Today marks the start of Week 3 featuring my favorite cuisine, Korean cuisine! As a Korean-American, I might be a little biased in saying this, but Korean food is AMAZING!
Something that pretty much everyone I have talked to can agree that Korean BBQ is delicious. From the ability to grill your own meats to the mouth-watering, all-you-can-eat experience perfect for gatherings, Korean BBQ is an understandably popular meal.
For today, I am going to focus on how to have a Korean BBQ in the comfort of your own home, especially since good options in Austin are quite limited. Since there aren’t too many steps involved in actually “making” the food (e.g., marinating the kalbi just means washing and soaking it in cold water before marinating it in the fridge for an hour to overnight), here are some of the essentials for having a Korean BBQ meal at home.
- Your choice of meat The classics are kalbi and bulgogi which I had tonight. You can also use chicken, pork, octopus, you name it.
- Rice I typically do a white rice, but you can also get fancy and do a purple rice which is basically white rice with a little bit of black sweet rice (there isn’t a huge taste difference in my opinion).
- Greens The classic move to make at KBBQ is to assemble a lettuce wrap using lettuce, meat, and whatever veggies or sauce you want. For tonight, I used red leaf lettuce and perilla leaves.
- Veggies I typically use onion, and you can also grill some garlic, but feel free to throw on whatever you want.
- Side dishes Also known as, banchan, you can include whatever you want. I had some of my favorites like stir-fried black beans and lotus root, and made some corn with cheese.
- Sauces My fiance loves ssamjang, so we usually include that and I really love to mix some sesame oil and salt to provide a simple, yet complimentary dipping sauce for my meat.
- *Soju This is completely optional, but I like to enjoy soju, the famous Korean liquor, with my Korean BBQ, especially the fruity flavored ones. I always describe soju as “vodka but smoother.”
This is, of course, not an extensive list of what you can have at your KBBQ table, but I thought it would be helpful to at least provide a basic list. I remember when I first looked into setting up KBBQ in my own home, I had a hard time finding such a list on Google. Happy eating!