Today's galbijjim (braised short rib) recipe comes from Baek Jong-won, a Korean cook and restauranteur who is basically Korea's version of Alton Brown except without the nasty Republican-ness. Like Brown, he's responsible for really demystifying and popularizing home cooking for young people. He used that as a springboard to become a household name and incredibly influential celebrity chef despite, also like Brown, not actually being a chef. If you've seen the Korean-Chinese chain Paik's Noodle, that's him (Paik is an alternate spelling of Baek/백). In Korea he's even more ubiquitous--the dude has his own trademarked spam knockoff.
ANYWHO galbijjim is one of those recipes that takes a lot of time but a lot of that time is just sitting around waiting. Case in point, the very first step takes 24 hours to finish but requires maybe 60 seconds of prep.
Dump yer short ribs inna bowl
Cover em in water
Done
In Korean (East Asian in general, tbh) cuisine, most recipes that use red meat have prep steps entirely devoted to removing the animal scent from the meat. The closest western equivalent would be what you call "gaminess," except that for Koreans that smell is perceived as present even in farm-raised cows and pigs. So for galbijjim, the first step is to leave the meat covered with water overnight so that the blood (it's not blood but you know what I mean) leeches out and into the water.
After a day soaking in water, you can see the color has drained from the meat. That's okay, though, since the flavor is in the fat and short ribs are hella fatty.
But we're not done yet. The next step is to blanch them in boiling water to get the blood out of the bones.
A lot of scum floats to the surface, and if you look at the cut surface of the rib bone you can see the congealed blood that has seeped out of it.
The steam kinda makes it hard to see, but it's that dark brown stuff on the left and center of the bone.
After blanching, you take out the ribs and then wash em. The process of cutting cow ribs into portions isn't entirely clean; a lot of bone fragments go flying around and if you look closely at the edges of the bone you can even see the serrated bits that could come loose and mix into your food.
Scrubbing the meat with your hands helps get rid of all those little fragments, and also helps wash away the congealed blood too.
Anyway, once that's done you set the meat aside for a sec and put together the galbijjim sauce. This is a bunch of sweet, savory, and salty elements like sugar/soy sauce/liquor/etc. The only cooking wine I had on hand was shaoxing wine so I used that (ignore the cat hairs, Odin likes to rub against liquor bottles for some reason). Also a shitton of aromatics like green onion and ginger and garlic.
Back into the pot with the meat, cover with sauce, add water to cover, and boil for a little under an hour.
In the meantime, prep the veggies. These will go in in stages. The daikon radish and onions go in first, followed a bit later by the mushrooms and carrots, and finally the peppers and green onions are added at the very end.
I still have over half the daikon left over so I might make dongchimi with what's left, idk
Also ngl I could not remember if my big green onions were, in fact, daepa (big green onions) or leeks. I decided not to risk it and just used the light green/white bits.
Once the mushrooms were good I gave the beef a taste. Short rib is such a magical meat, yum yum num num
Turn off the heat, add the peppers and green onions (leeks?) to let the residual heat cook em, and it's done.
I gave the broth a taste and it was missing something so
I tossed in some beef dashida (basically Korean beef bouillon powder). I learned only recently contains no kelp (dashima in Korean, but you probably know it as kombu) at all despite sounding like it should. This stuff is magical, frfr
Anyway it's late so no money shot, I shoved it in the fridge for tomorrow. The video in the link up top has English subtitles so you can give it a try too even if you don't speak Korean.
Now it's late so Imma go to sleep snrrrr
Have a picture of my cat looking holy
