Quest to Nowhere

Food + Heat = Bulgogi

I‘ve decided that I’m not just going to talk about video game here on the blog, but also talk about other things I enjoy. One of which is cooking (and well food in general,) so expect future posts at least about my own exploits in cooking, which will include instructions on how to make said things.

Ever since my friend (now roommate) got me into eating Korean food a few years back, I’d been wanting to learn to make bulgogi. For those that don’t know what that is, it is basically a marinated beef, and I’m going to explain how I make it since it is pretty simple. What got me to finally look up the recipe is that I got the idea to make a French Dip style sandwich with bulgogi instead of roast beef (I’ll post the recipe for this eventually since it’s still being tweaked,) and since then I’ve come up with some other ideas for how to use it in other cuisine fusion.

What you will need:

• 1.5 to 2.5 lbs of eye roast
• Soy sauce (about 1/3 cup)
• Sesame oil (about 1 Tbl)
• Sugar (about 3 Tbl)

What you can also add if you want:

• Garlic (3+ cloves, minced)
• Green onion (3, chopped)
• Sesame seeds (about 1 Tbl)

Prep Work:

Combine everything but the meat in a bowl, and make sure the sugar is as dissolved as it can be.

With the eye roast first cut off the chunk of fat, trying to remove as little meat as possible with it, but don’t throw it away. Wrap up the fat and put it in the fridge, because you’ll need it once we start cooking.

Then cut up the eye roast as you want. I try to cut really thin slices since I’ve got a sharp knife, but really you want to cut it up based on what you are making. If it’s for a sandwich you want thin slices, but if it’s going to be a pizza topping (bulgogi pizza will be discussed in a future post,) you are going to want small chucks. In the images there are some examples so you can see what I’m talking about.

Once the meat is all cut up throw it into the bowl with the marinade, and mix it all together. I usually do this by hand since it’s the easiest and fastest way to make sure everything is covered.

Then cover the bowl with plastic wrap or aluminum foil and put it in the refrigerator for 2 hours, or up to like a day. I’ve cooked it after marinating it for 4 hours and for over 24 hours, but I haven’t noticed much difference in flavor between the two.

Heat + Food:

Now that it has been a few hours, or a day, remove the marinated meat and the fat from the fridge. On the stove put two pans, a large non-stick fry pan and a large high edged pan (or use whatever you happen to have that can do what is described next.) In the fry pan put the fat, fat side down, and put the burner on high or mid-high. Basically we want to do is sort of render the fat and use it to grease the fry pan.

While that is going on dump all the meat into the high edged pan, which is also set to mid-high/high heat. Here we are basically braising the meat in the marinade. You want to let the meat cook here, and mix it around a bit every so often so that it all cooks evenly.

Once the meat is cooked, and there is enough fat in the fry pan, remove the fat from the fry pan and start moving the meat into the fry pan. Make sure thought that you don’t bring the liquid with you. What we want to do with the fry pan is brown with meat a little bit. You can either move all the meat over at once, or do this in smaller batches. Smaller batches seem to the better option, but will require you to probably use the chunk of fat to regrease the pan between batches.

Once you’ve cooked all the meat in the fry pan you now have my version of bulgogi.

Now what do I do?

Well you can eat it with rice, or whatever you’d normally eat meat with. Maybe a baked potato?

The batch pictured here was used for bulgogi pita pizzas, which are like normal pita pizza except with bulgogi and my custom pasta sauce variant 2 (another future blog post.) And as I mentioned at the start of the post I’ve also made French dip style sandwiches with it (although I’m still improving on the recipe.)