My family has always loved having people come to our home. Over the years countless grad students, family friends and colleagues have taken up residence for varying lengths of time. This is particularly true when it comes to many of our international friends, especially around the holidays when they may not have time in their schedule to return home. So when my little sister invited her Korean friend, Sarah, home for Thanksgiving in 2015, it wasn’t anything too surprising. If you had told me then that this trip was going to change my culinary life forever I wouldn’t have believed you. Those few days fostered a love and desire to know all about Korean food. Sarah opened our eyes, and stomachs, to a whole new world of food. And while Kimchi-Jjigae wasn't introduced to us until a few years after meeting her, it quickly became an obsession.
Jjigae is the name for a Korean stew and like the stews we have in Western cuisine, there are many varieties. But today, we are talking about the most delicious, most exquisite, most perfect stew for devouring all year round; the almighty Kimchi-Jjigae. Interestingly enough, we got this recipe by accident, as we were actually hoping for Sarah’s Haejang-guk, or her “Hangover” soup. As we made the jjigae and even plated it, we kept thinking this wasn't the recipe we’d been looking for. Boy were we wrong. What a happy accident this had turned out to be.
Savory, a little sweet, sour, robust, full of flavor, filling but not heavy. This new stew was everything. It was something we never knew we had completely been missing from our lives. And ever since the first time we made it, it has held a prominent role in our weekly meals, no really, sometimes we eat it 3 times a week.
Now every family has their own slight variation on kimchi-jjigae, but the core ingredients are almost always the same; Onions, some sort of mushroom, tofu, scallions and of course Kimchi. Our friend Sarah’s recipe, which is the one we use, specifies using King Oyster Mushrooms, Pork Butt, Goguma (Korean Sweet Potatoes, or here in the states sometimes referred to as purple sweet potatoes), Ddeok (Korean rice cakes) and garlic...lots and lots of garlic. But the thing that makes her recipe perhaps the most amazing thing you’ve ever tasted, is the type of Kimchi she uses.
Before we started making Korean food, we thought kimchi was just fermented cabbage, and that all kimchi was equal. Let me tell you... we were wrong. There are so many unique kinds of Kimchi; radish kimchi, fresh kimchi, white kimchi, cucumber kimchi, the list goes on. Each of these is not only very different in flavor from one another, but from house to house kimchi can taste vastly different. Sarah’s family is from the south of Korea, so when they make kimchi they add all sorts of seafood to it before fermentation. All of this is to say that the type of kimchi you use for different recipes matters. The kind that our Sarah always used to make jjigae was a very special kind of kimchi; Mukeunji Kimchi.
Mukeunji Kimchi (or Old Fermented Kimchi) is aged at least 6 months so the flavor is quite strong. It is bold and very sour, and it adds an incredible amount of flavor to your jjigae. There are, however, two downsides to using this kimchi. The first is that it is more expensive than fresh kimchi and the second is that we can’t purchase it anywhere near us. When we run out of it, we have to drive down to Boston to pick up some more at the H-Mart in Cambridge. But it is, and I can not stress this enough, totally worth the time and money. You can absolutely use fresh kimchi for this and it will still be very good, but there will be a certain depth of flavor that you miss that can only come from Mukeunji Kimchi.
Beyond just for flavor, Kimchi has amazing health benefits. Not only has it been said to be good for your heart, help improve your memory, and reduce inflammation, along with other things, but it also helps boost your immune system. This last one is something we can personally attest to. On multiple occasions, when we have gone some length of time without eating not just Jjigae, but kimchi in general, both my sister and I have either felt under the weather or straight up gotten sick.
Now, on to the cooking.The first step to making the jjigae is to marinate the kimchi. After that, the meat is sautéed in sesame oil. Next add the kimchi along with its marinade. You want to sautée the kimchi until it starts to become translucent before you add your onions, garlic and mushrooms. Then simmer it low and slow in the water that you have reserved from washing your rice, uncovered, stirring every so often. Side note: ALWAYS WASH YOUR RICE. Seriously. It’s important. (I’ll have to dedicate a post to washing and cooking rice at a later date because there’s a lot to it, but back to the matter at hand). Do not let it boil, if it boils it will burn, and if it burns you will have scorched and bitter jjigae.
After about thirty minutes, drain and add your diced potatoes, being sure to submerge them into the liquid. The last thing you add is the ddeok. It needs some time to cook and get soft. Depending on the style and size ddeok you use will determine when you add it, as different rice cakes take varying lengths of time to cook. The marinated kimchi will help your ingredients develop a spicy-sweet, rich flavor enhanced by the sourness of the kimchi. The final stage in cooking is to turn your enoki mushrooms into a raft for the tofu to rest on, cover and let simmer for another 10 minutes. Serve the jjigae topped with some of the tofu, and enoki mushrooms then garnish scallions. Eaten alongside rice, this is one stew that is sure to satisfy your soul.
Perhaps our most favorite thing about this dish is the ease in which if freezes. Since the entire recipe makes 6 servings, we are able to get three meals (for just the two of us) out of it. We simply freeze portions of two in freezer bags, and then put them in the fridge the night before we want to eat them. Kimchi jjigae has become a staple part of our diet being made at least once every week or so, and it never gets old.
Lagniappe of the Day: This is a dish were you will absolutely want to have mise'd all of the ingredients prior to the start of cooking. When you go to prep your potato, be sure to put your potato cubes into cold water to keep them from oxidizing and turning brown.
#kimchi #kimchi-jjigae #wusthof #korean #koreanfood