Yukgaejang (Spicy Beef Soup)

Variations

• Dak-gaejang: Use shredded chicken instead of beef.
• Yukgaejang kalguksu: Add knife-cut noodles to the broth.
• With taro stem: Add torandae for extra earthiness.
• Milder: Cut back the gochugaru and season with soy.

Tips

• Shred the beef along the grain so it blends into the broth.
• Making chili oil separately brings out deep color and aroma.
• Use plenty of scallion, cut large — it's the heart of the dish.
• Soaking out the blood first keeps the broth clean and clear.
• It tastes even richer the next day.
• Gosari has to be processed before it is food, and the recipe assumes you bought it that way. Bracken fern contains ptaquiloside, which is water-soluble and breaks down with heat — which is why dried gosari is boiled and then soaked with changes of water, traditionally in water with wood ash in it. Packaged gosari sold ready-to-cook has been through that; if you start from dried, boil it and soak it overnight rather than treating the soak as a texture step. It puts this dish in the same family as rawon and fufu, where the first job is making the ingredient edible at all.
• The scallion is a vegetable here, not an aromatic. Three whole stalks cut into lengths, simmered fifteen to twenty minutes until they go soft and sweet — that is why they are cut large enough to survive it and why the tip calls them the heart of the dish. In galbitang and seolleongtang the scallion goes in for aroma and is often lifted out; here you eat it, and a bowl of yukgaejang without a great deal of it is a different soup.
• Shredding along the grain is written up elsewhere. Jangjorim explains why a dish built on long strands wants the opposite of the usual slice-across-the-grain rule, and ropa vieja uses the same move to let a sauce reach every strand. Here the point is that the strands hang in the broth and carry the chilli oil rather than sitting in a lump.
• The chilli oil, and why soup soy sauce rather than salt. Pozole notes that both dishes build their chilli separately and pour it in — gochugaru's colour and aroma are fat-soluble, so they need the oil, and 20 seconds of gentle heat is the whole of it. Guk-ganjang then brings salt and a fermented savour that plain salt cannot (building umami), which is why swapping in table salt leaves the bowl tasting thin however much you add. Serve with kkakdugi.