Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- You know, South Korea is known for lots of things, including about 5,000 fried chicken places.

But here are some other recipes we really love, and we'll show you how to make them.

First of all, we're gonna do a chicken soup.

Almost every culture has that, but they include hand-torn noodles.

You make a dough, you just pinch off pieces and let it cook in the soup.

By the way, you can do that with hundreds of other recipes.

Next, we do a stir-fried pork.

It has a super amazing, vibrant, spicy red sauce, which we absolutely love.

And finally, we're gonna do some stir-fried rice with chicken.

And they do it a little bit differently.

They use fresh rice, not day-old rice, and they essentially mix it with leftovers.

We do this with chicken and sweet potatoes.

So, please stay tuned as we explore three of the great recipes from South Korea.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- (speaking Korean): Mm... - (speaking Korean): (laughing) (laughter) - So, after almost ten years here at Milk Street, I've discovered that if you want to compare how people think about cooking and a little bit about their culinary traditions, look at chicken soup, because almost every culture has some form of chicken soup.

Many of them also have chicken noodle soup.

And this dough can be used with thousands of recipes.

You can put these hand-torn noodles into almost any soup.

So hidden within this recipe is a master recipe.

A little salt goes in.

As you would do with making pasta, we'll take a well in the center and put in a little bit of water.

I also love the simplicity of this-- third a cup of water, some flour, a little salt.

So now we have a ball of dough.

And... now the fun begins.

So, I just fold it in like that, turn it, pull it back, fold it, run my palm against it.

So when I was in Austria recently, we were doing apple strudel dough.

What I was told is the same thing we learned in Korea: is you want to whack the dough like this, Which just makes me feel so good.

And that helps develop the gluten and get it into shape.

So you're going to do this for about four minutes.

Every once in a while, you-- and you really want to hear that smack, like that.

(dough smacking table) I mean, isn't this fun?

(dough smacking table) That's good.

Ooh!

That was a good one.

Makes good TV, right?

So this recipe is the gift that keeps on giving, 'cause it has two master recipes in it.

We talked about the dough, but it also has what is essentially white-cooked chicken, which is a Chinese technique.

In China, they would probably bring the chicken, soy sauce, some other ingredients-- ginger, whatever-- up to a simmer, and then they would cover the pot and let it sit off heat until the chicken was cooked.

We're gonna keep the heat on at a low simmer, partially covered.

It's a little less guesswork that way, 'cause it depends on the size of the chicken and the size of the pot.

So, we'll start with the scallions.

Like in many recipes like this, they use the whites as opposed to the greens in the pot.

And we'll use the greens, which we'll also slice, in the sauce.

The greens will be a little less pungent and a little grassier.

So, soy sauce, salt and pepper, garlic, onion.

Again, here's one of my pet peeves, of which I have thousands.

You know, you're just putting this in a soup, so you don't need a perfect dice.

So, you know, just chop onions, it's fine.

The chef isn't gonna come up with a little, you know, ruler to see if it's quarter-inch.

Two chicken breasts, bone-in, skin-on.

That's gonna actually provide a lot more flavor.

And water.

So, I washed my hands, since I was touching raw chicken.

Scallions again, soy sauce, gochujang, sesame seeds, toasted sesame oil.

So, this is gochugaru, which is essentially dried chilies.

You could use red pepper flakes, maybe use a little bit less.

So we have the sauce, and we're just gonna bring this up to temperature.

Keep it on a low simmer, and put the top on, partially covered.

It'll take 25 to 30 minutes, something like that.

I use an instant-read thermometer to check the meat.

I definitely want the meat to be about 160 to 170.

We're gonna take these out.

And that's our white-cooked chicken.

I'm gonna bring this up a little bit higher heat.

And then we're gonna drop the carrots.

We didn't put those in at the beginning, 'cause they'd be overcooked.

So we're gonna put them in now and cook them for about ten minutes, until they're just tender.

A lot of people talk about using... these are big forks.

(laughing): Using forks to do it-- which you can.

If the chicken's super hot, I would do it that way, but I find-- if your hands can take it-- I find using your fingers is much easier.

Especially when you're getting the chicken off the bone.

You can also, with your fingers, you can feel if there is a bit that's got a bone in it or it's a little gristly.

See, there's that little piece right there you probably wouldn't have gotten with a fork.

So, one other thing.

We just made chicken stock, right?

So, what I love is starting with a whole chicken, or you could just use the chicken breast bone-in, skin-on.

And when you cook them for half an hour in water, you know, most places in the world use water.

And so you made chicken stock, right?

And now you have soup.

So, and this is the fun part-- except whacking the dough, that was, that was the real big fun part.

So we're going to have pieces of dough stretched like that.

So you take a small piece, thumb and forefinger... stretch it out about like that, pull it off.

So this is not perfection.

So you can do it any way you want to.

Let your kids do it.

You just made pasta dough, right?

You've done so much with a simple recipe.

You can just take small pieces and roll it out super thin, almost like a thick pasta, like spaghetti, for example.

So you can make other shapes if you like.

You don't have to just do hand-torn noodles.

These are like fresh pasta.

Well, it is fresh pasta.

It'll take just about three minutes to cook.

Now we're adding the chicken and zucchini, and we're only going to cook it so it still has a little crunch to it.

You don't want it overcooked.

I grew up on zucchini that was cooked for an hour, so maybe I have some, some emotional issues around zucchini.

But if you don't overcook it, it's great, because it adds a little freshness, a little bit of crispness as well.

Now we have the sauce.

This isn't that spicy, but it adds, you know, a whole new layer to chicken soup.

So, we have a little bit of pasta, we have the chicken.

It's going to be hot.

Mm.

The dumplings, the hand-torn noodles, they have some texture to them, which is very different than the chicken, which is very different than the zucchini.

I'm not a big fan of spicy food, but this has just a little bit of spice to it, which makes it nice.

If you want to learn how to change the way you cook, this is the kind of recipe that really helps.

This recipe gives you two master recipes that you can use in hundreds of other ways, which means that you can come home, you know, on a Tuesday night and throw together a chicken dinner or a chicken soup in about 45 minutes.

- Today we are celebrating the fantastic cuisine of Korea with its big, bold flavors and smart cooking techniques.

But what makes Korean cuisine stand out from others?

The French have master sauces.

Mexican food, of course, has delicious salsas, moles.

But Korean food has jangs.

Those are sauces and condiments that give Korean food its big, bold, assertive flavor.

Let's talk about a few of those ingredients, and then I'm going to make a delicious stir fry with a few of them.

First of all is ganjang.

This is Korean soy sauce, very much like Japanese soy sauce, made very much the same way, with fermented soybeans, but it's a little lighter and a little saltier than Japanese soy sauce.

Next up is doenjang.

Doenjang is essentially a Korean version of miso.

It's not quite as salty as Japanese miso, but it's used very much the same way.

In sauces, in soups, it has a little bit more of an earthy, mushroomy flavor.

It is also fermented soybeans that is soaked in brine and sometimes aged in clay pots.

Next up, probably the king of the jangs, the gochujang.

This is also a fermented paste made with red chili, glutinous rice-- or sticky rice-- soybeans, and salt.

If you purchase gochujang in the grocery store, those are the only ingredients you want to see on the label.

If there's a lot of other junk in there, move on to the next brand.

You can also buy this in differing levels of heat, which is a beautiful thing, but also has that fermented, maltiness flavor that you get from miso.

Now, I mentioned this has red chili in it.

Now we're talking about Korean chili, which is a bit different, and that is called gochugaru.

These are Korean dried red chilies.

Now, they look just like a typical chile de rbol, but they are a little different.

They smell a little smokier, and when you eat them, they have a moderate heat, but they have a real fruitiness to them and a smokiness to them.

They add a little bit of a different dimension than a plain red chili flake might.

And when you buy this in the store, you typically just find it ground.

And finally, probably the king of the condiments would be kimchi.

This, of course, is fermented cabbage with garlic, lots of salt, and red chili as well.

There's probably hundreds and hundreds of versions of this that you will find everywhere.

So, we do love kimchi here at Milk Street.

We use it a lot.

We have a wonderful grilled ham and cheese with kimchi in it.

We have fried rice recipes.

Gochujang, same thing.

We make a roasted chicken with a gochujang butter.

Very, very useful.

You should get some and get it in your pantry.

So those are a few of the staple ingredients that we utilize for Korean cuisine.

It makes it so bold and delicious.

I'm going to pick a couple of these ingredients and show you a very simple pork stir fry.

This is a stir-fried pork with vegetables.

It's called jeyuk bokkeum.

And I'm going to start with prepping the pork here.

Typically, this is made with pork shoulder.

It's a little bit fattier and has a little bit more marbling in it.

But because you can typically only buy giant pieces of that, we're going with country-style ribs.

The very first thing I did was to pop the pork in the freezer for about 20 minutes.

This is a great technique when you need to slice meat super thin for stir fries especially.

So these are just going to be very thin pieces... No thicker than a quarter inch.

So you'll notice in these pieces there's lots of marbling, which is going to crisp up.

And you can see, it almost looks like bacon.

But it's not cured, it's fresh meat.

And it's going to get nice and crispy and sizzling in that hot pan.

And now we'll move on to the sauce.

This is where we're going to put a couple of these Korean ingredients to work.

First up, gochujang.

This is going to give us a little heat and a little sweetness in the sauce.

Now, to this, I'm going to add-- this is our gochugaru.

It's ground really finely.

If you don't have it, you can just use sweet paprika.

Doesn't have any heat, of course, but it does add an earthy flavor.

A little salt and pepper.

Sugar.

Our soy sauce, and mirin, which is a Japanese cooking wine.

I'm just going to really whisk this well together to dissolve the sugar and salt.

Now, I want to flavor the pork.

Get the party started here.

I'm going to put a couple tablespoons and then stir it together and get it all coated.

I'm not really marinating, I'm just getting that flavor started before we start up our stir fry.

Like any stir fry, you've got to be ready.

Have all of your ingredients prepped and ready to go before you cook.

I have some scallions that I'm going to just remove the roots here.

I'm going to add these in two separate additions.

First, the whites are going to go in with some of our other aromatics.

I've got carrots, sliced onions, lots of garlic, of course.

The scallion greens, I'm going to cut into one-inch pieces and add them at the end.

I'm treating them like a vegetable.

They'll be bright and crunchy at the very end of the stir fry.

Got everything sliced and prepped, ready to cook.

So I'll turn the cooktop on to medium-high.

And as this heats up, when you start to hear the garlic sizzle, we're ready to rock and roll.

We're gonna throw the pork in and get it browned.

Now, spread this out into a single layer, as best you can.

We want a lot of surface area with the pan and the pork to get it as crisp as we can.

It will render a lot of that fat that you see and make it nice and crispy.

When we traveled to Korea, we learned how to make this delicious dish with home cook Hakyung Han.

It's a really, really great weeknight dish.

As you can see, once the chopping is all done-- that's where all the time is-- this is going to come together in about ten minutes.

I can see the fat is rendering out a little bit.

The edges are beginning to brown and crisp.

It's time to move on.

I'll add the vegetables here.

Now just cook this, stirring-- stir fry-- until those vegetables begin to soften and wilt.

Just a couple of minutes.

Again, we're not going to, like, cook this for a long time.

We don't want things to get wilty and mushy here.

This is the beauty of the dish.

There's lots of layers of texture and flavor.

(sizzling) So, just a couple minutes, and now the sauce.

And I'll cook this briefly until the sauce thickens.

It's going to start to simmer, as you can see.

The sauce will thicken and glaze all of the vegetables and the pork.

Looks beautiful.

Now I'm going to toss in those scallion greens, the tops.

Turn off the heat, add some sliced serrano chilies to give it a little bit more of a fresh chili punch.

And that is a quick, beautiful Korean stir fry.

Now, of course, you could eat this with a little steamed rice like any other stir fry.

But my favorite way to eat this is in a lettuce cup.

A little spice.

There's a real kind of sweetness, almost honey sweetness to the sauce we made.

The garlic is a big pop.

There's heat, there's umami.

Beautifully balanced stir fry that you can throw together in 15 minutes on a weeknight.

So you've definitely gotta give this recipe a try.

This is our Korean spicy stir-fried pork.

I'm all in favor of repurposing leftovers, but to be honest, when I was in South Korea, I wasn't expecting it to happen while I was still at the restaurant.

In fact, it actually happened while I was still eating dinner.

But that's kind of the nature of dak-galbi.

It's a very communal sort of meal where the cooking is done right at the table.

So, you sit around a round table, and a server will bring out kind of a giant paella-like pan, and they start by sauteing usually some sweet potatoes and cabbage with some chicken and a really wonderful gochujang-based sauce.

Okay, well, you think that's the meal, but that's only stage one.

The server comes back and brings a ton of freshly cooked rice and dumps that rice on the other half of the pan.

Now the cooking really begins, because they turn the leftovers-- that you haven't even finished eating yet, by the way-- into fried rice.

So after they add the rice, they let it sizzle and sear and crisp on the pan and they combine it with the stage one of the recipe, so you end up with this really delicious chicken fried rice.

And it gave me the idea that this would be the perfect recipe for Milk Street because, you know, a lot of fried rice actually is built from leftovers.

The thing is, in order to adapt this recipe for home cooks in the United States, we had to figure out how do you take a two-stage recipe and turn it into a one-stage meal?

Because none of us is gonna make leftovers just to make dinner.

So the flavor base of this fried rice is all, of course, built around gochujang.

And you kind of doctor that up with some soy sauce, some rice vinegar, some salt.

And the result is a really complex sauce.

You know, a lot of fried rices, you don't get a whole lot more than, say, soy sauce and some garlic and ginger, but you get such depth from that gochujang and the rice vinegar brightens and heightens everything else.

The result is a very simple stir fry, but with really complex flavors.

Now we can proceed with stage one of the traditional dak-galbi, which is the chicken stir fry.

So, to do that, we're going to add about a tablespoon of neutral oil to a non-stick skillet.

And to that we're going to add about a pound of boneless, skinless chicken thighs that we've cut into one- or two-inch chunks.

And one of the traditional vegetables of dak-galbi, which is cubed sweet potato.

And a little sprinkle of salt.

We'll cook this for about five to seven minutes.

We just want to start browning the chicken and the sweet potatoes.

This is actually the messy part of dak-galbi.

When you get it in a traditional dak-galbi restaurant, they actually provide you with plastic aprons that both you and the servers are supposed to wear, because you tend to get splattered.

We're going to try to keep it a little cleaner today.

All right, we've got some browning, exactly what we want.

Now we're going to start building a bit more flavor.

And for that, we're going to add some chopped garlic and some chopped ginger.

And some scallion whites.

Now we can finish with green cabbage, another very traditional ingredient for dak-galbi.

And this is going to wilt down, become really nice and tender as well.

And, of course, our gochujang sauce.

This is going to cook for about another, let's say, nine to 11 minutes.

We want the chicken to cook through, of course, but we also want the sweet potatoes to get nice and tender.

So that was stage one of the recipe.

Now we get to transition to stage two, where we take that chicken and we combine it with rice and we turn it into a fried rice dish.

There's a really important difference here, because in across a lot of Asia, the rice used for fried rice is day-old, and that's because the rice dries out a little bit and the grains separate, and it makes for kind of a lighter, fluffier fried rice.

They don't do that in Korea.

In Korea, they prefer to use freshly cooked rice, and the result is a much chewier fried rice in the end.

It's actually really pleasant.

The goal during stage two is to develop what's called nurungji, which is a really crispness to the fried rice.

You know, in fact, when you're at the restaurant, the server will kind of flatten the rice against that paella-like pan and just let it sit for a bit over high heat, and that crisps the rice because, again, you've got this kind of chewy, freshly cooked rice, and now you're giving it this kind of crispy edge to it, and it's a great contrast of flavors and textures.

And then we're going to top it with some of our greens from the scallions and some of our nori flakes.

This is the same seaweed that you see wrapped around maki sushi.

And you can buy it as, like, a snack, and we just cut it up and put that on.

It adds a wonderful salinity to the dish.

Now, to account for unevenness in burners, about halfway through you're going to want to rotate your skillet just to make sure you get that even crisping on everything in the pan.

We're starting to get some browning.

Perfect.

Yeah, that's looking great.

This is what we're looking for.

You want to see that crisping and that browning.

It's just starting now.

Mix that all up, get all those crunchy bits mixed in, and for a final crisping, we're gonna spread it out evenly one more time and just let it crisp for another couple minutes.

I was really impressed with how we were able to streamline this recipe into kind of a one-stage recipe here at Milk Street.

And, you know, in the end, the trick to streamlining this recipe really just was a matter of picking the best parts of each stage and bringing them together in one pan.

It actually ended up being pretty easy and we didn't sacrifice anything in terms of taste.

That gochujang sauce makes all the difference.

That's really wonderful.

You get that crispness from the rice, you get some wonderful gentle heat from the gochujang and the savoriness from the soy sauce.

And it pairs really well with the chicken and the sweet potato and the cabbage.

I really love this.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street Television at MilkStreetTV.com.

- Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

- The new Milk Street Cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show.

From Vietnamese chicken salad and tiramisu to easy-stretch pizza dough and Austrian apple strudel, the new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $29.95, 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.