877 recipes. Page 22 of 37
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Busan-style kkomjangeo, or hagfish, is cooked fast over high heat. Leave it too long in the marinade or the pan and it weeps water and loses its springy chew. The scallions go in just long enough to wilt.
Shallow scores on both sides of the flounder let the chili broth seep in, so even this thin fish is evenly seasoned. When the flesh turns white and flakes easily, it is served with the radish and plenty of the red broth.
Wide, thick noodles take on the numbing tingle of Sichuan peppercorns, the heat of chili oil, the tang of black vinegar and the fermented saltiness of doubanjiang (chili bean paste) all at once. The numbing note comes from warming the peppercorns briefly in chili oil over low heat, pulled off before they darken or smell scorched. Heat is best adjusted with the amount of doubanjiang rather than more chili oil, which keeps the flavor clean. Because the noodles are so broad, a sauce with oil floating on top seasons them unevenly, so the sauce gets stirred to the bottom and the noodles are tossed hard. Boiled 1 minute short of the package time, they stay chewy to the last bite. Bok choy blanched in the noodle water adds a crisp, green bite between the oily strands.
Komatsuna, a Japanese mustard green, steams on the same plate as soft tofu, and both get a spoonful of warm dashi soy sauce with sesame oil and sesame seeds. Take it out once the leaves have wilted and the stems just bend, and the green stays bright.
Daegu's junghwa bibimbap, a Chinese-Korean rice bowl, piles pork, squid, shrimp, and cabbage, stir-fried over high heat until no loose liquid is left, onto rice and tops it with a runny-yolked fried egg. Once the burner is on high there is no time to stop, and the chili powder, oyster sauce, soy sauce, and garlic are measured out beforehand.
Thin beef that hits the pan in clumps steams instead of searing. So before it goes into the soy and pear-juice marinade, every stuck-together slice is peeled apart and laid flat.
Split blue crab grills shell side down first, then gets turned so the cut meat can take brushing after brushing of butter, garlic, soy sauce and lemon whenever it dries. Crabs vary in size and any time given is only a guide. The crab is done when the thickest meat reaches 63°C (145°F) and looks pearly and opaque.
Gochugaru and fresh cheongyang chili together make the broth properly hot. The radish is already half cooked when the flounder goes on top, and it ends up absorbing the fat that seeps from the fish as well as the seasoning.
Somewhere between a soup and a sauced noodle dish, mee bandung from Johor in Malaysia covers soft yellow wheat noodles with a thick red gravy of shrimp stock, tomato paste, and chili paste. A starch slurry at the end gives the gravy enough body to cling to every strand, the texture that defines the dish.
Each slice shows a dark spiral of kombu wrapped around soaked dried herring, glossy with a sweet soy glaze that reaches between the layers. The rolls come from the Hidaka area of Hokkaido, and because kombu sounds like yorokobu, to rejoice, they appear in New Year osechi boxes and at celebrations.
Regular khao man gai tops the rice with poached chicken; this version swaps in chicken thighs seasoned with soy and fish sauce, dredged lightly in flour, and fried skin side first to a deep gold. The rice cooks with garlic and ginger, giving it more aroma than plain steamed rice to stand up to the fried chicken. Excess flour is shaken off before frying, since a heavy coat tends to slip away in the oil. Sliced chicken goes over the rice with a sauce on the side.
Because its soy and pear-juice marinade still tastes right once cold, Seoul-style bulgogi often goes into lunchboxes. Apple juice can replace the pear juice and tenderizes the beef much the same way.
Half-dried pollock, kodari, is chewier than fresh pollock and much less fishy. It soaks in cold water for 10 minutes, both sides are seared plain, and only then does the soy, gochujang and syrup glaze go on, a thin coat at every turn.
There is no salting the eggplant to draw out water. It softens on its own under the lid, in the same pot as browned pork shoulder, and picks up the rendered fat along with the soy and chili, which makes it far richer than eggplant braised alone.
Mashed sweet potato loosened with chicken stock becomes a thick gravy ladled over yellow wheat noodles in this Malaysian dish. Curry powder and peanut butter layer spice and nuttiness over the potato's natural sweetness, and the result sits closer to a spoon-coating sauce than a broth. Mashing the potato while it is still hot keeps lumps out of the gravy. Halved boiled eggs and lime finish the bowl.
Straw ridges run along the outside of each slice, and inside, the crumbled tofu has knitted back together with tiny gaps that hold a sugary soy simmering liquid. That rough interior is the point: unlike a smooth block of simmered tofu, the cut surface drinks up the seasoning during the overnight rest. In central Ibaraki, villagers once pooled straw and made it in large pots for weddings and funerals, when meat was hard to come by.
Egg and scallion are about the only other things in the pan, so the sweetness of the crab comes through first. In Thailand it arrives with a wedge of lime on the plate for you to squeeze over yourself.
Chicken breast, sliced thin across the grain, is seasoned with soy sauce, garlic and ginger and seared quickly. The fussiest part is the knife work: slices of even thickness cook at the same pace.
Cut thin across the bones, each strip of LA galbi carries a row of small bone sections. It goes into a pear juice and soy marinade, and given a night in the fridge, the seasoning reaches the meat between the bones.
The eggplants are steamed whole, then torn by hand along the grain instead of sliced. The torn surface is rough, and the soy dressing clings to it. It is a summer side dish for when eggplants are everywhere, and it can go to the table chilled.
Equal measures of soy sauce and vinegar give this Gangwon-style dressing its sour edge, with gochugaru for heat and a little sugar to round it off. Finely chopped kimchi clings to the noodles instead of sitting in clumps, adding fermented tang and crunch to every bite. With little gluten to hold them together, buckwheat noodles snap apart when boiled past the package time or pressed down while mixing. The dressing is folded in by lifting from below. Several rinses in cold water wash off the surface starch that would make the strands stick together. Water left on the rinsed noodles thins the dressing fast, which makes thorough draining as important as the chill.
Full of tiny holes, freeze-dried tofu soaks up a sweetened soy dashi until almost no liquid is left, then gets a soft blanket of egg. With the broth cooked nearly dry, the moisture comes from the blanched greens and the softly set egg. The dish belongs to Fukushima City, where cold winds off the Abukuma highlands once dried thin tofu through the winter, and the result went into simmered dishes, soups, and New Year rice-cake soup. Households started after the November harvest, wrapping the tofu in straw or reed blinds and hanging it in the cold air for roughly two weeks. The greens are local shinobuna, with komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach) as the stand-in.
Five minutes in a hot pan turns sour, wet kimchi into something sweeter and more savory, as the moisture cooks off and the edges darken. The pan has to be hot enough that the kimchi sizzles on contact; otherwise it steams in its own liquid.
Garlic goes into melted butter, then the shrimp, and as soon as they turn pink the soy sauce, sugar and cheongyang chili go in for a thirty-second finish. There is no time to measure anything in those thirty seconds, so the seasoning is set out before the burner goes on.