Friday, June 10, 2011

Galbi at home: Could it get any better?

This is by far one of my favorite meals in Korea, and it's amazingly simple... Fresh grilled meat, peppers, and banchan. It's Korean barbecue and these restaurants are everywhere. In fact, there are two just down the street from us. They generally offer pork and beef, while other places specialize in duck. You can order the meat per 100g generally and it's offered either marinated or not.

However, because of the large amount of meat involved, it's often one of the more expensive meals offered here, so we decided to try it at home, on our own. I was given a grill pan that i just place on the gas stovetop, and we've got plenty of windows, so we figured it would be alright.

We started by buying the meat at our local grocery store, and bought about 250g which came up to about $7.50. However, next time I think we'd buy more like 350g or 400g. Next we just heated up the grill pan and threw the meat, peppers, and sliced garlic on top. Five minutes on each side for these babies and we were done!


I also made some sesame rice balls (middle) to eat with this, and served some ssamjang (the red stuff) as well, which is a garlicky fermented red pepper paste. Deelicious. Also, as is traditional, we ate our galbi in lettuce and sesame leaves. The lettuce leaves give a great crunch and freshness to the meal and the sesame leaves are much softer and very fragrant. They're a great pair to the juicy grilled meat.


It didn't take long for us to devour our dinner....


Which is why i think next time we'll make more. But I was stunned at how easy this is to do at home and definitely something we'll be doing more often! Ah, the simplicity and delicious flavors of Korean cooking....

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