Kongnamul Gukbap (Bean Sprout Soup with Rice, Reheated by Ladling)

Name: Kongnamul Gukbap (Bean Sprout Soup with Rice, Reheated by Ladling)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 45 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Korean
Ingredients: 400 g soybean sprouts; 1.5 L water; 1 piece kombu; 15 dried anchovies; 100 g daikon; 1 tbsp saeujeot; 1 tsp garlic; 4 bowls cold cooked rice; 4 sheets gim; 4 spring onions; 1 tsp gochugaru; 1 tsp sesame oil; 4 eggs; 100 g squid

What makes the Jeonju version of this soup is not an ingredient but the way the rice is warmed. It is called toryeom: cold rice goes into an earthenware bowl, hot broth is poured over it and poured back off again, five or six times, until the rice is hot. Boil rice in soup instead and the grains drink the liquid and swell while the broth goes cloudy with their starch. Toryeom avoids both. The aim is to make the rice hot without cooking it any further.

Steps

Rinse the sprouts. Simmer the water with the kombu, anchovies and daikon for 15 minutes and lift the solids out.
⏲ 15 min
Add the sprouts and boil 5 minutes with the lid on. Do not lift it partway — the old rule that opening and closing the lid makes them smell is real. Lid on throughout, or off throughout; pick one.
⏲ 5 min
Season with the salted shrimp and garlic. Keep the broth at a boil — toryeom does not work without genuinely hot liquid.
⏲ 3 min
Put cold rice in an earthenware bowl, fill it with boiling broth and pour the broth straight back into the pan. The cold air between the grains is pushed out and both bowl and rice take up heat.
⏲ 1 min
Repeat five or six times. Fill it a last time and serve. The rice is now hot and still separate, grain by grain.
⏲ 5 min
Top with the gim, spring onion and gochugaru. Do not put the bowl on the heat — boiling it now undoes everything you just did.
⏲ 2 min
Break an egg into a small bowl, spoon two or three spoonfuls of hot broth over it to half-set it, and serve it alongside. In Jeonju it is drunk first, not stirred into the soup.
⏲ 2 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Jeonju Nambu Market style: served by toryeom. Clear broth, separate grains, sometimes with squid.
Jeonju Sambaekjip style: the earthenware bowl goes on the heat and arrives boiling. Thicker, hotter, cloudier. The same city, the opposite method, and which is correct is an old argument.
With dried pollock: adding the fish from hwangtaeguk makes a much deeper broth.
Without squid: the plain version, and it needs nothing else.
With kimchi: well-fermented kimchi, chopped, over the top.

Tips

Toryeom warms the rice without cooking it. Boil rice in soup and two things happen: the grains drink the broth and swell, and the starch that leaks out clouds it. Toryeom instead pours hot broth on and straight back off, moving heat into the rice and the bowl and nothing else. The rice is submerged for a few seconds at a time, which is not long enough to take up water.
Cold rice is better. Freshly cooked rice is already full of water and swells further; rice that has cooled and begun to retrograde is firmer and holds its shape (cooking rice).
This is what the earthenware bowl is for. Toryeom heats the vessel as much as the rice, and a thick ttukbaegi holds that heat. Do it in thin china and the bowl is cold again by the third pour.
Do not put it back on the heat at the end. Boiling the assembled bowl swells the rice and clouds the broth. That is the Sambaekjip style, and it is a finished method in its own right rather than a mistake.
The egg goes in its own bowl. Beaten into the soup it turns the broth murky. In Jeonju it is half-set with a couple of spoonfuls of hot broth and drunk first — the same insistence on clarity, applied to the egg.
Lid on throughout or off throughout. The compounds that make bean sprouts smell raw are volatile: with the lid on they stay in, with it off they go. Opening it partway is the worst of both.
Season with salted shrimp rather than salt. It adds savour where salt only adds salt. Put it in as it is rather than dissolving the liquor into the pot.