KO EN Korean Side dish⏱ 70 minEdit history

Bugak (Kelp and Vegetables in Dried Rice Paste, Fried)

Name: Bugak (Kelp and Vegetables in Dried Rice Paste, Fried)
Prep time: 1 h
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 1 h 10 min
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: Korean
Ingredients: 100 g glutinous rice flour; 800 ml water; 1 tsp salt; 100 g dried kelp (dasima/kombu); 3 tbsp sesame seeds; 1 L neutral oil; 0.5 tsp salt; 10 dried laver sheets; 30 perilla leaves; 300 g lotus root; 20 green chillies

A dry banchan from Korean temple kitchens: kelp, laver, perilla leaves or lotus root painted with a cooked glutinous rice paste, dried hard, and kept until someone wants to fry it. What fries is not the vegetable but the film of starch set on top of it. The starch was cooked and then dried, so the moment it meets oil the little water left inside it turns to steam all at once and blows the film into a foam. That is why the frying is measured in seconds rather than minutes, and why something this thin comes out without absorbing oil.

Steps

Whisk 100g of glutinous rice flour and the salt into 800ml of cold water until there are no lumps. Tipped into hot water the flour cooks on the outside and clumps.
⏲ 5 min
Bring it up over a medium-low heat, stirring the whole time. It is ready when it turns from cloudy to translucent and thick. Cooking the starch out completely here is what lets it dry to a glassy film later.
⏲ 10 min
Do not wash the kelp. Wipe the white bloom off the surface with a damp cloth — soaked in water it swells and the paste will not stick. Cut it into 5cm pieces.
⏲ 10 min
Let the paste cool a little and brush it thinly over both sides of each piece. Laid on thick it never dries through, and instead of puffing it stays leathery in the oil. Scatter sesame over it.
⏲ 20 min
Spread the pieces on a rack in a single layer and dry them until they are completely hard. A day or two in good sun, or six to eight hours at 50C in a dehydrator. They are done when a piece snaps instead of bending.
Store the dried pieces airtight somewhere cool. They keep for months like this — the drying is the preserving, and the frying is something you do just before eating.
Heat the oil to 160-170C. Hotter than that and the film browns before it has puffed (deep frying).
⏲ 10 min
Fry two or three pieces at a time. They swell and turn white in three to five seconds. Do not wait for colour — by the time there is colour it has burnt.
⏲ 5 sec
Lift them onto a rack in a single layer and salt them while hot. Let them cool completely before they go into a container or they go soft.
⏲ 10 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Gim bugak: two sheets of laver glued together with the paste, sesame scattered on, dried. The commonest kind and the fastest — two seconds in the oil is enough.
Perilla and chilli bugak: the leaves or whole green chillies painted and dried. Leave the seeds in the chillies or there is no heat left.
Potato and lotus root bugak: sliced thin, blanched briefly, patted dry and painted. The blanching is to wash off loose starch and stop the slices browning.
Twigak is a different food. Kelp or kelp root fried without any paste is twigak. The names get used interchangeably, but whether the paste goes on is exactly what separates them.
As temple food: no meat or fish, and none of the five pungent vegetables (garlic, spring onion, Chinese chive, wild chive, asafoetida) either. In a monastery that had to get through a winter, dry banchan was not a choice.

Tips

What fries is the film, not the vegetable. Put a piece of kelp straight into oil and it curls and burns. The rice paste takes the heat first and puffs around it, which is how something as thin as a perilla leaf comes out whole.
Deep frying's premise works differently here. That guide explains that water at the surface of the food flashes to steam and that the outward rush is what keeps oil from getting in. Bugak has almost none of that water. What expands instead is the small amount trapped inside a starch film that was cooked and then dried, and it blows the film itself into a foam. The expansion happens in the coating rather than at the food's surface, which is why three seconds is the whole fry.
It is a fourth kind of coating. The three that guide lists are flour, flour plus starch, and a cold wet batter. A pre-cooked, pre-dried starch film is not among them. Tempura goes into the oil wet; this goes in dry.
It puffs differently from youtiao, where steam collects between two joined strips and hollows them out. Here a single film becomes the foam.
The drying is the preserving. Takuan also dries its radish, but that is to cut the water down so a ferment can work; here the drying is the finished state. Fully dried bugak has no water for microbes to live in and keeps for months at room temperature.
Thin paste, thin film. One part flour to eight parts water. Thicker and only the surface dries while the inside stays soft, so it toughens in the oil instead of puffing.
Low oil, short time. At 180C it colours before it puffs. Do not judge it by colour — judge it by whether it has swollen.