Tonight’s dinner is: dakgalbi
It’s a spicy stir fried chicken dish, cooked and served in front of you.
Koreans also love adding mozzarella cheese to this dish, sometimes it helps when it’s a super spicy version.
The stir fry includes chicken, cabbage, carrots, tteokk (rice cakes) spring onion and usually perilla leaves which I can’t get here.
You add the spicy sauce mix and fry!
Then once most of the food has been eaten, you add rice and kimchi and stir fry it to have a fried rice second main. That’s a common thing to do in Korea, using leftover sauce as base to fry rice. Husband found out the hard way when he was merrily eating a duck stew my mum made and ate plenty of rice with it. Then the second meal came and he struggled!
There are dedicated dakgalbi restaurants in Korea (in fact, restaurants in Korea all specialise in usually one dish, so you go out to have a specific dish rather than to a general place).
Recipe:
– 1 pound chicken thigh fillet or breast cut into bite size chunks
– Quarter of a white cabbage, roughly chopped.
– a medium carrot, sliced at an angle
– medium onion chopped lengthwise – handful of rice cakes (optional)
– 3 bunches of spring onion cut into 3 bits.
For the sauce:
– 2tbs gochujang
– 1tbs soy sauce – 1tbs mirin
– 1tbs gochugaru
– 1tbs sesame oil
– 4 cloves of garlic minced
– tsp grated ginger
– tsp honey or sugar
Arrange the meat and veg in a shallow pan.
Top with the sauce then stir fry for about 20 mins.
Add grated mozzarella and eat once it’s melted.
Add rice to the leftover sauce and some kimchi and an egg, fry.
Enjoy your second meal
