Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where I’m going to keep mainlining peanut butter to give me that sweet sugar rush like my phlebotomist was Jimmy Carter. I’m your Deep-Cut Darling, Jon O’Guin, and today, we’re making some simple dishes with a lot of waiting. If you want to skip the first step of waiting and get to the cooking, you can lap up this link. For everybody else, let’s dig in.

Well Galbi A Monkey’s Uncle

I was momentarily worried I had stumbled into racism with my dumb pun, but it turns out the phrase “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle” is just mocking the theory of evolution, rooted in evangelical anti-science rhetoric! That’s…better…? Oh, and maybe it is connected to racism, since the first records of it are connected to plays and satirical songs about…Native Americans? That is not the group I anticipated being targeted by the phrase.

“Work out with Indian Clubs! Get as strong as a Monkey’s Uncle!”
Thanks, Old-Timey Racism, for being so weird.

THE POINT was to give you a first brush with the pronunciation of today’s main event, galbi, also spelled kalbi, because, and I am not joking with this, even when it starts with a g, it’s SUPPOSED to have a K sound. This is because the “guh” and “kuh” sound are both velar plosive pulmonic consonants. Which is a lot of words that really just map out how the sound works: a pulmonic consonant refers to a consonant you make by breathing air out from your lungs through your mouth/nose. And if you just said “isn’t that how all consonant sounds are made?” I would answer “Why do you think we made the word if that was true?” MOST consonant sounds are made that way, but then you’ve got the various forms of clicks or lip pops in some languages, as well as “implosive” consonants, which involve breathing IN and then “popping” the air in the throat to make a sound that I can best describe as “what your plosive consonants* sound like when you have a broken/stuff nose”, and ejectives, which involve pushing air around in the mouth, but not the lungs. Which, to me, sound like the noises you make when you’re trying to quietly get a cat to stop doing something. Like, those weird hisses and little ‘ch’ noises?

Plosives, since we had to bring them up in our explanation of the other bit, are the consonants where you have to, for a second, stop the air, and let it “pop” out to make the sound. PUH, BUH, DUH, TUH, KUH, GUH. They’re ‘plosive’ because people found it weird to talk about “explosive” sounds.

And the first/final word “velar”, meaning “when you press the top of your tongue on the back of your mouth”. This works best when you go through that list of plosive sounds I just wrote out, since I (oh so cleverly) did them in placement order: P/B are Labial (lip-based) plosives, D/T are Coronal (tip of the tongue to right behind the teeth), and K/G are Velar.  So, in Korean, there’s not as clear a distinction between G and K, a fact evidenced by their NAME being based on the Goryeo Kingdom. A similar linguistic lack of distinction between the approximant coronal and the LATERAL approximant coronal (in English, the R and L sounds) is a common point of issue with Chinese and Japanese speakers learning English.

Think how close we came to a nation called “Goryo” or something like that.

While that might seem weird or silly, it’s an issue in almost all languages. There’s an old joke about how, if you take the end of ‘enough’, the o from ‘women’, and the middle of ‘action’, you get “gh-o-ti”, which, when pronounced, is clearly ‘fish’. So it’s a little ripe for English to try and sit there and laugh at other languages for having weird gaps in their sounds, when we clearly just started using letters however we wanted.

So, what the heck is galbi? Glad you asked, let’s get out of the linguistics, and into the history.

Look Man, I Got Beef

Galbi (And yes, I am dropping the italics, because they have begun to bore me), is a grilled Korean dish, most commonly beef, due to…man, I really want to get into synecdoche, but I didn’t anticipate going so hard on consonants. Alright, very quick: synecdoche (pronounced “si-neck-duh-kee”) is when you use “a part of something to represent the whole, or vice versa”. So like, when people say “the Pentagon released a new report”, we don’t think the physical building did that. We know the phrase means “people, presumably the leaders, in the building”. Or like calling a car “wheels”. It’s an intriguing little paradigm, super useful for artists. It’s important here because galbi in Korean is just “ribs”, but if you make PORK ribs, you typically have to call them “pork ribs” (dwaeji galbi).

And the reason that’s kind of interesting, and why I wanted to make sure you know what synecdoche was, is because, as I noted, it’s important for artists, and it’s very interesting for inspecting cultures. Synecdoche and metaphor can give interesting insights into cultures. Like, I can tell you that Spain has an interesting tradition of standards of masculinity that is a little more boldly asserted than America’s…or I can explain to you the words huevón and esposas, which are respectively, “Ball-dragger” (referring to a lazy idiot), and Handcuffs (or, in non-judicial settings, “wives”. The word for ‘handcuff’ is the exact same word as ‘wife’) Similarly, when and how, say a sports team is themselves, or the City they represent, and vice versa, can be an interesting dance. (Like, it’s a little more common for “Seattle” to win, and “The Mariners” to lose, especially when it’s Seattle/Washington doing the writing: when the team brings glory, it is shared. When they bring shame, they are excluded.)

Full honesty: I am so out of the loop on sports news that I grabbed this picture of how the Mariners’ stadium will be redesigned thinking it was a picture of the stadium as it is right now, but it’s 2 AM, and I don’t have time to fix that.

 So it’s mildly interesting that Korea gives no distinction to BEEF galbi, implying it to be the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ galbi. It plays into the broader trend of beef’s exaltation in Korea, which is a whole thing. Beef is one of those foods that you really need space to get into being cool with eating it, and you really want a certain level of industrialization or a lot of horses around, because without horses, cows are like, the go-to beast of burden, and without a lot of space, farms devoted to making more cows just aren’t going to do super well. And right when those ideas were starting to become a real option, Korea ended up in a series of wars, proxy wars, and occupations, being controlled by China, then Japan, then America and Russia showed up to “free it” from Japan…and then things kind of fell apart resulting in the Korean War. As such, it wasn’t until fairly recently (like, “the 1960’s”) that Beef became something that the average (South) Korean could reasonably dream of eating with anything like regularity. Combined with a lot of cultural weight, beef became the king of meats as Korea modernized, and entered global trade markets. This is why so many of the big Korean dishes known in America are beef-based: as with the immigrants from Europe back from 1880-1900, Korean immigrants found a bounty of beef that allowed them to eat and live like kings. Bulgogi, galbi, and mandu, ox-bone soup and spicy beef stew all went from luxuries to lifelines.

And it’s that interplay between America and Korea that birthed today’s dish.

California IS technically the Flank of America

Today, we’re making L.A. Galbi, which is a variant preparation of the dish that was born in L.A.’s Koreatown: In korea, the traditional way to make Galbi was…basically as a kind of Meat-flag: a roll of thinly sliced beef connected to an exposed bone on one end.

The bone is on the left. The leaves are…present.

That style of preparation didn’t catch on as readily in America, and thus the food shifted, and went for a more common cut on American shelves that we’ve already discussed before, the Flanken-style short rib. In case you don’t want to read that link, or I forget to go back and put it in the post (an irritatingly common occurrence), flanken-cut means that the cut goes through the rib bones, creating a thin sheet of meat studded with 3-5 cross-sections of bone.

The bones are VERY visible in this picture.

Now, This is a complicated recipe, so I want you to pay close attention: first, you marinate the meat. Then, you grill the meat. Do you think you got all that?

Yeah, there’s a reason I was willing to wallow in linguistics for the first half of this. Galbi is super simple, ESPECIALLY when you make it as lazily as I do. Let’s explain what that means. Galbi marinades are one of those “there’s a million minor variations on how to make it” situations, where the backbone is agreed on (soy sauce, sweetener, garlic, onion, rice wine or rice vinegar), but the exact ratios, and what’s being used where change. Is the sweetener honey? White Sugar? Brown sugar? Or do you go big, with the one big fancy ingredient that, if you can get it, is supposed to make a real difference…ASIAN PEAR.

You may note this is a CHILEAN “Asian” Pear, because sometimes words are dumb.

Also called the Apple Pear, Sand Pear, Korean pear, and a bunch of other names, the Asian pear is, as the name suggests, a pear. Specifically, it’s a large pear with a lot of water content, and there’s a bunch of different traditions associated with it. (it’s kind of expensive, so it’s a common gift, but in China, it’s also seen as a like, a subtle way to suggest you want to leave someone. In Korea, they’re bae, as in that’s literally the word for them. And they’re often used in these kind of marinades as a way to add sweetness and acidity to marinade without using sugar, and to use enzymes in the juice to break down and tenderize the meat.

If you can find them, cool, if not, there are recipes that use other fruits as substitutes. Personally (and this may be one of the joys of living in Western Washington) I’ve found that they’re not that hard to find at local supermarkets anymore: they’re the pears in the little foam netting. Different recipes have you prep them different ways (including one which specified ‘washed, peeled, and grated’, which…if I’m peeling it, why do I need to wash it first? The washed part is being removed.) Anywho, I looked at 3 different recipes, and decided to kind of wing it in terms of marinade, so I went with somewhere between ¼ and 1/3 of the pear, washed, peeled and rinsed, because of course I chose to embrace madness.

My recipe was based off of…Food Network’s. Sorry, couldn’t find it for a minute there. The only thing that really makes it at all interesting is that rather than just directly incorporate the brown sugar into the marinade, it has you rub the ribs with brown sugar, and let them sit for 10 minutes as you bring together the rest of the mix, which consists of Soy sauce, water, mirin, onion, Asian pear, minced garlic, sesame oil, and optional green onions. Which I immediately made every more lazy, because I didn’t make the recipe until like, 1:30 AM, so I decided I didn’t feel like mincing garlic or grating an onion, and instead just used dried minced onion and garlic powder.

The gang’s all here.

And once you have your marinade mixed together, it’s time to toss in your brown-sugar dusted ribs (and any excess brown sugar), mix everything around, seal the bag, and pop in the fridge to marinade for at least 4 hours, or, as I did, for 12. Shit, is this too easy? QUICK, let’s make a second dish.

A Side to Savor

SO it’s been 11 hours, and you realize you can’t just have 1-2 cuts of marinated flank steak and call it a meal. You need something to fill you up. And luckily, do I have a side for you. Courtesy of long-time icon of the blog, José Andres, it’s “Really Good Garlic Rice”, which has the advantage of ALSO being stupidly delicious…and a dish whose cooking time I doubled through trouble.

Basic summary, this is a very simple kind of seasoned rice, almost-pilaf. It has…I think 6 ingredients, and 3 of them don’t really count: you need garlic, a bay leaf, rice, olive oil, salt and water. (I don’t count water, salt, and oil as “real” ingredients unless it’s a lot of any of them.) The thing that delayed me was that the official recipe calls for Bomba or Arborio rice, both short-grain European rices. But at some point, apparently we “used” all our Arborio rice (a very vexing discovery, since I bought it to make risotto, no one else cooks rice, and I still haven’t made risotto, meaning there was nothing for it to have been used IN…) So we ended up using sushi rice, since that’s the only short-grain rice we have (THREE BAGS OF).

I’m sure you, a trained rice expert, can immediately see my shame.

Anyway, minced garlic salt and bay leaf go in some hot oil, lightly brown the garlic, then add the rice, toss to coat with the flavored oil, add the water, cover and cook the rice. Bing bang boom. On a good day, 25-30 minutes with prep.

While that’s bubbling away, prep the grill, grab your galbi, and cook on medium-high to high for 2-3 minutes per side, let rest for 5. 10 hours of marinade goes to 10 minutes of cooking/resting. I served them both up with some gochujang and kimchi.

Full disclosure: The reason the rice isn’t very pretty here is because I actually ate about a third of the plate before remembering I need a picture. I turned the galbi around so it was the un-gnawed end, but I couldn’t fix the rice because I didn’t know how much everyone else wanted.

The results are…pretty damn good, honestly. The garlic rice was a really interesting deep garlic flavor (maybe a touch too deep: I think I slightly over-browned the garlic before the rice went in), which honestly made it AMAZING mixed with the kimchi and gochujang. Like, I had 3 helpings of that combination. The meat was also pretty good. It wasn’t mind-blowing, but, like, my mother, unprompted, praised it, which is a high recommendation. AS with so many recipes we do, I think it’ll really benefit from riffing on the formula to find what we really like. Like, I wouldn’t be ashamed to serve these at a barbecue, but I wouldn’t have the confidence to brag about them beforehand. Personally, I think they need a little more heat (maybe a dash of cayenne in the marinade) and maybe a touch more sweetness. But for a first attempt, they may not be ready for Hollywood, but they’re okay for L.A.

THURSDAY: I HAD AN IDEA OVER THE WEEKEND, BUT I LOST IT.

MONDAY: MAYBE TACOS? OR SPAGHETTI. HARD TO KNOW.

Recipes

L.A. Galbi

Makes 4 Galbi (can be scaled)

Ingredients

1.25 pounds flanken-cut beef short ribs (4 cuts)

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 tbsp cup water

1 tbsp mirin

1/4 a small onion, or 3 tbsp dried minced onion

¼ Asian pear, washed, peeled, and grated

1 tbsp minced garlic (or ½ tsp garlic powder)

1 tsp sesame oil

A Pinch Black pepper

Preparation

1. Rub the ribs with brown sugar, and let sit at room temp for 10 minutes as you prep onion and pear, combine all non-beef/brown sugar ingredients in a gallon Ziploc bag. Add the Ribs, toss to coat, press air out of bag, seal and place in the fridge for 4-12 hours.

2. Once marinade, preheat a grill to medium-high or high heat. Remove the ribs from the marinade, and grill for 2-3 minutes per side. Move to a plate, cover, and let rest 5 minutes. Serve with sauce and kimchi.

Very Good Garlic Rice

Makes 4 servings (3/4 cup)

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 bay leaf

Pinch of kosher salt

1 cup short-grain rice, preferably Bomba or Arborio, but do what ya gotta do.

1.5 cup water

Preparation

1. In a small saucepan (4-6 cup capacity) with a lid, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the garlic, bay leaf, and salt, and cook for 2-3 minutes, until garlic is lightly browning. Add the rice, cook another 1-2 minutes, tossing to coat rice. Add water, and bring to a boil.

2. Lower the heat, pop on the lid, and let cook 18 minutes.

3. Remove from the heat, fluff with a fork, and serve.