal scent close to mugwort along with an earthy, forest-floor note. Squeeze the boiled greens gently and leave them slightly moist, and chop the tougher stems finer than the leaves so every bite chews the same.
Pork shoulder simmered for about an hour in beef bone broth turns the soup milky and full-bodied. Salted shrimp (saeujeot) and salt come on the side so each person seasons their own bowl, which is how it is eaten in Busan.
Doubanjiang, the Chinese fermented chili bean paste, is salty and hot, and how salty depends on the brand. So the soy sauce here is not poured by the recipe; it is decided after tasting the sauce. There is no meat, just pan-browned tofu and bok choy.
Sundae, Korean blood sausage, alternates with onion and green onion on the skewer before it goes into the pan. The onions lose water and turn sweet as they cook, a break between rich mouthfuls of sausage. The glaze mixes gochujang with ketchup, oligosaccharide syrup, and soy sauce.
Soy-marinated short rib meat, seared over high heat, comes topped with a pile of green onion shreds that have been soaking in cold water. Each pick of the chopsticks takes hot meat and cold, crisp onion together.
As soon as the clams open, soft tofu is spooned in with a large spoon and left alone. The curds soak up the clam broth in soft lumps; stirring hard breaks them down and clouds the soup white. Seasoned with soup soy sauce and no chili, it is not spicy at all.
A Gangwon province dish: buckwheat batter is cooked crepe-thin, rolled around a stir-fried filling of aged kimchi, tofu and pork, then crisped in the pan a second time. Buckwheat has no gluten, and the batter needs more than 10 minutes' rest before it can be spread thin without tearing. Unrinsed aged kimchi keeps its fermented sourness in the filling; rinsing it makes the filling milder.
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.
The wingettes brown in a dry pan, skin side first, before the soy sauce mixture goes in to reduce. By the time the sauce is nearly gone, the meat pulls easily off the bone.