Home Cooked Beef Bulgogi by Arn

Another home cooked dish from your truly. This time I set out to try and cook one of my favorite korean dishes – beef bulgogi! I fell in love with this dish years ago – when I got a taste of it from a korean stall in the canteen of our school. Really good stuff. It wasn’t the traditional korean beef bulgogi that you get from authentic korean restaurants – it was simpler and the main difference was the beef – based on my experiments, I came to the conclusion that the beef used in the version from my high school was sukiyaki beef. Cool huh? Only drawback is that sukiyaki beef is a bit more expensive… but trust me, it absorbs the seasoning better, its faster to marinate and it tastes great.

Are you ready? Here’s how I did it…

Ingredients:

• Sukiyaki Beef – the ones pre-packed at rustans or waltermart will set you back around 120 bucks but that much can serve up to 4
• Sesame oil
• Sesame Seeds
• Soy Sauce
• Brown Sugar
• Garlic
• Salt and Pepper

How:

Try separating the sukiyaki beef a bit and put into a bowl. Add the soy sauce, just enough so that the meat gets covered. Add a tablespoon of sesame oil or even less – it has a powerful flavor. I also decided to heat some sesame seeds on a pan to get the flavor our, set it aside and added it to the mix. Next, half clove of garlic – minced, around 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, and some salt and pepper to taste. Mix it a bit.

Set it aside – cover your bowl or do it like me where I mix everything on a plastic container that comes with a cover so I can shake it up with the sealed cover. You’ll need to leave it alone for about 30 minutes.

While your waiting, you can do one of my favorite side dishes which compliments the bulgogi well — bean sprouts (togue) with sesame oil.

Here’s what you need:

• Bean sprouts – one plastic at the grocery is around Php25 and that is all you need
• Carrots
• Green Bell Pepper
• Sesame oil and seeds
• Garlic
• Salt and pepper

Now here’s how you do to take out the bitter taste of bean sprouts. Heat some water on a pan and just guesstimate that if you add your bean sprouts they can all get soaked in it. Pour in the bean sprouts when it starts boiling and turn down the heat or better yet just turn it off – just let the bean sprouts soak in there for a while. After probably 2-3 minutes, drain it out. Be careful to not let it sit there with the hot water for a long time because we want to retain a bit of that crunch. After draining it, just set to the side.

Next you need to heat a bit of oil in a pan, throw in your minced garlic, carrots and bell pepper cut into strips (just for color), sesame seeds, and then throw in your bean sprout. Mix it all up in high heat because you will want to cook this quickly. Add in a few drops of sesame oil followed by salt and pepper to taste. You’re done! Great side dish to go with your bulgogi.

Time for the bulgogi…

If you’re not big on prep work then like me, you probably spent a few more minutes cutting up the ingredients used for the bean sprout side dish. Good move because at least you didn’t have idle time when the bulgogi was marinating.

Cooking the beef bulgogi is the easiest part, heat a pan and throw it all in there. Can you smell it? Yummy.. it takes less than 5 minutes for this version of the bulgogi to cook because we used sukiyaki beef and as you all know it gets cooked in a blink of the eye.

Buy some rice at ministop! Chow time!

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