Yukpo (Soy-Seasoned Dried Beef)

Name: Yukpo (Soy-Seasoned Dried Beef)
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 4 h 40 min
Total time: 5 h 20 min
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: Korean
Ingredients: 600 g beef round (top round or eye of round); 4 tbsp soy sauce; 1.5 tbsp sugar; 1.5 tbsp honey; 1 tbsp rice wine (cheongju); 1 tsp ginger juice; 0.5 tsp black pepper; 2 tbsp pine nuts

Korea's traditional dried beef: lean round sliced thin along the grain, seasoned with soy sauce, sugar and honey, and dried. It is served at weddings and on the ancestral-rite table. Slicing thin, trimming away every trace of fat and drying fast at the start are the whole method — the rules for drying fruit and for keeping biscuits, all applied to one strip of meat.

Ingredients

6servings

Beef
beef round (top round or eye of round) · as lean a piece as you can buy600 g
Seasoning
soy sauce4 tbsp
sugar1.5 tbsp
honey1.5 tbsp
rice wine (cheongju)1 tbsp
ginger juice1 tsp
black pepper0.5 tsp
To serve
pine nuts · finely chopped, scattered just before eating2 tbsp

Steps

Cut away every trace of fat and white membrane with the tip of the knife. Any fat left goes rancid once the meat is dry and changes the taste of the whole batch.
Wrap and freeze 30-40 minutes so the outside firms up.
⏲ 35 min
Slice along the grain into wide sheets 4-5mm thick. If the thickness varies, the thin parts dry first and the thick parts stay wet.
Mix the seasoning and work it into each slice. Refrigerate 2 hours.
⏲ 120 min
Lay the slices on an oven rack without overlapping. First bake them at 160°C for 10 minutes — the step that follows the US Department of Agriculture's advice to heat meat to 71°C before drying it.
⏲ 10 min
Turn the oven down to 70°C and wedge the door open a fist-width. Dry for 4-5 hours, turning every hour. Halfway, lay the slices on a board and beat them flat with a rolling pin.
It is done when a slice bends without snapping and tears along the grain. Cool and keep sealed in the fridge. Scatter with pine nuts when you serve it.

Tips & Variations

Variations

Pyeonpo: the beef minced, seasoned and shaped into a flat cake before drying. Minced and pressed back together, it has no grain, so it is cut rather than torn.
Pyebaek yukpo: the version set out for the bride's formal greeting at a wedding is trimmed into neat pieces and studded with pine nuts. It also goes on the ancestral-rite table.
Without honey: soy and sugar alone make it less sticky, and it keeps a little longer.
The Nigerian relative: suya calls kilishi "Suya's jerky sibling, and it keeps for weeks." Its paste is peanut rather than soy, but the frame — sliced thin, then dried — is the same.
In a dehydrator: no need to prop the oven open. Do the first heating step in the oven separately.

Tips

Gotgam explains why the slices are thin. Dry something whole and, as gotgam puts it, "Once the outside dries first, that skin traps the moisture inside." Tklapi purées its fruit for that reason — "spread it as a thin puree and there is no inside to trap it, so it dries in days." Meat cannot be puréed, so the knife does it: 4-5mm is thin enough that there is no inside to trap.
Biscotti explain why the fat goes. Biscotti: "Fat goes rancid over months, so a biscuit meant to keep cannot have any." In anything meant to keep, fat is the part that spoils with time. That is why the cut is the round, and why there is no sesame oil in the seasoning. The nutty note comes from the pine nuts, scattered just before eating.
The start is the risk. Gotgam says "The first three days are the whole risk." For yukpo those days are hours. The oven door is propped so the water coming off the meat leaves the oven instead of hanging in it.
Slice with the grain. Cooking meat says to cut against the grain and states the limit of the rule itself: "The rule is about meat you still have to bite through, not about meat whose grain has already been undone." Yukpo is torn rather than bitten through, and cut along the grain it tears cleanly into strips once dry instead of crumbling.
Soy is the salt. What marinades do: "soy sauce is doing the salt's job." The seasoning concentrates as the meat loses weight, so it should taste a little light when it goes on.
Half-freeze it to slice it evenly. Exactly as yukhoe says: "You want it firm at the surface, half-frozen — not frozen through."