Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man fights against exhaustion to get you all stuck in. I’m your honestly-not-too-tired-host, Jon O’Guin, and today, we’re taking things nice and easy with another Instant Pot recipe. So get ready to build up a nice head of steam, and then do nothing for like, 20 minutes. If you want to get started and read while you wait, here’s a link to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Time to Hit the Jjim

Sorry if my wordplay is a little under-par today, as noted I am a little beat-up. Nothing too bad, just a late night and early morning because Kado would not stop harassing me, but couldn’t convey to me what the issue was that had her so upset. The answer, it turned out, was “her water dish was empty”, a frustrating revelation since at several points, I directly got up and followed her, in a way that we have used in the past to have her lead me upstairs if someone’s forgotten to feed her, but she never even TRIED the stairs.

In many ways, as a cat, she is much closer to me in temperament than Nate or Stephen.

So I am operating on like…I guess 5 hours of sleep, which isn’t as bad as I thought. Anywho, what are we talking about? Why am I asking you? We’re talking jjimdak, a recipe whose name I lightly hate, because for some reason, I keep thinking it’s “jjimbak”, which is very wrong: “dak” is Korean for Chicken, and “bak” is a musical tool used in traditional Korean music as like, a conductor’s rod meets a Clapperboard. “Jjim” means…technically “steamed”, but it refers to braises too sometimes. So I’m confusing “braised chicken” with “Steamed dumb slate”.

Normal people know “the thing they snap at the start of movie scenes” is called a “clapperboard” or “dumb slate”, right?

I also keep mentally confusing it with “dim mak”, the mostly-mythical Chinese (in name at least) martial art of the “death touch” (more literally, the “heart/artery press”), based around the idea of hitting people in their pressure points to knock them out, cripple, or even kill them. I say “mostly mythical” because there are a variety of biomechanical tricks and situations where you could, conceivably, pull some of the stuff they say off, but it’s mostly either in the realm of party tricks, or insanely difficult to do with any kind of reliability. Like, you CAN hit someone in the chest at the exact right moment to stop their heart…but it’s based on hitting them in a specific timing with their pulse, so you’d have to be perfectly timing a punch while counting their heartbeats in a visible vein or artery. That’s not a trick you can pull off with any regularity, though it does tragically happen in a number of youth sports events: whether a line drive to the chest, a thrown elbow in hockey, or other forceful contact to the chest can trigger the event. (Such a blow, in a mildly weird coincidence to a recent post topic, is the suspected cause of death of Ettore Boiardi’s grandson in a game of lacrosse.)

BUT, if none of those confusions are the truth, then what IS jjimbak?

It’s braised chicken. I told you that already. Specifically, and somewhat interestingly, apparently all jjimbak is technically “Andong jjimbak”, or “Andong steamed-chicken”. Andong is a port city on the eastern side of Korea, that used to be a very important trade center and is now mostly associated with various foods that were developed there, and tourism. So it’s like the New England of Korea, and this their chowder.

Though it looks more like a Manhattan.

And…crap, am I out of stuff to talk about with this already?  Ummm… there’s some interesting discussion on how much of its backstory is a lie? That’s something worth mentioning, right?

So, I mentioned early that technically all jjimbak is “andong jjimbak”. Apparently, there’s not a long/broad history of braising chicken in Korean culinary history. Some places in Andong say it dates back to the Joseon period (which, as far as timings go: not super great: the Joseon period is over 400 years long, and it’s last time there was a “true Korea”: the last Emperor of the Joseon Dynasty renamed the country the “Korean Empire”, and then the whole country was annexed by Japan 8 years later, not to be “Self-governed” until 1945, when the USSR and America freed the North and South halves of Korea, respectively, and if you didn’t know that before now, you probably just realized the root of the modern situation for the peninsula.

Anywho, the important thing is that, while people say it dates back to the Joseon era, there’s relatively little evidence to support that. Like, there’s not 200-year-old braised chicken recipes lying every which way. As such, there’s a belief that the dish is actually around 40-50 years old: that, as western-style fried chicken (and Korean refinements on it) grew popular, a couple restaurants in “Chicken Alley’ (a real part of Andong, where several chicken-based restaurant are found) invented this recipe as a competing market niche: you could get the crunchy fried chicken, or a heartier and homier pot of tender braised chicken and vegetables. Like if someone responded to KFC getting popular by opening a Chicken Noodle Soup chain.

I didn’t actually think there WERE any “chain soup restaurants”, but I am apparently wrong about that.
My dream for my own restaurant, “Sixty Goddamn Soups” grows ever closer to reality.

 Still, the dish has become quite popular, and it is pretty good, so whether it’s 400 years older or 45, let’s find out how to make it.

Under Pressure

So, this is an Instant Pot recipe, which means, as ever, that it is a dump recipe: everything goes in the pot, a meal comes out of it. However, for this one, there is an extra little step: you gotta get the gunk out. What does that mean? Glad you asked, because otherwise, this is a fairly direct process, and there’s only so much content I can make out of mirin.

The first step of this recipe is to blanch your chicken. Which is a pretty common technique in East Asian and Southeast Asian cooking that’s not as common in the West. We still do it, but typically only when making soup stock or broth, or with certain kinds of roasts. In case you haven’t encountered the idea before, “blanching” meat is the process of partially cooking it in order to draw out…gunk, for lack of a better word. Any blood left in the meat or bone marrow, any mineral impurities, myoglobin. You know when you scrape off the gunky foam of a long-simmering dish? Blanching is that step, done as a prequel; rather than skim the foam over the cook time, you cook the meat in an extra pot first, just until whitened/greyed (hence “blanching”), and then you just throw that water, which has absorbed most of the gunk, away.

It’s particularly noticeable with beef, which is one of the reasons it’s very common in pho preparation to just throw all this mess out. .

Why is this so common in some parts of Asia? A common argument is that,  depending on your local market scene in such areas, a blanching step might help with possible food-borne illnesses: due to a relatively slow/late adaptation to refrigeration in broader Chinese homes, many people only buy fresh, “warm” meat, killed that morning or the day before, and never frozen or refrigerated. Thus, a pre-cooking step helps clean off/handle any unsavory elements that may have rubbed off on the meat. That sounds reasonable…but it actually isn’t: Blanching meat like that wouldn’t appreciably “clean” meat more than just, you know, cooking it. It’s like suggesting someone wash their hands before they take a shower in case their hands are dirty. Just…use the shower. The ACTUAL connection between wet markets and blanching is that such markets allow aromatic compounds to develop and spread more easily, so meat in such places can be stronger/more funky smelling. Blanching helps tone that down. It also means the broth will be clearer, which is taken as a more important sign of purity/good cooking in many Asian cultures. It also helps calm down/imbue flavors: with a strongly flavored meat such as liver or salt pork, blanching will make it milder and more appealing to a broader range of palates. With a gentle meat like chicken, you could (though we’re not going to) infuse the blanching liquid with some aromatics, as a kind of “mini-poach” before the full cook.

We use the aromatic of “goop”.

While your chicken is getting blanched, it’s time to build the sauce, which is yet another classic in the “Super Soy Sauce” regime: a mixture of oyster sauce, soy sauce, sugar, and mirin that forms the backbone of a TON of different Chinese and Korean sauces. This one is a little more elaborate than normal, adding in “chicken powder” (powdered chicken bouillon), some minched garlic, corn syrup for added sweetness, and “Some” black pepper, which my family actually went a little extra on.

Ah yes, the O’Guin idea of “a little extra”.

This is because a classic component of the dish in Korea is a backbone of spiciness, formed by tossing in some dried chiles. However, we weren’t sure the SIZE of the dried chiles we were supposed to use, and we suspected that the ones we had were a little small. Hence a little extra pepper to hopefully keep things sharp enough.

We also chopped up some potatoes, some carrot, some onion, and some mushrooms (not strictly traditional, but we had spare shiitake, and my mom likes them in braises or stews.) Veggies, chicken, sauce and some water all go in the instant pot, and let it run for 15 minutes. Take the time to clean up, or do what I do and cram a 12 minute YouTube video in because I have an addiction to content.

Release the steam, and for the final steps, cook some glass (aka cellophane, aka sweet potato starch) noodles in the soup, then drizzle a little sesame oil into the mix, and serve it up.

It will look like soup.

The results were widely accepted as solid. There was one minor complaint, in that the dried chiles, if they nestled next to a bit of meat, did rub off on said meat, making it that portion of it particularly spicy, but otherwise, we quite liked it. It’s not fully authentic, of course, but the recipe we got WAS from a Korean source (the Aaron and Claire channel), so it’s presumably fairly close. If you’ve got a multicooker, and want a nice variation on your typical warming stews, I certainly recommend it.

THURSDAY: I REALLY HOPE TO, ONE DAY SOON, HAVE A DAY TO ACTUALLY PLAN OUT THESE POSTS.  

MONDAY: BISCUITS? A WEIRD SANDWICH? SOME MAGICAL THIRD THING? I DON’T KNOW.

RECIPE

Instant Pot Jjimdak

Serves 2-3

Ingredients

2 ¼ lbs bone-in chicken pieces (breasts, legs, thighs, or one cut-up whole chicken)

                Sauce

3 tablespoons soy sauce

3 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon oyster sauce

2 tablespoons Mirin

1/2 tablespoon chicken powder

1 tablespoon corn syrup

1 tablespoon minced garlic

Freshly ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon of MSG (optional)

 1/2 tablespoon dark soy sauce(optional).

                Braising

½ of a medium yellow Onion, roughly chopped

2 stalks Green Onion, roughly chopped

½ a medium carrot, roughly chopped

½ pound yellow potatoes, chunked

3-5 Dried Chilies

3 ounces potato starch noodles

½ tbsp. sesame oil

Preparation

In a large pot, bring about 2 quarts of water to a boil. Blanch the chicken in the water for about 5 minutes. While chicken is blanching, in a medium bowl, stir together all sauce ingredients. When blanched, dump the water and lightly rinse chicken.

To your instant pot, add the chicken, onions, green onions, carrots, potatoes, 2 cups of water, and the sauce we made. Stir lightly, and toss in dried chiles. Seal pressure cooker, and cook on high pressure for 15 minutes.

Quick release the steam, remove the lid,  and add in noodles. Turn to Sauté mode and cook for 10- 15 minutes. When the noodles are cooked through, add sesame oil and give it a final stir. Transfer it to a serving plate and serve with some rice.