Colm O'Gorman: Brighten dark January days with my beautiful Bulgogi Beef recipe

Bulgogi Beef is a beautiful Korean barbecue dish, but it can be easily cooked on a griddle or in a skillet.

The holidays are over, and most of us are back to work, or school or whatever our everyday usually is. As is often the case at this time of year, the airways, papers, and social media are littered with content about New Year’s resolutions, fitness goals and worst of all in my view, detox diets. Do not get me wrong, I do not begrudge anyone whatever works for them to get their year off to a good start, or a focus to get through what can be a bit of a miserable month, but I am always at a loss to understand why that often seems to involve making it even more miserable by denying themselves comfort and pleasure. If there was ever a month to eat comforting, warm and satisfying food, then January is most definitely it. After all the rich food and indulgence of the holidays, an adjustment may well be needed, but there is no need to make long, dark January days even more miserable than they need to be.

Of course, as with most things, there is a middle ground. In January I generally like to change things up a bit and introduce some new dishes to my diet or resurface old favourites that I have not eaten for a while. I go for freshly cooked dishes with lots of flavour, avoiding over processed foods, and using fresh ingredients. I most definitely go for comfort, food that warms the heart as much as it feeds the body.

Bulgogi Beef is a beautiful Korean barbecue dish, but it can be easily cooked on a griddle or in a skillet. A Korean colleague told me that ‘bulgogi’ translates as ‘fire-meat’ and that it can be made with tender thinly sliced cuts of any meat which is marinated and then cooked over fire. However, beef is the most commonly used meat for this dish. Use a decent quality steak if you can. A rib-eye is perfect as it will have some marbling which adds lots of flavour.

It does not take long to prepare and cook, but the meat needs a few hours to marinate, so a little forward planning is needed.

Asian pear is usually added to the marinade to tenderise the meat and add some sweetness to the dish. If you cannot source Asian pear, use kiwi instead as I do in this recipe. Kiwi will tenderise the meat more quickly than the pear, so you can reduce the marinating time down to about two hours if you use it.

Serve your bulgogi beef with fresh little gem lettuce leaves, boiled rice, kim chi and some Korean-style pickled onions. The onions are very easy to prepare, but delicious. Combine 250ml each of apple cider vinegar, soy sauce and water, warm it up in a small pan and then dissolve 100g of brown sugar in that mixture. Peel and roughly chop a few large onions. Wash, deseed and finely slice one red and one green chilli and add that to the pot. Remove for the heat and allow to cool while your beef marinades and they will be ready to eat when you serve up the dish. Stored in a clean glass jar, these picked onions will keep for a month or so in the fridge.

Bulgogi beef

recipe by:Colm O'Gorman

Serve your bulgogi beef with fresh little gem lettuce leaves, boiled rice, kim chi and some Korean style pickled onions.

Servings

2

Preparation Time

 2 hours 20 mins

Cooking Time

 20 mins

Total Time

 2 hours 40 mins

Course

 Main

Cuisine

 Korean

Ingredients

• 450g rib eye steak

• 1 kiwi

• 3 tbsp soy sauce

• 2 tbsp honey

• 20ml rice wine or sherry

• 2cm fresh ginger root

• 2-3 cloves garlic

• 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil

• A good grind of black pepper

• 1 tbsp gochujang (optional but recommended)

• 2 onions

• 2 carrots

• 3 spring onions

• 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds

• To Serve

• Plain boiled white rice

• Leaves of a head of little gem lettuce

• Kim chi

• Korean Picked onions

Method

1. Start by thinly slicing the steaks. Do this when the meat is chilled as it will make it easier to cut. Use a very sharp knife to cut the meat into thin strips, about 3mm thick is perfect. Pop them into a bowl and make your marinade.

2. Peel the onions, roughly chop just half of one and set aside the rest for now. Peel and grate the garlic and ginger. Peel the kiwi. Pop all of those into a food processor, along with the soy sauce, honey, rice wine or sherry, sesame oil, and the gochujang.

3. If you are a regular reader of this column, you will be familiar with gochujang by now, a Korean chilli paste that is readily available from most Asian supermarkets. You can also quite easily make your own.

4. Blitz the marinade until smooth and pour it over the beef. Mix everything to fully coat the meat and marinade for two hours. If you use Asian pear instead of kiwi fruit, marinade the meat for four hours.

5. Peel and very thinly slice the carrot or cut it into strips. Slice the remaining onion. Wash and chop the spring onions.

6. When the meat is ready to cook, heat a large heavy based skillet or griddle pan over a high heat. When it is good and hot, add a little toasted sesame oil, and pop in the sliced onion. Reduce the heat to medium and stir fry the onions for two minutes. Now add the beef and the marinade to the pan. Cook for four to five minutes until the meat is almost cooked through and add the carrots. Cook for another two to three minutes and add half the chopped spring onion. Stir that in and remove the pan from the heat.

7. Serve the bulgogi beef on a platter, with the rest of the chopped spring onions and the toasted sesame seeds sprinkled over the top. To eat the dish, wrap some of the beef, rice and sides in a lettuce leaf and tuck in. You can also eat the beef with just rice and the kim chi and pickles on the side if you prefer.