Tieguodun (Iron-Pot Stew with Corn Bread on the Rim)

Variations

• With goose (tieguodun da'e): Korean Wikipedia gives pork, chicken, goose or fish as the main ingredient. Goose is chopped on the bone and simmered longer than the ribs here.
• With fish: fish is not simmered long. Cook the vegetables first and add the fish when the bread goes on, so they finish together.
• With suancai: the side ingredients Korean Wikipedia lists include suancai, soured cabbage. Its sourness sets off the fatty ribs.
• In a restaurant: as in the photograph, a big iron pot set into the table with a group round it. At home a cast-iron wok stands in for that wall.

Tips

• The bread on the wall is the centre of the dish. Korean Wikipedia describes tieguodun as meat or fish cooked a long time with vegetables in a big iron pot, and goes on to say that while it simmers, corn bread called dabingzi or yumibing is stuck round the rim of the pot and cooked with it.
• The bread cooks two ways at once. Gyoza describes the same arrangement: "A gyoza runs them at once: with the lid on, the base is still against hot oil while the top is in steam, and the wrapper is what holds the two apart." The bread on the wall bakes by conduction on the face against the iron, and the face turned into the pot is steamed by the stew under the lid.
• But it never crisps up again at the end the way a gyoza does. A gyoza finishes once its added water has gone — "Uncover, drizzle with sesame oil, and cook a little longer to crisp the bottoms." Here the steam comes from the stew, and the stew does not dry out. So the only crisp face is the one against the iron, and the rest stays soft. That is the shape of this bread.
• Make it wet or it will not stick. It is naan's reason for the tandoor: "It sticks to the tandoor wall because the dough is slack." Only a wet dough, it goes on, can be slapped on by hand. A dry dough slides off the iron into the stew.
• Press the corn dough flat against the iron. As wotou puts it, "Corn has no gluten, so nothing rises and the dough cooks at the thickness you built it" — nothing rises to help. Wotou hollows its middle out and hotteok presses flat; this bread takes hotteok's route, pressed to 1.5cm so the heat has a short way to go. Wetting your hands is wotou's reason too: "With no gluten, this dough is held together by moisture rather than by stretch."
• The stew must not reach the bread. Where boiling liquid laps over it, that part neither bakes nor steams and just goes to paste. Set the level before the bread goes on, and keep the heat low enough under the lid that it does not boil up the wall.
• Keep the lid on for the first 15 minutes. It is the trapped steam that cooks the inner face (steaming).
• Noodles last, soaked. Jjimdak says of the same noodle: "Here the soaked noodles go straight into the braise, so the sauce is the only liquid they will ever get". Tieguodun's noodles drink only its broth too. Put them in early and they take it all up and go soft.
• Give the ribs their time. The connective tissue on the bone takes long cooking to give (braising).