Cooking Attempt #47: 불고기

불 - fire (bul)
고기 - meat (gogi)

It's beef stirfry! You can order this already cooked, but if the restaurant has those tabletop grills, you can cook it yourself.

I had a huge chunk of frozen sliced beef in the freezer. It must have been over 1kg of meat. I let it thaw completely and patted it with paper towel to soak up the excess blood. I sliced up some zucchini, carrots and onion. The marinade was made with soy sauce, fish sauce, ginger powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper, honey and diced apples. The honey and diced apple are for keeping the meat soft during cooking. I would have used apple juice, if I had some. I mixed everything together and left it to marinate overnight.

That's a lot of meat.

The next day, I heated up a pan with a tiny tiny bit of oil and cooked it in sections. There was just too much to cook all at once.

Now, how to eat bulgogi, or any other type of Korean BBQ you order. You could always eat it with rice, but you'll get sick of it. I should know. At a restaurant, it should always come with some lettuce leaves, maybe raw cloves of garlic and a dish of miso-chili paste. What do you do with those?

Take a piece of lettuce. You should really hold it in your hand, but I couldn't do that and take pictures at the same time. I'm only one person.

You put a decent amount of your food on the lettuce. This is actually a bit much. You'll see why. Think about your mouth size and how much you can fit in there. I could also have had a bit of rice on the lettuce, but didn't have any cooked just then.

Then you have other stuff you can put on top. I personally like a little dollop of miso paste. Other people put the raw garlic or a mixture of green onions soaked in soy sauce. Figure out what you like. There aren't any rules.

Wrap it all up into a tidy ball and shove it into your mouth gracefully. If you've done it right, it should all go at once in your mouth. If it's too big, then things will spill out after your bite it in half. Cover your mouth with the other hand. Believe me when I tell you that you'll look even messier than when you're eating those gigantic rolls of sushi. But that's part of the fun. There are no crazy rules of meal etiquette here. Just keep yourself relatively clean. That's all!