Korean recipes are almost never measured. At least the people I have watched, like my mom and aunts, never measure and just go by eyeballing measurements and taste. I guess it’s an old school thing because I’ve seen similar behavior from other ajummas, Mexican doñas, Italian nonnas, and the like. My mother scoffs at measuring cups and instead, gives me measurements from one of our tablespoons and different levels of hand-cuppings. Measurements are given like half a handful, a full handful but with the hand slightly splayed, just the fingers but from the second knuckle up. I have done my best to turn these measurements into standardized cups and spoons but since most of these recipes are scalable, just eyeball them.
Bulgogi might be THE taste of Korean cuisine. It’s the marinade that everyone has tried and associates with Korean food. As soon as you smell the garlicky, soy sauce-y, sesame seed-y fumes, you know someone’s cooking a variation of bulgogi. The name bulgogi translates to fire meat. Technically, it can be any animal and any cut of it, but it’s usually beef. Any variation on animal is usually noted in the name, like dweji bulgogi which is pork bulgogi or dak bulgogi which is chicken.
In this recipe, I’ll concentrate on the marinade. Use any beef you’d like that your budget will allow. Most people use top sirloin or tenderloin when going the inexpensive route, and short rib or ribeye when splurging.
Ingredients
– 1/2 cup soy sauce
– 1/4 cup garlic honey (or regular honey or a bit less brown sugar)
– 4 tbsp mirin (rice wine)
– 1 onion
– 4 tbsp fermented ginger garlic (or 2 tbsp ginger + 2 tbsp garlic, chopped)
– 1 large asian pear
– 5 tbsp sesame seed oil
– Pepper to taste
Slice your meat thin. It helps to either buy it sliced or freeze it for a couple hours before cutting. Blend all the ingredients and marinade the meat for about 5 hours. This is one of those recipes that is hard to mess up. Add more or less honey depending on how sweet you like it. You can’t go wrong with a lot of garlic, so play around with that, too. If you choose to go with less garlic than I recommended, gtfo and don’t come back. Just kidding, but no, really.
Cook on a skillet or grill on medium heat, you don’t want the sugars to burn before the meat is cooked. If you crowd the pan, you end up steaming instead of grilling the meat. It’s not the worst thing to happen since you get a bunch of “sauce” you can mix into your rice, but you won’t get the delicious char. You know what you like, so play around with it. The recipe makes a lot of marinade so you get a few tries to find out how you like it.