Pivoting back to a savory direction, I decided to take a stab at making a dish I have been too intimidated to try cooking. Fortunately, it turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought!
Making the Dish
Following the recipe by Korean Bapsang, there are a few ingredients that may be a bit tricky to find, especially the optional garnishes, but the dish will probably still taste amazing even without the garnishes. Of course, the star ingredient of this dish is the beef short rib which should show the cross-sectioned bones and still have some beef on it. If you’re familiar with Korean beef short ribs in Korean BBQ called “galbi” or “LA galbi,” the ones for this dish are like a much thicker version of them.
A crucial part to making this dish is to ensure that the stock remains as clear as possible for that signature “clean taste” as Koreans call it. The majority of time spent with this recipe was soaking, cleaning, and braising the ribs, all the while skimming off any scum, foam, or fat. I ended up also using a soup stock filter bag that I had bought from H-Mart to strain again so that the stock was nice and “clean.”
Eating the Dish
Words cannot describe how delicious this came out. My first bite transported me back to eating galbi jjim at restaurants – I found myself unable to stop eating and shamelessly devoured my whole bowl. If you’re not familiar with this dish, it is typically eaten with rice (side note: growing up, I was very confused when I would eat American beef stew and it did not come with a side of rice).
Summary
This dish took me about 4 hours total to cook which sounds like a long time, but I thought it was well worth the effort since most of the time does not include active cooking. I would recommend speeding up the process by taking the step that some other recipes instruct, which is to blend the marinade ingredients so you don’t have to separately grate or mince the Asian pear, onion, garlic, and ginger. I am so happy with how this dish came out that I intend to make this again very soon, albeit a bigger batch to get several meals out of it.