Haemul Pajeon (Seafood Scallion Pancake)

Variations

• Kimchi jeon: Use chopped sour kimchi instead of seafood.
• Buchu jeon: Swap the scallions for a pile of garlic chives.
• Dongnae pajeon: Busan style — heaped with seafood and a runny egg cracked on top.
• Gamja jeon: Finely grated potato for a chewy version.

Tips

• Bindae-tteok files this dish among the three that "stir ingredients into a wheat-flour batter", and this recipe stirs nothing. The scallions are cut to the width of the pan and laid out; the batter is poured over them; the seafood is scattered on top and a little more batter drizzled after. Kimchijeon folds everything in, and gamja-jeon has no separate batter at all — the potato's own starch is the adhesive. Among the jeon this one is built rather than mixed, and the batter is not the subject but the least amount that will hold a lattice of scallions together.
• Which is why the seafood is drained and goes on top. Bindae-tteok writes the failure down: "water left in any of these thins the batter and the pancake spreads in the pan — this is where it most often goes wrong." Chopped seafood is mostly water, and stirred through the batter it thins it from the inside and goes on releasing for the whole cook. Drained and laid on the surface, what it does release leaves upward, against the hot pan, instead of into the structure.
• Flipping only once follows from the same architecture. A mixed batter is the same material everywhere and has redundancy; a built one has a single seam, the layer where scallion meets batter. Move it before the underside has set and the top and the bottom travel separately, and nothing afterwards rejoins them.
• The thin-batter and cold-water tips are already explained next door. Kimchijeon ties those two together as routes to the same end, keeping a wheat batter from building a network, so there is nothing to repeat here — except that in this dish thinness is not only about crispness. The batter has to be thin enough to let the lattice show, because the scallions are what you are supposed to be eating.
• Keep the batter slightly thin for a thin, crisp pancake; thick batter turns gummy.
• Mixing with cold water makes it crispier.
• Use plenty of oil over medium heat so the inside cooks through and the edges crisp up.
• Flip it only once so it does not fall apart.
• Best eaten hot off the pan with makgeolli.