Yukhoe (Seasoned Raw Beef with Pear and Egg Yolk)

Variations

• Yuk-sashimi (muntigi): unseasoned, cut thicker, dipped in sesame oil with salt or in soybean paste. With no dressing to hide behind, the cut and the freshness are exposed far more harshly. Common in Daegu and North Gyeongsang.
• Yukhoe-bibimbap: the Jinju and Jeonju version, over rice with seasoned vegetables. Distinctively it uses no gochujang — sesame oil and soy sauce instead, which puts it in a different family from bibimbap.
• Radish instead of pear: less sweet with a little of radish's harshness left. Soaked in cold water first it works well. Apple is too aromatic and covers the beef.
• With heat: a teaspoon of gochujang in the dressing. Some regions and some restaurants do it; it deepens the colour and pushes the sesame aroma into the background.
• Gaphoe: yukhoe served together with liver and tripe, the old-restaurant presentation. The freshness bar is higher again.
• Steak tartare: the same raw beef pointing the other way. Capers, onion, mustard and Worcestershire build acidity and salt, and there is none of the nutty-sweet axis that sesame oil and pear create here.

Tips

• The cut replaces the cooking. Use lean muscle with almost no fat or sinew — top round or eye of round. Cuts that only become tender with cooking (brisket, shank) keep their sinew raw, and a well-marbled cut is worse: cold, its fat is solid and reads as wax, the melting-point problem covered in serving temperature.
• Say it is for eating raw, and use it the same day. Tell the butcher, keep it cold on the way home, use it within a few hours in the fridge. The standard advice everywhere is that pregnant people, young children and anyone immunocompromised should not eat raw beef.
• Half-freezing decides the knife work. Twenty to thirty minutes in the freezer firms the surface enough to cut thin and even. Lean beef at room temperature slides away from the blade and tears (knife skills).
• Cut against the grain. The point is to shorten the muscle fibres, and since nothing is cooked, this single decision is the texture — the same rule as in cooking meat.
• Never salt in advance. This is the step that most often goes wrong. Salted lean beef starts releasing water within minutes and that water does not go back in (salt and seasoning). It is precisely the phenomenon that golbaengi-muchim uses on purpose to dry its cucumber, run the other way round: there you pull the water out ahead of time, here you hold on to it to the end.
• Sesame oil protects the colour. A film of oil over the surface reduces contact with oxygen, so the myoglobin browns more slowly. That is why dressed yukhoe stays red for a while — the oil is doing more than adding aroma (cooking oils).
• Pear goes underneath, not through it. Mixed in early its juice thins the dressing. Pear also contains protease, so given time it turns the beef soft — which is exactly why bulgogi marinades use it, and exactly what yukhoe does not want (bulgogi).
• Cold, including the plate. Chill the plate in advance and do not let it sit once it is on the table. Yukhoe gone lukewarm pushes the smell of the beef forward (serving temperature).
• Treat the yolk as a sauce on the side. Stirred through, everything turns richer and the colour dulls. Which is better is a matter of taste, so leave it unmixed and let whoever is eating decide.
• Do not use beef that has been frozen and thawed. Thawed lean beef has ruptured cells, weeps, and will not hold as strips. Half-freezing for twenty minutes and freezing through are different things (freezing and thawing).