Simple Potatoes, on the side

As I've mentioned before, one of my favourite things about going to a Korean restaurant was enjoying the side dishes, or panchan, included free of charge with the meal. These side dishes were made from whatever vegetables the kitchen decided to use, and varied seasonally, and with the moods of the staff. Part of the fun of going out to dinner was the anticipation for the side dishes - to paraphrase Cartman from South Park, wondering what side dishes we would be enjoying with the meal.

Somethings were quite common, and very Westerner-friendly - such as pan-fried spinach with sesame oil and garlic, or small boiled quail's eggs with salt and pepper for dipping. Barbecue restaurants often featured some sort of creamy salad, like pasta or potato salad. (And cheap places offered mounds of shredded cabbage with a mayo-ketchup dressing) Other panchan were more challenging, like raw crabs fermented in chili sauce, or raw-oyster studded kimchi.

I always enjoyed getting a potato panchan, because thanks to my North American upbringing, a meal never quite felt complete unless it involved some sort of potato. Normally, this craving could be satisfied with the aforementioned creamy salad. But other times there might be whole baby potatoes, simmered in soy sauce and malt syrup (better than they sound). One of my favourites was extremely simple, and I remembered it the other day, when I was staring crankily at two runty potatoes that were malingering in my kitchen.

In Korea, this panchan came with matchstick potatoes fried in sesame oil, garlic, salt, and green chili. Since I wanted to make this to fill out my bento, I made it without the garlic, as I always feel shy about using a lot of garlic in Japan. Instead, I cut the two potatoes into thin matchsticks, heated up a frypan, and added about two tablespoons of sesame oil. The potatoes go in for about five minutes - the key is to madly toss them about in the hot oil, getting them coated, and cooking them no more than until they're still a little firm when you bite them. (Try not to lose too many behind the stove; this really annoys the person tasked with cleaning up.) Then, I season them heavily with the shichimi togarashi I'd bought in Takayama. This is a a flavourful seasoning that isn't particularly spicy, and worth picking up if you're curious about it. If not, try using Montreal steak spice. This takes only minutes to make - most of the work is in cutting the potatoes. It's great for lunch the next day, or in a morning omelette.

Galbi Salad

One of our favourite things to do when it was hot in Korea was to hit up an outdoor galbi (grilled meat) place - the best of which were to be found on the infamous "meat street" in Ilsan, where my friends Dave and Jo live.

Meat street is, in the words of my friend Aaron - "like RibFest all the time" - translated it means that if what you want to eat is meat; meat street is the place you must go. Near to the outdoor shopping plaza called La Festa, this street is lined up and down with barbecue houses selling various pieces of pork and beef, to be grilled up by you and your friends, seated around a metal table with a hot grill in the middle. The best places use real charcoal in their grills, and offer a wide variety of panchan to go along with the meat. At the end of the meal, you invariably need to shower to remove the fine coat of pork grease that seems to hang in the air, penetrating your hair, your clothes, and your soul.

The whole meal is a steal, as you need only pay for your meat (which comes in 200g orders), beer, and rice. All side dishes are complimentary, and are refilled at your request. If you're a foreigner, they especially love to refill your kimchi plate if you at all show any love for it. We rarely spent more than $12 a head to fill up on meat, rice, soup, and enough soju to cover the table with a forest of green bottles.

Each of my friends had their own grilled meat quirks. Dave always wanted to stay a little longer and get another bottle of soju, as "it's cheaper here than at the bar..". Jo was a creamy salad aficionado, and knew all the places with the best variety of panchan, since she didn't like meat so much. Peter always wanted to see if anyone will go in for the beef, even though it cost double the pork. Evan always grumbled that we always go out for galbi, and why do we never go for ddalk galbi? Corey liked to cook the slivers of garlic in the tops of the grilling mushrooms, and Dan always tried to beg the staff to bring the rice out at the beginning of the meal, instead of at the end, as traditional. And me? I liked to deconstruct the panchan - like, how exactly do they make this? My favourite panchan is what we like to call "galbi salad" - if it has a Korean name, I'm sure I don't know it. But if you're looking for something that goes really well with barbecued meat, this is the ticket.

Clean and tear one head of red leaf lettuce. To this, add several green onions, shredded or chopped thinly. For the dressing, combine 1 tbsp each of sugar, roasted sesame seeds, Korean chili powder, and white sugar. Mix together with 2 tsp. of soy sauce, 3 tbsp of rice vinegar and 4 tbsp. of sesame oil. Shake vigorously, and toss it together with the salad. Spicy, sweet and crisp, this goes incredibly well with barbecued pork chops or pork belly.

Kimchi Bokkumbap

Kimchi and pork together are one of life's great flavour marriages. There's nothing more delicious, especially after a long day of hiking, than a big plate of Dubu Kimchi (tofu topped with sauteed pork and kimchi). Except possibly a slab of samgyeobsal (pork belly) grilling on a slanted plate with the kimchi cooking in the pooled pork fat below.

I didn't have the time or inclination to make either of those dishes this weekend, so I had to settle for my runner-up favourite - kimchi fried rice. A staple of lunch restaurants and food courts in Korea, it's traditionally made with Spam; I prefer to use bacon. It's great for using leftover bits of rice in the fridge, which is what I did at the end of this week when I was cobbling together the scraps of the fridge to fill in our bento boxes. A warning - if you've never tried kimchi before, the smell is powerful. I apologized profusely for the smell to my co-worker, but as a kimchi fan, she said it only made her hungry.

The method is simple; in a hot pan, saute around a 1/3 cup sliced kimchi in sesame oil. When it begins to lose a bit of its violent red colour, and becomes a little limp, add a few strips of thinly sliced bacon. Continue sauteeing on low heat until the bacon is browned, then add a cup or so of cooked rice. Conventional wisdom requires the rice to be cold for good frying results, but to be honest, I find short grain koshihikari rice sticks in hard clumps when it's cold, and is almost impossible to break up in the pan. If my rice is cold, I blast it in the microwave first. Continue frying until the rice has soaked up all the kimchi juice and bacon fat it can, and then remove to a hot plate. In Korea, it's often served sizzling on a hot cast-iron plate. I like to garnish it with some toasted sesame seeds and strips of nori when I can. The gilding on the lily is to add a fried egg to the top - if the yolk is still runny, you can let it ooze over the rice as a decadent sauce.

Mixed up rice.

My rice isn't confused, it's just mixed up.

Bibimbap is a dish I fell in love with in when I was living in Korea. Beloved of schoolchildren and English teachers across the country, it's a one-bowl dish of rice topped with various vegetables, beef, gochujang, and a fried egg. It can be served in a stainless steel bowl or a stone crock that's been heated on a burner - in which case it's called dolsot bibimbap. In Korea, the town of Jeon Ju is famous for it's bibimbap, for reasons that are currently obscure to me.

If you haven't tried Korean food before, I urge you to start with this dish. A traditional Korean meal includes rice, kimchi, a stew (such as deonjangjigae) and several side dishes (panchan) that are seasonal, and prepared on the whim of the cook. These panchan are often made in advance, and kept in the fridge for several day's worth of meals. The rice and stew are made fresh as needed for meals.

Bibimbap, on the other hand, is much simpler to prepare and serve. You can use almost any vegetables you have on hand, and while beef is traditional, there's no reason you couldn't use ground chicken or pork either. If you can't find gochujang, you can use any thick chili sauce (sri racha comes to mind) ; or, if you're afraid of the spice, barbecue or tonkatsu sauce could be used. There's a bit on bibimbap history here, but I suspect its current popularity as a dish in Korea is due to its usefulness in using up all the odds and ends of panchan lurking in the fridge.

Traditional bibimbap includes vegetables that might be hard to find outside of Korea (fern brake, anyone?), so I make it with whatever vegetables are on hand and cheap. Last night, that included carrot, spinach (100 yen a bunch! practically free!), enoki mushrooms, and bean sprouts. Since I didn't have several Lock and Lock containers of panchan in the fridge, I prepped the veg and meat individually while the rice cooked. All told, it took about a half hour to put together - and about ten minutes to eat! There were enough leftovers to make a bento for lunch the next day as well.

You'll need: (for two people, plus maybe a bento leftover)

1 bunch of spinach, cleaned and trimmed.
1 big carrot, peeled and julienned.
1 bunch of enoki mushrooms, bottoms trimmed off (or about 1 cup of sliced mushrooms)
1 bag of bean sprouts, rinsed.
200-300g of ground beef/pork/chicken, depending on how much you like meat. (or make it vegetarian by using more veg - why not?)
3 cups of cooked rice.
4 Tbsp. gochujang, plus some rice vinegar for thinning.
Sesame oil, chopped garlic, soy sauce, chili flakes to taste

First put your rice on to cook. While it's bubbling away, get out your fry pan and heat it up. Add some (1 tsp-ish) sesame oil, and then your carrots. Fry over med-high heat until you think they're tender enough, then tip them out onto a big clear plate you've kept to the side. Push the carrots into a pile (tongs help for this), and put the pan back onto the heat. Next, add some more sesame oil, some chopped garlic and spinach, and saute until the spinach is wilted. Tip that out next to the carrots, and add the bean sprouts to the pan. I usually add a tablespoon or so of soy sauce and chili flakes to my bean sprouts, but this is optional. When they're limp, tip them out next to the carrots and spinach, and cook the mushrooms similarly. When the vegetables are all done, cook the meat with another tablespoon or so of soy sauce and sesame oil. By the time the meat is well browned, your rice should be nearing completion.

To assemble the dish, you'll need two deep bowls - one for each person. Add a cup or so of cooked rice to the bottom of each bowl, then top with the meat and vegetables, each in its own little pile around the bowl. Then, in a smaller bowl, thin the gochujang with 1-2 tablespoons of rice vinegar - this will make it easier to mix around in the bowl. Dollop a good spoonful of the thinned gochujang in the middle of your bibimbap, so it looks like a red sun in the middle of a vegetable sky. (If you like it more spicy, add more; if you like it less spicy, add less.) At this point, you can top it with a fried egg and flakes of nori, but I usually leave it here, as the meat is good enough for me.

Then you take it to the table, and stir it all in together, ruining your fine arrangement.



Bento!

Ddalk Galbi

One of the first dishes I ate when I landed in Korea for the first time was ddalk galbi, a spicy mix of chicken and vegetables cooked on a hot plate at your table. Ddalk galbi restaurants are a big hit with the young people in Seoul, and most of the entertainment districts downtown have several spots where you can sample its greasy, spicy charms.

The name means "chicken ribs", and it consists of chicken stir-fried with a mix of cabbage, leek, carrot, sweet potato, and rice cakes (ddeok). It's all held together with a fiery sauce made from sesame oil, Korean red pepper paste (gochujang), garlic, chilis, and a little bit of soju, a popular Korean liquor. Like many Korean dishes, it's cooked right in the middle of your table, and the potential for collateral damage to your clothes is so great that many restaurants provide their patrons with all-over aprons. Nothing like heading out for a night on the town with the scent of chicken fat and chili in your clothes!

Ddalk galbi conjures up a lot of great memories for me of meals eaten with friends, the table littered with green soju bottles, piles of creamy salad and yellow pickle on the side. Since the restaurants were popular with young people for both the dish and the price - never more than about $6/person, depending on how much soju you drank - the places that sold it were often dives of the first order, with gas lines running above the floor, precarious plastic stools tangled around stainless steel tables that were little more than loops of steel around a gas hose, and a haze of red-tinted chicken fat born aloft on a cloud of charred chili-paste smoke.

We had ddalk galbi on our first night in Korea, when Andrew and Terra dragged our jet-lagged corpses into Bupyeong for the first time. We had it in Chuncheon, the purported home of the dish, with Annette, on our first trip out of Seoul, the first winter we were there. We had it in its short-lived curry incarnation with Dan, and I remember him asking the waitress to add more mini hotdogs, because we loved them so much. I remember having it with my parents in Jongno, meeting Dave just before he fell down the stairs in the subway breaking his ankle in three places. I remember Jo filling up on creamy salad, because of her rules about not eating anything red. And I remember Evan showing us his favourite ddalk galbi place in Yongin, on a winter day so cold that we couldn't even bear to go to the folk village.

It was also the final meal we had with all of our friends together in Korea, and with memories like that, how can I help but want to make it whenever I can? When I happened across a small display of Korean ingredients at the La Zona shopping spectacular in Kawasaki, I was thrilled, and immediately got everything I needed.

My recipe is simple, and feeds two generously with leftovers available for lunch the next day.

You'll need:

• 500g of chicken, preferably boneless thigh meat, although breast is okay as long as the skin is left on.
• 2-3 tbsp. of sesame oil
• 2 tbsp. of soju (or sake, which is what I use in Japan)
• 2 tbsp. of soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. of mirin
• 2/3 cup (roughly) gochujang
  
• 2-3 heads of garlic, crushed
• 1/2 head of cabbage, sliced in about 1 inch width strips
• 1 carrot, sliced thinly into rounds
• 1 sweet potato, sliced thinly into rounds
• 1 Japanese/Korean leek, sliced into 1 inch pieces
• 3 or 4 perilla (ganeep) or shiso leaves, cut in half
  
• 1 cup ddeok ( optional)

First, marinate the chicken in the soy sauce, garlic and soju for 15-30 minutes.








Heat a large wok or frying pan, and add the chicken. Stir-fry briefly, then add the ddeok, sweet potato, carrot and gochujang. Let this cook together for about five minutes, then add the cabbage, leek and shiso.








At this point, you can add mirin to taste, as well as a little more sesame oil, depending on how greasy you like it. I have added as much as 1 cup of gochujang without affecting the success of the dish - it depends on how spicy you like it. You can also make this a little more spicy by adding one whole Korean chili, sliced thinly, and a tbsp. of Korean chili powder (gochugaru) to the marinade stage. Cook everything together until the cabbage is limp and the chicken is firm - maybe another ten minutes over medium heat, stirring frequently to keep the gochujang from burning.


You can serve this right out of the pan at the table for an air of authenticity, with lettuce leaves for wrapping pieces of meat in to cut the heat. You can serve it over white rice, if you're more comfortable with that, but my husband and I like to eat all the big bits out of the pan first, then add two cups of cooked white rice to the leftover sauce, and return it to the heat to make fried rice at the end of the meal, just like back in the day. For the ultimate Korea nostalgia experience, serve with macaroni salad or coleslaw and yellow radish pickle (takuan) on the side, and try not to trip over the gas line on your way out.