This past Sunday, the 5th, I tried my hand at making dwaeji bulgogi and seasoned radish.
I decided to start off with making the seasoned radish. Well, actually I started off with two grocery store runs while still half-asleep, but once my annoyance waned, I began to make the seasoned radish or musaengchae (무생채). While not a dish I eat often, it’s one of my favorite banchan (side dish), the crisp flavor of the radish and the spice from the gochugaru a perfect combination for a hot day or to cleanse the palate when eating fatty foods.
The actual process of making the seasoned radish is fairly simple but took longer than anticipated due to my lack of a food slicer. Slicing 1.7 lbs of Korean radish (mu or 무) with nothing but my Kiwi brand knife (purchased from Boo Han, my family’s go-to Korean grocery in Portland) was quite the task, but one that felt more relaxing than anything. AS mentioned before, I always feel a sense of peace from just working with the ingredients every time I cook. There’s something about the intentionality that makes me feel grounded.
Overall, the seasoned radish didn’t take too long. Within an hour I had everything combined into a dish and stored in the fridge to chill until I left for my friends’ house. My next step was to move onto the dwaeji or daeji bulgogi (돼지불고기). This bulgogi is a dish I’ve eaten often at home, usually made by my older sister Miranda. Though, the first bulgogi I ever ate was the beef bulgogi, which my dad showed us how to cook. It’s the one he remembers his mom cooking the most, though she would weave the thin, marinaded meat on wooden skewers to grill. Dad recounted how even the raw marinaded meat tasted so good that when he was younger his mom would constantly have to shoo him away from the grill so there’d still be bulgogi left for dinner. My paternal grandpa wasn’t one much for Korean food, but Dad said he’d always eat the bulgogi.
When I was younger and first tried dwaeji bulgogi in a restaurant, I didn’t care for it much. The texture of the pork’s marinade was somehow grainy, and I wasn’t a huge fan of the flavor. It tasted alright but wasn’t something I would order again with item like haemul pajeon (seafood pancake) or duk gook (rice cake soup) on the menu. It was a favorite of my brother’s right off the bat, and we started cooking it at home. That’s when I decided dwaeji bulgogi was my favorite bulgogi.
For me, dwaeji bulgogi is definitely one of those foods that I’ll only eat if home cooked. The restaurant versions just never live up to what we create in our own kitchen. I was excited to share this with my friends, though a little nervous as this would be the first time I ever cooked the dish. But it seems watching my sister as she cooked paid off because the prep felt like second nature. I cut up the pork into thin slices, though I opted to use pork belly, and mixed that with the rest of the ingredients in a Ziploc bag, setting it aside to marinade for 10 minutes while I heated up the pan. Cooking takes longer than I’m used to since my apartment has electric stoves instead of the gas stove that we have at my parents’ house.
And that’s another way I had to deviate from Jenny Kwak’s recipe, I had to cook the meat on the stove top instead of a grill. Cooking the meat in the pan made me wish I was home, chatting with my sister in the backyard as she stood over the grill, cooking the dwaeji bulgogi. But eventually I got through cooking all the meat and packed it up to take over to my friends’ house. I arrived and was welcomed in, placing my simple meal on the table. I was glad to share in this meal with my friends, while I don’t like eating around strangers, I always enjoy eating with my friends.
It was a fun night, ending in a movie and the promise to come back the next night. Though, before the night was up, my friend Jackson shared with us what he was cooking up in the kitchen; sesame balls. While I sadly have no photos of the delicious treats, my friend Sako and I stared wide-eyed at each other after taking our first bits, absolutely wowed–and damn-near speechless–at how perfect the sesame balls were. It was a beautiful piece of nostalgia for me that I was glad Jackson shared. Between my own cooking and Jackson’s dessert, it was undoubtedly a night of nostalgic eating.
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