Now, as an adult, he finds himself longing for bulgogi, which, in the grand scheme of grilled Korean meats, isn’t a fancy dish by any means. Kim preferred the more expensive kalbi, grilled short ribs, which he got to eat only on special occasions like his birthday. Simon Kim, the owner of Cote Korean steakhouse in New York, says he can’t serve bulgogi at his restaurant because the paper-thin slices would fall through the grates of the metal mesh grill pans lining his tables. Their broadness and heft mean that you can flip the slices over flames without losing them to the fire. These skirt steak segments - not unlike the neobiani that the royals ate - work well on a charcoal grill, too. Cut into segments and pounded with a meat mallet, it mimics the presliced beef that stocks the many H Marts across New York, New Jersey and beyond. Other cuts require even less culinary deftness: Skirt steak, flank steak’s more marbled cousin, comes pretty thin already. Maangchi’s bulgogi recipe calls for “well-marbled boneless sirloin, tenderloin or skirt steak.” Seonkyoung Longest, the blogger behind the YouTube channel Asian at Home, uses “rib-eye, chuck or skirt steak” and even has a popular ground beef variation. Most seem to agree that thin, tender slices are a must, but the specific cut of beef is negotiable. But bulgogi to me is beef that you don’t have to chew much.” “It could be Korean barbecue, and many other things that feel Korean. “A thick cut of meat is not bulgogi,” he said. Though the presentation is modern, the bulgogi in question is still thinly sliced marinated meat. The most popular menu item at the New York chef Hooni Kim’s restaurant, Danji, is a bulgogi slider that uses brisket. “The cheese was almost an extension of the bulgogi,” she said. The crispy rice was topped with the deeply seasoned meat and mounded with molten mozzarella. Lee found her Proustian bulgogi in a bowl of dolsot bibimbap, which she had as a tween in a shopping mall in Seoul. As an adjective, bulgogi describes the combined taste of soy sauce, garlic, ginger and sugar, among other ingredients, depending on how you cook it.īulgogi means something different to everyone, and that’s part of its lure. These variations on the original grilled preparation, which the restaurant also serves, hint at the many ways in which bulgogi has, over the years, become culinarily both a noun (referring to a specific dish) and an adjective (summarizing a flavor profile). A feature of royal court cuisine during the Joseon dynasty (1392 to 1910), neobiani is considered a predecessor to today’s beloved bulgogi.Īt Cho Dang Gol, a restaurant that’s been on the 35th Street of Manhattan for over two decades, bulgogi finds its way into lacy zucchini jeon, a spicy octopus stir-fry and ttukbaegi bulgogi, a dreamy caldron of tender beef swimming in its own powerful juices where, once again, those familiar thin slices make an appearance. Years later, maekjeok evolved into neobiani, a dish of broad, thin slices of beef tenderized and grilled over flames. 668), the Maek people in the northern Korean Peninsula ate maekjeok, a dish of grilled pork marinated in doenjang, a fermented soybean paste. Versatility is a chief characteristic of the dish, its many forms through history serving as evidence of its long journey from modern-day North Korea to South Korea and all across the Korean diaspora.ĭuring the Goguryeo kingdom (37 B.C. Just as there is no one way to make kimchi, there is no one way to make bulgogi. If you grew up in a Korean household, then the dish wasn’t just occasional barbecue it was dinner on the regular, a quick pan-fry on the stovetop. An adaptable staple of Korean cuisine, bulgogi is most often made from thin slices of marinated and grilled beef (though sometimes pork and less commonly chicken). Park, a forensic chemist for the New Jersey State Police who has since retired, bulgogi was a weeknight workhorse, even without the convenience of presliced meat. “You got a chunk of meat and had the butcher slice it for you.” Or, if there wasn’t a butcher, you did it yourself.įor Ms. “Back then, you couldn’t just buy bulgogi beef like you can now,” she said. Park immigrated to the United States from South Korea, she had no access to Korean grocery stores, where today entire cases are dedicated to presliced meat often labeled “bulgogi beef.” In a decades-old spiral-bound police community cookbook, Songza Park’s recipe for “BUL KOGI (Barbecued Beef)” calls for two pounds of sirloin steak that you have to slice “very thin on the bias” before scoring each piece with an X.
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