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(chill music) Welcome back to another episode
of "Anything with Alvin." This time we're gonna be making
the Korean cheese corn dogs that I watch all the time on the internet. Now, these are a little bit different than American corn dogs. Instead of a liquid batter, they kind of use this yeasted
batter that they twirl around, roll in panko and breadcrumbs, and have a little bit of sugar at the end. They're really popular and
I've eaten them a few times, so I thought it'd be fun to
come make it from scratch. So to begin, I'm gonna take some low
moisture mozzarella blocks and just cut them into little sticks, about half of the size of
a normal hot dog or so. Set those aside and work on the potatoes. Now, the street vendors that sell this seem to use kind of like
these little potato cubes that they eventually
roll onto the hot dogs. I'm assuming they're cooked
and a little bit dried, So we're gonna take a couple
of russet potatoes here and just cut them up in very tiny cubes. Once these are all nice and cubed up, they're gonna go into
a pot of boiling water for about five minutes or so, just until they're cooked through. They don't need to be
fall-apart or even tender. They just kind of need to not be raw. While those are cooking,
we're gonna go ahead and make the actual
corn dog batter itself. This one is quite simple actually. It's seven cups of flour, two tablespoons and two
teaspoons of instant yeast, four cups of lukewarm
water, half a cup of sugar, and two teaspoons of kosher salt, all just mixed together into
a bowl until evenly combined, covered with Saran wrap, and left to sort of proof in
the fridge for an hour or so. Now for a little snack break. If you've watched the previous video where we made a giant,
jiggly Castella cake, you might have noticed that we made a flan with the remaining egg yolks that we had left over from that video. This is the big flan that
we had actually made. We weren't able to show you guys what it looked like last
time, but we did promise that we were going to unveil it this time. So here it is, a flan made from
about 36 leftover egg yolks, condensed milk, and evaporated milk. I must say, I think it
does look quite beautiful. We did mess up two other
ones that last time, but we're gonna go ahead, tip it over, and give it a nice slice. Yeah, this one is pretty good,
super rich, super custardy. We're gonna go ahead and
make sure that we enjoy this by packing it home for
everybody in the studio. Now, the batter is still
resting in the fridge and we have a little bit of time, so we're gonna go ahead
and assemble our hot dogs. I'm gonna skewer some of
these with just hot dogs, some of these with just
our cheese from earlier, and some of these with half and half. I think the fun part about those Korean corn
dogs that they sell is that sometimes they're half cheese, sometimes they're half hot dog, and sometimes they're whole hot dog and sometimes they're whole cheese for the cheese lovers out there. Once we've got a little arsenal going, we're gonna go ahead and
go back to our potatoes, which have finished by now. The potatoes are gonna come out and go onto a tray lined with paper towels just to make sure that all
the moisture can be removed. Then we're gonna toss
them in some cornstarch and shake off any of the excess, 'cause we don't want too much
of the cornstarch to be there. That's just gonna make sure that it's gonna stick to
the batter and not fall off. Now here's the fun part. Our batter has spent quite
some time in the fridge, and after giving it a nice unveiling, it looks like we have a
great yeast situation go on, which is not really what you would say about a lot of things, but
in this case, it applies. There's a lot of great
sticky gluten formation, which looks exactly like the way the street vendors make the batter, so I'm pretty excited about this. We're gonna take one of our
sticks that is just a hot dog, sort of dip it into the
batter by slapping it, and twirl it around. Now, this is actually a little
bit tougher than it looks. There's some real pull and
elasticity to the dough, like it really just
wants to pull the hot dog down into itself, and I
can't let it take it from me, so I gotta play tug-of-war. We're gonna roll around and
coat the hot dog entirely in this really elastic batter. Then we're gonna go ahead and
dip this in panko breadcrumbs, making sure to roll it so that it's evenly dipped on all sides. Give it a tap right at the tip. We're gonna go ahead and fry
this at about 350 degrees for about two to three minutes
until everything is brown. The best part about this is the
way that the batter puffs up and gets all smooth. Now, it's kind of lumpy when it goes in, but I think the beauty of
having a yeasted airy batter is that it kind of just turns into this fried bread situation, which I think is really,
really, really cool. Once this is golden brown on all sides, we're gonna take this out, let a drain on some
paper towels and a tray, and repeat this process with another one, slapping in the hot dog to the batter, playing a little bit of
tug-of-war in a spiral pattern. But this time we're gonna go
first into those potato chunks that we had blanched earlier. The goal here is to coat the potato chunks as evenly around this as
possible, using just your hands just to make sure that they're all coated, and then dipping this and
rolling this in panko breadcrumbs to fill in any of those gaps left behind, which I think is a really
cool sealing process. There's a little bit of floating, so I'm just gonna submerge
it into the oil as best I can just to cook it more evenly, frying it until golden brown, and draining it once more
again on some paper towels. Now it kind of smells like French fries, which is pretty cool, 'cause it smells like both corn dogs and French fries at the same time. We're gonna go ahead
and repeat this process with the remaining dogs, alternating between hot dog,
cheese dog, and hot cheese dog, alternating also between panko breadcrumbs or potato and panko. And at the end, once
they're all golden brown and slightly cooled, we're gonna roll some
of these in some sugar. This just seems to be the defining element in a lot of the Korean cheese dogs. they somehow put sugar on it. I'm not exactly sure why,
but in my experience, Korean cuisine that can be really popular uses a lot of sugar,
and I'm not complaining, because honestly, that
stuff's pretty good. How is it gonna taste?
We'll find out pretty soon. Once most or all of our
dogs have been fried up, we're gonna go ahead and
take one of the simpler ones that are just coated in panko. On top for some garnish, we're gonna give this a
little classic squiggle of some ketchup and some mustard. Otherwise, this can't really
be called a corn dog, can it? It's just a fried hot dog on a stick. Let's see how this tastes, shall we? Now, this tastes super fascinating. It kind of tastes like a really super crunchy mozzarella stick, but with a little bit of sugar that honestly, I kind of enjoy. It makes it taste more
fun. It's not weird. It's almost like more of
a fair food situation. Okay, here's another one. Um, so, okay, a lot of
cheese is coming out. We're getting a huge cheese pull here, and after finding the end of it, I realized that we have taken
all the cheese out of the dog and there's nothing left. So we're gonna wrap this
around and eat it as normal. Now, these are pretty delicious. These do compare to the ones
I've been able to eat in Seoul, and I think that we've did a great job at replicating the taste of
these Korean-style hot dogs. But the thing is, we do have
a lot of extra leftover batter and toppings that I really
don't want to go to waste. So it's time to have some fun. Rachel had this great idea of just taking a scoop
of the sticky batter, rolling it in the panko, and frying it, kind of like these fried
donuts, so to speak. So that's exactly what we're gonna do. It's just a nice crunchy donut. Also, taking inspiration
from mozzarella sticks, why don't we take a hunk of that cheese, wrap it in some batter, and
just wrap it in some panko, throw it in directly, no need for a stick, 'cause that way we can get
these nice little crunchy, super crispy mozzarella balls or mozzarella sticks, if you will. This batter is probably the
highlight of this experience. It's so versatile and super, super fun and super, super easy. So we're gonna continue to
see what we have lying around. How about a bar of dark chocolate? If you take one of these
bars, cut a nice square, throw it into the batter
and coat it all around. We're gonna aim to make a
chocolate donut coated in panko. After rolling this in
sugar and cutting it open, I can say that this is probably one of the best things that we made. After our frying bonanza, we
do end up with a lot of food, so we have to make sure
that everybody goes ahead and does their part by taking it home, and we're all gonna have
fun eating this fun food for quite some time. - [Babish] Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode. They've been a great partner in supporting the Babish culinary universe and bringing my websites to life. From websites to online stores,
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