Bulgogi (Korean bbq) Recipe

by. Yeji Kim

Bulgogi is loved by all age groups in Korea and I believe the taste will be appealing to you too.

Bulgogi picture from a Korean blog post

What is Bulgogi?

Bulgogi (불고기) is a Korean preparation of thinly sliced beef or pork marinated in a sweet and savory sauce. The name literally means “fire”(bul) and “meat”(gogi). This dish has existed over a thousand years and was considered a high-class cuisine because of how expensive it was in the past. Today, although beef is more available to many families, my family and I still seem to notice the value of bulgogi. We usually have one main dish and several side dishes to eat with rice and bulgogi is one of the main dishes. I would usually just eat bulgogi and rice while my mom nagged me to eat the other side dishes with vegetables. Bulgogi is one of my favorite main side dishes that can easily be made. There are a lot of different variations in how to make bulgogi, but in this recipe, I will be showing you how to make a traditional bulgogi dish with a little bit of a twist in the process of marinating the meat. This recipe is heavily influenced by a Korean food blog because I want to introduce a recipe that is closest to the traditional and popular flavor of Korean bulgogi.

Bulgogi Sauce

The sauce that the meat will marinate in is made with few ingredients like soy sauce, black sugar, sesame oil, sesame seeds, black pepper powder, garlic, and plum extract. It is important to balance out the sweet and savory taste of the sauce. Here, plum extract is optional, but it helps add sweetness and get rid of the smell of meat.

*If you are including a lot of vegetables, you should make plenty of sauce

Twist of process

The meat is traditionally marinated in the sauce for 30 minutes. However, according to a famous Korean chef, adding one spoon of sugar and one spoon of corn syrup to the meat and marinating just these three ingredients for 20 minutes will make the bulgogi taste even better.

After you marinate the meat in sugar and corn syrup, there is just one more step to follow before you add the sauce. Many Korean people blend Korean pear or apple with onions and then add them to the meat to enhance the flavor and tenderize the meat.

Modern bulgogi

Bulgogi is not only loved in Korea but also in many other countries. We can see that this dish has spread over the world today through the inclusion of bulgogi on different cultural foods like pizza, tacos, fries, hamburgers, etc. Through the combination of bulgogi with different cultural foods, it helped people to be more willing to try a new taste while also having tastes that they are familiar with. With the help of fusion food, bulgogi is more accessible in America today. I hope this recipe can reach to those who have tasted, seen, or heard about bulgogi that wants to try making their own at home.

Ingredients

• 300g of meat: pre-cut beef meat (sold in Korean marts), rib eye, or any beef like chuck eye, sirloin, and tenderloin

• Vegetables: onions, carrots, enoki mushrooms, green onion

Marination:

First time

• 1 spoon of sugar

• 1 spoon of corn syrup

Second time

• Apples or Korean pear(blended)

Sauce ingredients (when 300g of meat is used):

• 6 spoons of soy sauce (preferably Korean soy sauce)

• Sesame seeds

• Pinch of black pepper powder

• Half spoon of minced garlic

• Half spoon of sesame oil

• 2 spoons of plum extract (optional)

How to make bulgogi by Yeji Kim; made with procreate, iMovie, and GarageBand(music).

If you need visuals to guide you to make this dish, watch this quick video and follow along the step-by-step instructions below.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. If you are using a pre-cut meat, separate the slices and remove any excess blood from the meat using a paper towel.

2. Place the meat in a bowl and add 1 spoon of sugar and 1 spoon of corn syrup.

3. Mix well and marinate for 20 minutes.

4. After 20 minutes, add the blended apples or Korean pear and add in the prepared bulgogi sauce together.

5. Mix in the vegetables,

6. You can cook it right away or you can marinate it for 20-30mintes again to get the sauce to smear into the meat more and add more flavor.

7. Two ways you can cook the meat is by:

• grilling: grill the meat on high hear until slightly caramelized; do not crowd the skillet

• stir frying: cooking the meat over high heat until the meat is no longer pink; the pan can be crowded

*If you would like more meat juice, you can add some water and cook the meat, or the onions will help generate the juice.

Look at how juicy this bulgogi made by Junid looks!

And that is it! It is very easy to make. Through this dish, I hope you can taste a glimpse of Korea. If you have any leftovers, you can just place them in a container and store it in the fridge or just place a plastic wrap over the bowl the bulgogi is in and also store it in the fridge. When you get more familiar with this flavor you can try adding them to different kinds of dishes like tacos or burgers or you can add in glass noodles or rice cakes into the bulgogi. However you would like to make it, I hope you enjoy your meal!

Written Reflection

I have chosen to do my remediation with a food blog because I thought it would be best to show how to make bulgogi after writing a research paper about it. Although my research paper was not only about bulgogi, I wanted my food blog to focus on bulgogi because it has a personal connection to my heritage identity. At the end, I also wanted to mention the fact that this dish is being fixed with other cultural foods like I have written about in my research paper.

For the writing part of the food blog, I wanted it to be more concise and easy to read so I decided to follow other food blog designs and included the headers that represented the topic I was writing about in the following paragraph. I did not include a lot of personal anecdotes because I thought it might stray away from the focus. I included small details of why bulgogi is important to Koreans and my family and then the rest of my blog focuses more on the ingredients and the process of making the food. For the recipe, I mainly followed the ingredients of the Korean food blog, but I got some of the instructional ideas from another food blog that I’ve hyperlinked in my food blog.

For the media part, I included the pictures of the final product and I drew an animation of the process of making the dish. I added music that I've created from GarageBand and put the animation and music together in iMovie. I wanted to make an animation because I find it easier to follow a recipe when I visually see while also reading the recipe alongside. Since I do not have a kitchen and I cannot film myself cooking, I’ve decided to just make an animation of my own. This process was a little difficult because I was a little stressed to finish the animation on time on top of my other final projects. I couldn’t make the drawings too detailed and had to keep the animation simple, but in the end I think it worked out well.