Korean-style short ribs — pan seared/braised method

korean style short ribs or kalbi it's simply one of the great classic beef dishes of the world and if you want a super authentic recipe go try someone who can pronounce colby this recipe is how i was able to get as close as possible to the korean-american restaurant style dish that i know and love in my home kitchen with stuff from my grocery store and here's the two forms in which short ribs are generally sold in mainstream u.s grocery stores these are english cut one long bone with a big block of meat hanging to one side sometimes i'll see them sold twice as long like those two connected that would not work for korean short ribs but these english cut ones absolutely will the other form in which i commonly can get these is known as flankin cut instead of one long rib bone by itself it's a chain of short rib bones all connected with meat if i drove up to atlanta and went to a korean market i could get something that was like this but about half as thick that would be los angeles style colby really the more traditional thing among korean americans but i have to make do with this and i'll show you a way to adapt to their thickness look at all that delicious fat marbled through both of these cuts don't trim too much of it off that fat is a lot of what people like about short ribs one thing though the sheer amount of cut bone surface on a flank and short rib makes it really likely you'll encounter some bone dust or shards on there that's never bothered me but a lot of people wash these to get rid of that they also wash these to quote unquote draw out the blood and yes there is blood in here not the meat juice that people always mistake for blood but actual red blood cells inside those bones and you will see it come out during cooking most korean recipes i've seen call for washing the bone dust off in a bowl of water and then letting these soak in there for at least a half hour frankly i really doubt that's going to do much to address the blood situation but hey let's try it now to prep these english cut ribs we'll have to butterfly them it's kind of tricky but here's the easiest way that i've found the bone will usually be a little off center look for the side where the bone is closer to the edge lay it down with that side on top and then cut down right along the bone as close as you can to it then stop right before you go all the way through lay it out that extra meat on the side of the bone makes a better hinge then i'm going to do this the really easy way which is just to do one more cut to make the remaining meet half its original thickness stop before you get to the edge then just open it up like a book for me that's it two cuts three flaps people often do like three or four cuts to get a much thinner ribbon of meat i've tried that i don't do it for three reasons one it's really hard and i'm not very good with a knife i don't know about you number two more cuts for more thinner flaps would get you a ribbon of meat so long that it won't fit in a domestic skillet it'd be great for the grill or for the oven but not for the pan well if it'd be too long why not just cut it in half adam well number three if you accept a thicker than traditional cut of meat you can cook twice as many portions at one time it's really hard to make enough very thin korean short ribs to feed the whole family if you're doing it inside in a pan going thick just gets you more food quicker and quick cooked short ribs are surprisingly tender even at this thickness though i might cover this with some plastic and use my meat mallet just to pound out the thicker spots the hinges between the flaps no idea if that's traditional but i found it to be effective and way easier than delicate knife work me smash lastly people often score these to create more surface area for the marinade to penetrate very shallow cuts and with something this thin you got to make sure that you do them perpendicular on the opposite side otherwise your two scoring cuts from each side might line up in the center and you'd slice the thing right in half scoring is really supported by science marinades only penetrate a few millimeters so the more surface area the better i've got a whole video about marination in the description and if you like videos and science might i briefly suggest the sponsor of this video stream want to learn how humans first created the delicious cow we're about to enjoy subscribe to curiositystream to watch this excellent five-part documentary on the history of food and yes i did say we created that cow by selecting from the wild varieties keeping them together in one place breeding from them producing ever bigger specimens for more food more nutritional value and whether you're interested in food history science or technology curiosity stream is a streaming service with thousands of non-fiction titles to feed anyone's hunger for lifelong learning plenty of stuff for grown-ups and kids and unlike other streaming services this one is crazy inexpensive just 2.99 a month even less if you sign up for a whole year 20 dollars for a whole year you can watch on your tv computer phone same way you watch any other streaming service get your first month for free by following my link in the description use my promo code rogucia that's all down in the description thank you curiositystream now here's my marinade for these korean style short ribs a few garlic cloves i'll just smash them to get the skins off a big thumb of ginger just roughly shave the peel off any form of onion would be fine but i'm going to garnish the finished dish with sliced green onion tops so i might as well use the white parts in my marinade and you could skip this but i think it's quite nice peel and core a pear an asian pear would be great but i'm making do with this bosque pear which is a french cultivar asian pears have more of an apple texture and some people use apple in this too you could use all kinds of fruits you can chop this up fine maybe grate it but i'm going to use the food processor everything in then for this much stuff i would guess maybe half a cup of soy sauce like 100 to 150 mls you can eyeball this whole recipe because in a minute we'll be able to taste and adjust now sugar i've got some demerara sugar you could use honey you could use brown sugar you could use white sugar maybe put in a dab of molasses with it because that's all brown sugar is i would guess like two tablespoons or something though some people like this dish way sweeter apparently some people put 7up or sierra mist soda in here a splash of rice wine vinegar and then i've seen a lot of recipes call for the precursor of that vinegar rice wine mirin you could do that but for my taste none of the traditional recipes i read are acidic enough so i'm going to skip the mirror and just go straight rice vinegar even more in there i'll grind in some pepper and obviously all the salt we need is in the soy sauce time to blitz that up and then you can give it a taste i think you're looking for it to taste good but way too strong in every respect it's just the flavoring for the meat it's not going in the dish i think it needs a little more sugar but be careful the sweeter it is the more likely the meat is to burn sugar burns i'm going to put in a little water mostly just to help this flow around the meat and coat it some recipes call for a lot more water but they usually have less pear the pear is mostly water then the final flavoring toasted sesame oil a few drops go a long way i think as long as you have soy sauce sugar and maybe a little vinegar in here you're going to be fine the recipes for this marinade differ so much i'm just synthesizing various ideas that i've read all right here's two of our water-soaked flank and short ribs and i'll put in two of the butterflied english cut ones just so you can see how both of those would come out that's probably around three pounds of meat and bone one and a half kilos enough for like four people and honestly that's probably enough marinade for twice that especially if you watered it down some more some people water it down just because they plan to leave it in the fridge for a couple of days and they don't want the meat to get too salty or too mushy from the acid i'm just doing this overnight cover it up and in the fridge the next day i'll take them out and pretty thoroughly wipe off the marinade you can even wash it off with water the flavor is locked into the outer layer of meat see my marination video for that science any remaining marinade actually on the surface is just likely to burn and indeed some people apparently like the bits of burnt sugar you can get on these if you grill them really hot which is how i first tried doing it this is my instagram i like a little char on meat but burned sugar is not a flavor that i'm into so here's a different traditional method suggested to me by a korean viewer on that instapost meet in your widest pan no oil and then pour in some water enough to come like halfway up put the heat on high and just let it boil out this is the exact same process often used for cooking bacon or duck breast super fatty meats fat melts at a much lower temperature than the heat at which meat browns and sugar burns water can heat no higher than its boiling point so by starting these in water we're giving a lot of the fat a chance to render and go deliciously melty this will also probably dissolve some connective tissue like you do when you braise short ribs there's that blood that we supposedly drew out of the bones by soaking not a problem it'll get cooked i'll just flip these one or two times as the water boils down korean short ribs are generally served at least medium and often cooked all the way through so don't worry about overcooking these they're filled with fat which is going to keep them moist on the inside i've watched korean cooks do this semi-wet method with much thinner la style short ribs but i think the method is even better suited to these much thicker cuts it gives them time to really cook and soften a bit before we have to start worrying about the sugar burning speaking of which as soon as most of the water has boiled out things will start to brown and then burn extremely fast you got to turn your heat way down and even then i can see some sugar starting to burn on the bottom of the pan and get it off let that cool for a sec and then over like medium low heat i can just gently fry these in their own rendered fat i'm flipping constantly just to make sure nothing's burning and the juices and residual marinade are concentrating to form a glaze that is coating the meat i absolutely love this hybrid method it's half braising half searing all deliciousness out these come and i have no idea if any koreans do what i'm about to do but i was trying to think of a way to make use of all that fond and the leftover marinade and also get some vegetables into this dish so in addition to those chopped shallots i'm going to throw in a huge pile of dark leafy greens as much as you can fit in because it'll wilt down a ton this is rainbow chard which is super pretty i just trimmed off the really stringy part of the stems hacked it into chunks washed it in a bowl of water lifted it out of there so the settled sand stayed at the bottom of the bowl and then dried it in my salad spinner i love these things you can totally be lazy and buy a bag of pre-washed pre-cut greens instead and once i've gotten some nice dry heat on them i'm going to put in some of my leftover marinade not all of it unless you're doing a huge pot of greens stir that constantly and you see how much that wilts down the sugar in that marinade is really going to balance the bitterness of the greens a little bit of rice that i got started before doing the meat that's jasmine but use whatever and cook it however you want i washed off the outer starch coat use displacement to measure 1.5 parts of water to one part rice i usually mix in like half a teaspoon of salt per cup of dry rice bring to a boil then cover and take the heat all the way down to warm just let it sit there until i'm ready to eat some of the chard next to it and you can put on one of these rib cuts whole or you could slice them up it's really common to cut or snip the flanking ones in between each bone i like that makes it a finger food these butterflied ones i might just slice thin like a steak in fact you can eat short rib as a medium rare steak more on that another day you can see with these korean style ones though were just barely a little pink in there it was hard for me to not cook beef medium rare but korean folks on my instagram were right this dish really is better more thoroughly cooked on go some ribs followed by a common garnish toasted sesame seeds you can buy them pre-toasted but the flavor is more intense if you toast them yourself dry pan moderate heat just swish them around until they start to turn brown and smell nutty not necessary but very nice as are sliced green onion tops you can cut those at a steep angle they look especially pretty you could be nice and eat this with a knife and fork but come on these flanking ones are dying to be finger food and that's really the only way you can gnaw all the meat off around the bone total umami meat candy explosion that is thanks again to all the korean folk on instagram who helped me work this recipe out i apologize if you're bothered by any of my customizations speaking of which if you're wondering what i did with the other half of the meat that we prepped check it out same exact dish but with caribbean flavors instead of asian ones i'll put that recipe out as a bonus sometime soon

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Views: 515,908

Rating: 4.942039 out of 5

Keywords: korean food, korean bbq, korean cooking, beef short ribs, short ribs, korean recipes, korean short ribs, korean barbecue, korean kalbi, korean short ribs recipe, korean beef ribs, short ribs recipe, korean food recipes, korean beef short ribs, korean kalbi recipe, la galbi, galbi

Id: qsf8RlQW8Hw

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/poopyheadthrowaway]

Korean-American here throwing in his two cents:

• I'm glad Adam didn't add any gochujang (Korean red pepper sauce) or gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes). It seems like every online recipe for kalbi or bulgogi uses them, and the rule of thumb in Korean cooking is beef marinades and red peppers don't mix (although gochujang is still fair game when making lettuce wraps with bulgogi). I'm not going to say you shouldn't use red peppers in this recipe--you do you (or as Chef John would say, you're the queen bee of your kalbi), I'd just like to point out that it's not the usual method.
• Koreans traditionally braise their short ribs rather than fry or grill them. Grilled short rib is really a recent-ish trend that came with the sudden popularity of Korean barbecue (which IMO isn't really barbecue but whatever). The braised short ribs use a lot of the same ingredients and have similar flavors as the barbecued ones, so if that's more your style, I'd suggest giving it a try.
• Adam's method reminded me a bit of what a lot of Korean moms do when pan-frying meat. They'll add splashes of water to the pan as the meat cooks to control the heat/prevent browning. The two main reasons for this are that Korean meat marinades often contain a lot of sugar which likes to burn rather than brown, and it's common for Koreans to be wary of browned meat because they think it causes cancer (something Adam touched on in his last video, in a different context). If you go to a Korean barbecue joint and you see a family, you'll probably see the parents feeding their kids bits of meat with browned bits cut off.

[u/ToBeFrozen]

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つPOUTINE VIDEO WHEN༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

[u/mylox]

Huh, I don't think I've ever seen the 'LA galbi' cut in a non Korean grocery store before, even if it is thicker than normal. I might have to check the meat section again next time at the local store.

Also, I'd be pretty conservative with the black pepper if you want something more Korean tasting. Koreans don't use it too much and when they do, I'm pretty sure its usually the pre ground stuff which has a milder flavor.

Speaking of black pepper, I've always considered the defining flavor of 'Western' cooking, in the same way that soy sauce/garlic/scallions is enough to make anything taste vaguely 'Asian' for Western palates. I've seen people call it a very neutral flavor, which has always boggled my mind. To me, it has a very distinct flavor that I can always pick it out when its used to season a dish. My immigrant parents in particular are very sensitive to it and I always have to cut the amount of pepper in half when I cook Western dishes for them.

[u/Chowdahhh]

Is there a particular reason to use bone-in short ribs for this instead of boneless ones?