Dakgalbi 닭갈비 – means grilled chicken, literately.

I posted a photo of Dakgalbi dinner from Korea a while ago, and Jenny mentioned that this was her favorite dish in Korea. We briefly talked about making it when I’m traveling to Vietnam. Few month later, here I am staying in Hanoi, Vietnam. We decided to make Dakgalbi for the Saturday dinner. I’ve never properly made it before, and neither did her. But since we both like cooking and eating, I was sure that we’ll love it no matter what.

Ingredients:

Gochujang 고추장 (red pepper sauce)

Gochugaru 고추가루 (red pepper powder)

Vegetables: garlic, onion, green pepper, carrot, cabbage, and any vegetable you like. I added some baby corns.

Soysauce

Sesame oil

Cooking wine

Sugar (or any kind of syrup)

Noodles or rice

Chicken (with or without bones)

#Only critical ingredient is Gochujang, since that has unique flavour that you can only taste in Korean food. The others can alternate vary.

Basically, make the sauce and marinate the chicken in the sauce for few hours before cook it on the pan. If the chicken is already ready, start making the sauce and put the chicken in.

Prepare Sauce

Mix everything that goes into the sauce all together.

Gochujang 6 Ts (depend on the spicy level preference), gochugaru 2 Ts, soy sauce 2 Ts, cooking wine 1 Ts, sugar 2 ts, half of onion – blended, and one bulb of diced garlic.

Add 1 or 2 Ts of sesame oil at the end.

#This is a standard recipe but you can make it different depending on how you like it. More/ less sugar, more/ less Gochujang and so on.

Prepare Chicken

We preferred no bones in the chicken. It’s just easy to eat. The chicken thigh we bought needed to de-boned. Jenny was in charge of that and she did a wonderful job! Since it was going to marinate for few hours, we left the big chunk of chicken instead of cutting them small pieces. We used two big thighs and two big chicken breath for three people. It was equivalent of one whole chicken.

Now, mix the sauce and the chicken together in a big bowl, and put it in the refrigerator for few more hours.

Cooking

Cook the well-marinated chicken with all vegetables on the frying pan. If you are using carrot and potato, put them the first with chicken since they took a long time to cook. While cooking the chicken, don’t forget to cook some rice and noodles to eat with dakgalbi. Nothing is a proper meal without a bowl of rice.

Cut the chicken into small pieces and for the final touch, mix the boiled noodles with the sauce. Make sure to minimize the fire.

 
 

Eat!

It was spicier than I expected, but it tasted pretty authentic to me. All three of us are fans of eating and also Korean food, we liked it so much. I was so full I could barely move after dinner. I should say it was pretty successful. In Korea, they used to cook the rice at the end of the meal; using dakgalbi sauce and cook it on the pan. But since we were so full, we had to skip that.

Thanks to Jenny for sharing fun cooking experience, and Stephen for taking pictures of us cooking!

Read Jenny’s blog post about our Dakgalbi on her blog Culinary Wanderlust for more detail on how to prepare and cook. She’s really good at writing recipe down!