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Maesaengi-guk (Oyster and Fine Seaweed Soup)

Name: Maesaengi-guk (Oyster and Fine Seaweed Soup)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 25 min
Yield: 2 servings
Cuisine: Korean
Ingredients: 200 g maesaengi; 150 g oysters; 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil; 1 tsp garlic; 700 ml water or anchovy stock; 1 tbsp soup soy sauce (guk-ganjang); salt; sesame seeds

A winter soup of maesaengi, a green seaweed finer than hair, cooked only briefly with oysters. Its fibres mat so densely that the soup barely steams, yet it holds its heat for a long time, so it is easy to take it for cool and burn your mouth.

Ingredients

2servings

Steps

Put the maesaengi in a fine sieve and dip it into a bowl of water and lift it out three or four times to rinse off sand and grit. Drain lightly without wringing it.
Heat the sesame oil in a pot, add the garlic and oysters and stir only until the oyster edges curl.
⏲ 1 min
Pour in the water or stock, bring to the boil and season with the soup soy sauce.
⏲ 4 min
Add the maesaengi and loosen it with chopsticks. As soon as it comes back to the boil, turn off the heat. Do not keep it boiling.
⏲ 1 min
Adjust the salt, ladle into bowls and scatter with sesame seeds. It is hot even with no steam. Take a little at a time and let it cool.

Variations

With rice cakes. Add sliced rice cakes for maesaengi tteokguk.
With noodles. Add knife-cut noodles for maesaengi kalguksu.
Instead of oysters. Clams or prawns work too.
As a pancake. Stir it into a jeon batter.

Tips

In season from November to February. Use frozen outside that.
Rinse it in the sieve. Rubbing it by hand breaks the fine strands.
Once it boils, you are done. It only needs heating through.
Keep the oysters brief. Long frying toughens them.
Season with soup soy and salt. The seaweed brings its own sea flavour.

More detail and the reasons why (2)

No steam does not mean it has cooled. The Korean Wikipedia article on maesaengi says the cooked seaweed gives off little steam and its fine fibres are so densely matted that it does not cool easily, so people often burn their mouths; hence the southern saying that you serve maesaengi soup to a son-in-law you dislike. Normally the steam over a bowl tells you how hot it is (serving temperature). Here that signal is switched off.
The same family of seaweed, cooked the opposite way. Miyeokguk fries its seaweed in sesame oil and simmers it twenty to thirty minutes until the broth turns milky. Maesaengi comes off the heat the moment it boils. Miyeok gets its flavour from the time; maesaengi, finer than hair, is already as loose as it will get, and all the pot has left to do is heat it.