Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man is blazing a fierce new path, abandoning the old, and becoming what he was always meant to be. I’m your Quite-Fat Haderach, Jon O’Guin, and yes, I did just see Dune, and had a real good time. I’m trying to ride the high of that good time, because the choice of today’s topic is a bold one. Why? Because I haven’t made it yet. But I plan to by the time you read this, so let’s lay some ground work for more work, and talk about Korean Corn Dogs, which I like saying more than Korean Hot Dogs, so it’s the name I’m using for this dish. If you want to skip me dishing, and get to the dishes, click this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Why Work Harder, When You Can Work Smarter?

So, as a brief aside, I do want to note that I don’t HAVE to make this recipe today, or do the post like this. I HAVE a recipe I made like, 2 weeks ago, ready to plug in. So, why not use it? Well…BRANDING, my dear boy/girl/cosmic other!

With your special eyes. Oh yeah, we’re in DEEP meme territory today, muchachos.

Specifically, this recipe plays a bit better with Halloween, and the one I have saved…KINDA plays with Dia De Los Muertos? It’s a Mexican-American recipe. Whereas this one is basically in a disguise. Speaking of which, I have just realized I have no Halloween costume. Also…the high has worn off, and a migraine has set in. Good night.

Stuffing Sausages

The only reason I’m not as mad at past Jon as I probably should be is that I know he’s not lying: we went from “feeling pretty good, let’s start some work on this post” to “I seek only the sweet oblivion of sleep” in like, 25 minutes. Anywho, that’s the justification: this post fits the theme of Halloween a little better, and the next one fits Dia De Los Muertos a little better.

Is it filled with bones and candy?

Now, what, exactly, are we making? Korean Corn Dogs! Now with no Corn! So, if you missed my Seattle/Seoul Dog post of a couple months back, I briefly touched on this, but to go more in depth: You gotta remember that bread isn’t really a thing in a lot of Asian cuisines. Noodles, buns, fried dough, those are all pretty standard, but the idea of baking dough into bread isn’t common in the region. There’s a bunch of complicated reasons for this, but one critical one is fairly simple: Wood is a more difficult-to-use resource in the area, for instance: in temperate regions, it’s less abundant (some estimates suggest that medieval Europe had over five times the amount of wood per person as medieval China), and in tropical ones, it’s wetter and harder to use. A lack of wood means you don’t tend to make ovens, so you don’t do much baking.

As such, whenever recipes that RELY on bread or bread products go over to Asian cuisines, there tends ot be a fairly interesting ‘translation’ issue. In Okinawa, you can find takoraisu, or “taco rice”, which is…probably even MORE ‘exactly what it sounds like” than you’re thinking: It’s literally just “a bowl of rice with all the fillings of a Tex-Mex Taco as a topping.”

You can’t even see the meat! Damn you Japan, and your frugal and sensible meal compositions!

This is a similar, arguably more extreme version of the same process: As hot dogs were brought to Korea thanks to the US army during the Korean War, another food, or at least the idea of one, was brought with them: see, Corn Dogs were invented sometime around the mid 1920’s, with a machine for making them being sold in magazines in 1926. Several other locales claim to have invented it at a later date, which…isn’t right, but needn’t be WRONG, as it were. One of the early patents notes that the idea of dunking various things in batter and frying them is a pretty straightforward one that can be used for a wide array of options. All it takes is a little bit of “telephone”, and various places are all inventing the same thing at different times: this guy makes hot dogs, mentions you can do the same thing to eggs or fruit to another guy. That guy makes fried fruit sticks in another town, someone sees him, and goes “hey, I could do that to a hot dog”, and “invents” the corn dog.

The point is that, when the fact that there aren’t exactly a lot of hot dog buns in South Korea came up, someone suggested making corn dogs, and thus hasdogeu, or “Hot Dogs” became a Korean thing. (editor’s note: at this point, MONDAY Jon ran up against the hard edge of actually having to MAKE the recipe, so “Legally Tuesday” Jon is taking over.) Now, this is where I want to add something that…may ruffle some feathers. And it’s that I personally think that the evolution and variety of hasgogeu emphasizes a point made by Baek Jung-won in the show we discussed last Thursday or Friday (editor’s note: Saturday, actually, because, as mentioned, Jon has been a dumpster fire.) , I’m so constantly overwhelmed that time means nothing. Specifically, as he was frying the pork belly at the shop he used to go to back in the day, he asserts that he believes that “All Koreans have some of a chef’s DNA”, or something very close to that effect.

This is much less weird than my phrasing. Mine sounds like Korean shredded a chef and each have a drop of his viscera.

And he does so by specifically calling out how different people will add different vegetables to the frying plate: some add the garlic, others the kimchi, while he likes to add the seasoned scallions. And I think there’s something to that idea, or, perhaps more accurately/broadly, there’s something about Korean cuisine that creates a lot of opportunities to customize and play with one’s food. Banchan, as a sort of pre-made, mix-and-match ensemble, which allows the eater to pair foods based on their preference, to eat more of one side than another, all gives a kind of culinary freedom.

Hasdogeu, in that same vein, have…a BUNCH of variations. Like, despite the name being a direct transliteration of “hot dog”…you don’t have to have hot dogs in it. Korean fill them with pork wieners, sure, but they also use fish sausage, or mozzarella cheese, or spicy sausage or rice cakes, or they’ll do half-and-half dogs, mixing cheese and sausage. The outside can be simply panko crusted or studded with chunks of potato, or chopped up French fries, or chunks of sweet potato, or crumbled fried ramen noodles, . You can wrap cheddar cheese around the sausage (or cheese), making a thin cheese layer in between the dough and the filling. You can dye the dough with squid ink, or season it with curry, and literally all of these examples come from TWO menus. That’s it! Hell, I haven’t even STARTED on SAUCES. (And I am not going to, because there’s like, 8 at ONE of the two places, and I’ve already made my own eyes glaze over.

My point is that there’s a lot of foods that Koreans really let themselves “play” with, trying new ideas and styles of doing things, and it’s fun to join in on that. Speaking of, let’s stop talking, and start doing.

Bubble Bubble, Oil and Trouble

I…kind of hate this recipe, because it’s in this weird middle ground of “recipe I think is super easy, and anyone can try”, and “recipe that had some real barriers and issues that I don’t know how to help people overcome.” Like, on the basics: this is a fairly simple recipe. We’re not going for the potato add-ins, or squid ink, or anything like that. The BIGGEST thing we’re doing is half-and-half dogs: hot dogs on bottom, mozzarella on top.

You could also frame it as “right” and “left”, but you know, EVENTUALLY the “bottom” and “top”.

From there, it’s just a matter of “make batter, dip, roll, and fry”. But that’s like saying the secret to hitting the bullseye is “aiming”. It’s true, but the components OF that action are kind of what determines if it succeeds or not. For instance: I used a yeasted dough recipe, stolen from Joshua Weissman because I’ve been watching more of his stuff of late, and because using a yeasted dough helped me fix one of my problems: see, I didn’t actually HAVE those hot dogs or that cheese I just showed you, until after I’d already started the recipe. Yeah, one of the reasons I had to start this post before I cooked it was because this weekend was stuffed for my family, and I was…in a mini-depressive episode, so I kept saying “I just need to go to the store and get 2 things. 20 minute trip.” And then…not doing that. So by starting the dough, I FORCED myself to go to the store and get them, because now I’m wasting dough if I don’t.

I cant’ let THIS success story go to waste.

Now, if you don’t need to hold your meals hostage in order to motivate yourself, you could use a non-yeasted dough, with baking powder. That might help you with some of the problems we faced. Will it? Let’s go through the run down of the issues we faced, since, honestly, up until now, everything was fine.

• Our skewers were too long to fit into our frying pot, so we had to trim them down.

• The glass used to coat the dogs (it’s recommended you pour the batter into a glass, since the long, narrow shape will allow the batter to be applied more easily to the dogs) was only BARELY long enough to hold the dogs and cheese. (Did someone foolishly buy “bun-length” franks, meaning this was a mistake of their own making? The world may never know.)

Turns out, technically, no. Ha-ha, technicality!

• Our batter looked much thicker than the version shown in the video, and struggled to adhere to our skewers (though, on re-watching the video, the dude has clearly dusted his dogs with either flour or cornstarch, which we did for the second half of our batch) This may have been due to the fact that it was a super-humid day, though…I think that would actually work the opposite direction, right? The batter should be too WET. Anywho, this led to a weird paradoxical problem where it was hard to coat the dogs, but at the same time, there was too much coating on each dog. I was making a half-recipe of this, but made a full recipe of the batter, and I think we used like, 2/3rds or more of it.

• Our kitchen is set up in a bad way for frying food. (the cutting board/prep surface is to the right of the sink, with the drying rack on the left side…next to the oven/stove. So anything we coat has to be coated on the right side of the room, and walked (2 steps, but still something) over to the stove to be added ot the oil)

• Our oil got way too hot, as we tried to sort out the other bits, and we didn’t have time to cool it down.

So…using a non-yeasted dough might have solved ONE Of the problems we faced.

Thank you, past me.

So…take notes, I guess: make sure you’ve got normal length hot dogs, check the height of your glass, the width of your pot, and length of your skewer before starting heating of the oil, and then all you’ve got to do is ensure you’re rolling the batter so it doesn’t droop on one side, get it coated in panko and in the oil.

No pics of those steps because my hands were full. Duh.

After an amount of time (supposedly 3-5 minutes, but my oil was over 400 degrees instead of 350, so mine were done in around a minute.), you pull them from the oil, plop them on some paper towels, and dust them with some sugar: the sugar is supposed to add a slight amount of texture, and a contrasting sweetness. We served ours with some super-market Chinese food, because I just told you I was in a depressive episode, of course we didn’t make anything reasonable as a side.

The gyoza were LONG cold, and the chow mein blandly unseared, lacking in wok hei.

The results were…somehow, even more upsetting, because you know what they were? Pretty damn good. Like, these were hideous, bulbous monstrosities: obvious failures in form…but excellent in function. The Yeasted dough, with the shake of sugar on it, makes you think of sugar-dusted donuts, with its light and soft texture and sweetness. But the panko adds just enough texture and crunch that as you hit the tube of molten cheese inside, it just gets processed as the biggest, softest mozzarella stick you’ve ever had. And then at the bottom, the hot dog is…honestly, the hot dog is the weakest part of my version. If it were a little more savory, that’d make a nice contrast with the sweeter shell, but that’s just a “choose your brand carefully” issue. Also not helping things is that I eyeballed the most dangerous measurement in my recreation of Chef Weissman’s Gochujang Aioli, and threw off the flavor on the sauce. (I’m not including the recipe for the sauce, both because I messed it up,  because it’s in the link I put up earlier, and because it makes a fun call back to when I refused to talk about the sauces early. BOOM, LITERARY.)

THURSDAY: JON PROBABLY HAS TO GO TO SPIRIT HALLOWEEN TO FIND A COSTUME, AND TALKS ABOUT…SOMETHING? I DON’T KNOW.

MONDAY: FINALLY, THE RAJAS MAC AND CHEESE COMES OUT, LIKE THE DIA DE LOS MUERTOS PARADE. THAT JOKE IS VERY FUNNY TO ME, AND I DOUBT MANY OTHERS.

Recipe

Korean Corn Dogs

Makes 8 corn dogs

Ingredients

Dogs

8 skewers

4 hot dogs cut in half (width-wise not lengthwise)

8 sticks low-moisture mozzarella cheese (roughly ¾ of an ounce each, or the same rough size and shape of the halved hot dog)

                Batter

1 cup warm 98f water

1 teaspoon instant yeast

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

                Coating

¼ cup flour or cornstarch (optional)
2 cups panko

4+ cups neutral oil for frying

Additional granulated sugar for coating

Preparation

1. Press onto each skewer one half of a hot dog, and then a matching chunk of mozzarella. Place on a plate or tray in the fridge to chill while dough proofs.

2. Combine water and yeast in a measuring cup. Whisk together other batter ingredients, and pour in yeast-water. Mix until homogenous (so not necessarily ‘smooth’, but “all the same level of smoothness”), cover, and let sit for 30-45 minutes for yeast to develop.

3. Preheat the oil in a large pot to 350 degrees. Assemble rolling station by spreading the panko over a plate or baking dish. Assemble a cooling station by placing paper towels on a plate or in a baking sheet under a cooling rack. Pour the batter into a tall, thin glass. Remove the skewers from the fridge.

4. If using, dust skewers with flour or cornstarch to help batter adhere. One at a time, push the skewers into the batter-filled glass, twirling to coat.  Roll in the panko, moving frequently. Add to the preheated oil, and fry 3-5 minutes, or until golden brown.  (don’t fry more than 1 or 2 dogs, depending on the size of your pot.)

5. Once fried, remove from the oil, move to the cooling station, and sprinkle on all sides with granulated sugar. Serve hot.