323 recipes. Page 11 of 14
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Pour in the egg, leave it for 30 seconds, then give one wide stir, and it opens into broad, petal-like pieces. From prep to table it takes about ten minutes.
When the drinking table runs short of snacks, this soup is ready almost as soon as the water boils. Pour the egg in along a chopstick while the broth is only gently bubbling, and it spreads out into fine threads.
Pork spine bones simmer for about two hours into a cloudy, rich stock, then blanched cabbage greens (ugeoji) rubbed with doenjang and chili join the pot for an earthy, spicy depth. Cubes of seonji, congealed blood, are added near the end and warmed by ladling broth over them rather than stirring, so they hold their shape.
Blue crabs go in shell and all, turning red as they cook and flavoring the radish broth, and with cheongyang chilies for heat the pot goes in the middle of the table for everyone to dip into.
Cut into 0.7 cm half-moons and cooked only briefly, the zucchini keeps its shape in the clear broth and a little firmness at the center. The shrimp, added first, flavor the broth; dried shrimp make it deeper.
Hair-fine strands of maesaengi seaweed spread green through the whole broth, with pieces of mussel to chew on in between. Both are winter ingredients from Korea's south coast, at their best from November to February. Oysters can take the mussels' place.
The potatoes are cut 0.7 cm thick, enough to hold their shape while their edges fray slightly and give the clear pollack broth a little body. Wring the pollack shreds hard before toasting them, or they steam instead of turning nutty.
Pollock left on racks in Gangwon-do through the winter, freezing and thawing over and over until it dries, becomes hwangtae. Its chewy strips and wisps of soft egg end up in the same spoonful of this clear soup, which is made for hangovers and for ordinary breakfasts alike.
The pollack shreds are not soaked, only swished briefly in cold water. A long soak would wash their savoriness away.
Marsh clams from the Seomjin River area around Hadong are tiny, so the pleasure lies in the broth: pale and clear, yet surprisingly full-tasting. Garlic chives go in just before the heat is cut, wilting only enough to stay green and fragrant. When lifting the clams out of their soaking water, scoop from the top so the sand at the bottom stays behind.
The abalone guts are fried with the radish in a little sesame oil before anything else, and they are why this otherwise clear soup turns faintly green and smells strongly of the sea.
Because this soup goes on the table for ancestral memorial rites, even the way it is cut matters. Brisket, radish and tofu are sliced into neat squares of the same thickness, and the fat that rises is skimmed off to keep the broth clear.
The ingredients are nearly those of kimchi stew, but with more water, so it becomes a soup for pouring over hot rice. How it tastes depends on how sour the kimchi is; if yours is still young, a little vinegar fills the gap.
Thin bulgogi-cut beef and ripe kimchi are fried in sesame oil until red oil starts to gather in the pot, and that is when the water goes in. The tofu is added late but still gets ten more minutes, enough to soak up the kimchi broth all the way through.
Soybean pulp (kongbiji, the solids left from making soy milk or tofu) drinks up the anchovy stock as it cooks, and with the pre-fried ground pork and sour kimchi mixed through it, the pot ends up thick enough that a spoon leaves a hollow behind.
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.
This is a soup for November through February, the months when maesaengi (a seaweed as fine as thread) and oysters are both in season. The seaweed spreads loose through the broth, so every spoonful lifts green threads along with an oyster or two.
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.