Saturday, May 17, 2014 – My friend Vinni wanted to do a cooking party. So we did. Somehow, we decided we wanted to make bulgogi, so we ended up making a Korean dinner.
Vinni wanted to get us started with an appetizer before we got into the bulk of the cooking. The original dish used Korean pork belly or something like that and garlic chives. But we just substituted prosciutto and green onions to give it a bit of an Italian twist. It’s topped with a pine nut and the dipping sauce is made with fish sauce, chili sauce, and a bit of honey.
This was Jon N’s contribution. Gamjajorim. A Korean potato dish. Caramelized potatoes. Sounds delicious already. The recipe is from Maangchi.
Vinni wanted to make a bean sprout dish, with bean sprouts she had grown in her garden. She couldn’t find the recipe in her recipe book (presumably it was in the other recipe book), so we pulled one from, again, Maangchi. It was a little spicier than anticipated, but still good.
Vinni’s next contribution was a stirfry mushroom dish. Delicious umami.
Not pictured: Steamed snow peas.
This was my contribution. A super simple tofu dish that I learned from my mother many years ago. A super simple dish that starts with a block of cold soft tofu, topped with green onions and soy paste. In retrospect, an 18oz block of tofu is way too much.
And now for the main event.
We got the recipe for bulgogi from Food52. This recipe calls for some of the usual aromatics: onion, garlic, ginger, green onions, but it also throws in an apple and a pear.
The recipe is a little unusual. It claims that 5 lbs of meat serves 4 people. There’s no way in hell 4 people can finish 5 lbs of meat. (Unless the meal is nothing but meat, and these guys are voracious eaters.) So I halved the recipe. Except half an onion. I didn’t want to halve half an onion. That might have been a mistake.
The marinade had very little liquid. And it needed a bit of alcohol to bring out more flavor. And it already had pear in it. So pear brandy was a shoe-in. Also, Chinese 5-Spice Powder, because Chinese 5-Spice Powder is awesome.
Here is the marinade. As I said, I didn’t halve the onions. The marinade is mostly solids. I shoulda halved the onions.
And here is the 2.5 lbs of well-sliced ribeye, marinating overnight. Just looking at the meat, you can already tell this is way too much meat. The half recipe of marinade is probably only enough for 1 lb meat. And 1 lb meat is probably enough for the three of us (me, Jon, Vinni).
And of course, we’re not going to eat the meat raw. Vinni brought her hot plate, and we grilled the meat on the hot plate.
The meat turned out a bit sweet (thanks to the apple, pears, and Poire Williams), but the overall flavor was just lacking. My first instinct was to add more soy sauce, white pepper, and some rice vinegar. But once you start grilling the meat, you can’t really adjust the seasonings. I know bulgogi is traditionally grilled, but I think this recipe would work better as a stirfry.
Still, lots of good data, and delicious by-products too.