Dak-hanmari (A Whole Chicken in Plain Broth, Seasoned in the Bowl)

Name: Dak-hanmari (A Whole Chicken in Plain Broth, Seasoned in the Bowl)
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 55 min
Total time: 1 h 20 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Korean
Ingredients: 1.2 kg whole chicken; 2.5 L water; 10 cloves garlic; 2 leek or spring onion; 2 potatoes; 150 g rice cake slices; 2 tbsp prepared mustard; 4 tbsp soy sauce; 2 tbsp vinegar; 1 tbsp garlic; 1 tbsp gochugaru; 1 tsp sugar; 300 g fresh kalguksu noodles; 1 handful garlic chives

The chicken pot that started in Dongdaemun, Seoul in the 1960s, and it is built the opposite way round from every other chicken broth on this site. Samgyetang stuffs the bird with rice, ginseng and garlic and puts everything into the broth; seolleongtang and galbitang finish their flavour in the pot as well. In dak-hanmari the pot holds a chicken, water and a few cloves of garlic, and it is not seasoned at all. All of the flavour is built in the small dish in front of each person, and what that dish turns on is mustard — whose heat contradicts, one by one, everything this site's chilli guide says about capsaicin.

Steps

Rinse the chicken and pull out the tail and the yellow fat pads inside the cavity. No salt and no doenjang go into this broth, so there is nothing to cover anything up.
⏲ 10 min
Put the bird in a wide shallow pot, add the water and the garlic, bring it to the boil, skim the foam and drop the heat to a bare simmer. Why it must stay clear is in stocks and broths.
⏲ 15 min
Simmer 25-30 minutes. Make the sauce while it goes.
⏲ 30 min
Mix the mustard powder with lukewarm water at about 40°C and leave it 10 minutes. Those ten minutes are the dish. Inside a mustard seed the sinigrin and the enzyme myrosinase sit in separate cells, and grinding plus water is what lets them meet and manufacture the pungent compound (allyl isothiocyanate). Boiling water kills the enzyme, so mustard made with it is not hot at all.
⏲ 10 min
After the ten minutes, add the vinegar. Acid stops the enzyme, so vinegar added early locks the heat in at whatever level it had reached. Once it is as hot as you want, stir in the soy sauce, minced garlic, gochugaru and sugar.
⏲ 5 min
Lay the potato and leek over the chicken, add the rice cakes and cook 15 minutes more. A chopstick pressed into the leg should go in easily.
⏲ 15 min
Bring the pot to the table. Cut the chicken up with scissors and eat it dipped in sauce, each person loosening theirs with a spoonful of broth. The broth is still unseasoned — the same structure as pot-au-feu putting mustard and cornichons on the table and ajiaco serving cream and capers apart, except that here it is the entire dish.
⏲ 10 min
When most of the chicken is gone, add the noodles and cook 5-6 minutes, then the garlic chives. By now the broth has reduced into something rich on the strength of the chicken alone, and this is the first point at which a little salt goes in.
⏲ 6 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Mustard heat is not capsaicin heat. Chilli and heat makes four points: it lives in the white pith, it dissolves in fat rather than water, cooling the dish does not reduce it, and it does not cook off. Mustard reverses all four. It does not exist at all until the seed is broken, water is what makes it, it is volatile enough to fade from an open bowl within the hour, and heat destroys it. That is also why it goes up the nose instead of staying on the tongue.
Dosa handles the same seed the opposite way: its step says mustard seeds go into hot oil "until they pop", which kills the enzyme outright — no pungency at all, only a nutty aroma. Same seed, opposite result.
Against samgyetang: that one stuffs a young bird with glutinous rice and ginseng and drives everything into a milky broth, and the diner adds a pinch of salt. This uses a full-size chicken in a shallow pot, keeps the broth clear, and builds all of the seasoning in a dipping dish.
Rice instead of noodles: some finish by stirring rice into what is left and cooking it down to a porridge. Noodles are the Dongdaemun way.
Dongdaemun's dak-hanmari alley started in the 1960s and is now listed among Seoul's food tourism draws. Every shop mixes its sauce differently, and that difference is the shop.
For more heat, slice a green chilli into your own dish. Safer than more mustard, which past a point only stings the nose and stops tasting of anything.

Tips

Mix mustard powder with lukewarm water. Hot water kills the enzyme and cold water works slowly. About 40°C — a temperature you can hold a finger in — is right.
Vinegar goes in after the ten minutes. The other way round gives you a bland sauce. It is the only step here with an order to it, and it is the one people get wrong.
Mix the sauce just before eating. An hour old it is noticeably milder. Leftovers keep covered in the fridge, but the next day's is a different sauce.
Do not season the broth. Nothing goes in until the noodles at the end. Salt it early and you have simply made baeksuk.
Use a wide shallow pot. It has to keep simmering at the table, and the bird sitting half out of the liquid is normal.
Skim only at the start. After five minutes nothing more comes up.