Bi Bim Bap

I really don't cook enough Korean food at home. I don't really know why: the ingredients are all pretty accessible here in Kobe, and I certainly do adore the flavors. I should try harder to get tonight's dish into my regular rotation.

I first encountered bi bim bap over 12 years ago, when I first started teaching overseas in Uijeongbu, South Korea. It was one of those dishes that just instantly spoke to me: the combination of rice and veggies, with a spicy/sour/sweet sauce and fried egg, just seemed so natural and effortless. To this day it's one of my favorite dishes.

It's not very hard to make at home, but it is a bit time-consuming--and dirties quite a few dishes in the process, which, admittedly, is a bit of a pain in the ass. But it's well worth it in the end.

Digging around in my stash of recipes, I came across something I'd printed out long ago. It's a basic recipe for bi bim bap from Korean Kitchen, and it served as a good starting point.

Bi bim bap is basically just a bowl of rice topped with some lightly-sauteed veggies, some form of meat, a bit of kochujang sauce, and a fried egg. You can use whatever veggies you like, but each needs to be prepared separately and seasoned a little differently. This is where the website cited earlier comes in handy: most vegetables just take a bit of salt and some sesame oil, but some meatier veggies (like shitake mushrooms) can handle a bit of soy sauce, some sugar, and some garlic.

Tonight we used the following veggies:

• Carrots (sliced with the mandoline and quickly fried with some sesame oil and a dash of salt)
• Spinach (quickly steamed and rinsed under cold water, tossed with a dribble of sesame oil, some sesame seeds, and a pinch of salt)
• Shitake mushrooms (sliced thinly and fried with a splash of soy sauce and some sugar)
• Bean sprouts (parboiled in a bit of hot water, rinsed quickly under cold water, and tossed with sesame oil and a dash of salt)
• Eggplant (also sliced with the mandoline and quickly sauteed with sesame oil, a bit of garlic, and some salt)

The eggplant was a last-minute replacement for zucchini, which would be much more common in Korea. The eggplant took the sesame flavor really well and i thought it worked out quite nicely.

For the meat, I took 150g of a beef/pork combo (ground by the local butcher, no less!) and fried it quickly with some soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, garlic, and salt and pepper. This is basically a simplified bulgogi marinade.

Once the meat and all the veggies are done, it's time to assemble the meal: scoop a good-size serving of short-grain white rice into a big bowl, and arrange the veggies around the sides of the bowl. Pile in the meat in the center, add as much kochujang sauce as you can handle, and top off with a fried egg (sunny-side up, cooked in a splash of oil--but keep it nice and runny. The heat of the rice will finish the cooking.) Garnish with a sprinkling of sesame seeds and you're done.

The kochujang sauce is really simple. The recipe I found is from AsiaRecipe.com and is adapted from a book called Flavours of Korea by Marc and Kim Millon, a British book I've never laid eyes on. The balance of flavors in this sauce seems fairly authentic to me, although I would probably up the vinegar a bit next time.

In Korean snack-bar type places (where I ate a lot of bi bim bap), this would always be served with a simple seaweed soup (called mi yeok guk). It was probably just an instant soup from a packet, which is fine with me. I recently found a Japanese version of the same soup and was happily surprised by how tasty it was. I forgot to serve it tonight, but it would've made an excellent side dish with the bi bim bap.