In my house growing up, Korean-barbecue clothes were a set of raggedy T-shirts and sweatpants reserved for nights when we were grilling at home — and by grilling at home, I mean indoors.
My family would grill meat right at our round, lacquered dining table. In the center sat a portable butane stove, topped with a three-foot domed wheel of steel, a heavy black pan made by a metalworker friend of my mother’s. A spaceship-looking thing, it sat perfectly over the butane stove, sizzling with galbi, soy-marinated short ribs; samgyeopsal, gloriously fatty pork belly; and chadolbaegi, razor-thin slices of brisket that curled up as soon as they hit the heat. These fiery meals were precise but casual, remarkable but easy to throw together.
You can’t imagine the mess they made. After one of these dinners, our basketball jerseys and band T-shirts would go straight into the wash. As for the flying-saucer pan, we got many meals out of it until I stole it, driving it up to New York and never bringing it back. (It’s too heavy to move twice.)
If you don’t have a metalworker friend who can fashion you a special Korean-barbecue pan, then a regular outdoor grill and full steaks, marinated in advance and sliced after grilling, work just fine. It’s a technique I learned from Peter Cho, the chef and owner of Jeju in Portland, Ore.
Even as a good Korean American who was raised on his mother’s Sprite-marinated, flanken-cut short ribs, I found that the grilled whole steaks at Jeju took me right back to those dinners. It also reminded me of a liberating truth: Korean barbecue can be whatever you want it to be. To me, the meal is less about going out than it is about centering a quiet evening at home on a perfectly modest portion of grilled meat, less about what you don’t have than what you do.
To me, Korean barbecue is less about what you don’t have than what you do.
At Jeju, Cho serves his Korean barbecue set with thin rounds of tteok, or rice cake, gently sweet, chewy landing pads for the slivers of juicy beef. The specific cut of steak doesn’t matter to him as much as what is available, he says. So pick what looks appealing at the market and what works for your budget. As Korean-barbecue restaurants like Cho’s show you, they’re all good cuts. It’s the marination and slicing that bring out their best qualities. And when it comes to marination, Cho’s is pitch-perfect: salty, sweet and savory in just the right ways. Taking the extra step to strain the marinade results in cleaner flavors, and less burning.
It’s worth remembering, too, that Korea is a peninsula, without much land to raise cattle, making beef quite expensive. Most Koreans in my life have told me that Korean barbecue is only 50 percent barbecue — “that little slice of meat goes a long way,” Cho says — and 50 percent snappy vegetables, crunchy lettuces, tongue-enticing sauces, salads and stews as support. It’s a lesson in tightrope-walking, in balancing salt, fat, acid and starch. The ssamjang is less a sauce than it is a condiment, a tangle of doenjang and gochujang, their fermented saltiness knocked back with whatever finely chopped seasonal vegetables you have on hand: fresh mild peppers and alliums in the summer, to keep it light, and steamed soybeans in the winter, for depth. Cho loves adding Jimmy Nardello peppers, or what he calls “Jimmy Nards.” Serve with your favorite Korean BBQ staples: pa muchim (scallion salad) and gyeran jjim (steamed eggs), for instance, and at the end of the meal, a burbling pot of doenjang jjigae (soybean paste stew) with fresh white rice, as is customary. You can call it Korean barbecue if you want, but for me it’s just dinner.
