Korean Cooking: Mi Yuk Gook

I've been experimenting with Korean cooking and I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. Of course, as soon as I think I've got one in the win column, I try to re-create the dish and it ends up flat. Case in point: mi yuk gook.

I tried two different techniques for the mi yuk gook. For the most part they were similar in taste, however recipe 2 took longer to cook but resulted in softer meat. I think you can remedy this in recipe 1 by cooking the soup longer.

Recipe 1 (courtesy of korean-cuisine.blogspot.com):

Ingredients:

* 2.5 cups dried miyuk (seaweed)
* 1 TB sesame oil
* 3 TB gook ganjang
* 1/2 TB minced garlic
* 1/3 cup beef (drained of blood)
* 6 cups of water

1 - Take 2.5 cups of mi yuk and break it into smaller pieces before adding the water.
2 - Then add some water and let it sit out for about 20 minutes. It will GROW.
3 - In a pot add 3 TB gook ganjang, 1/2 TB minced garlic, and 2 TB sesame oil.
4 - Add the 1/3 cup of drained meat and saute until it's cooked.
5 - Add the miyuk and stir it around for 5-10 minutes.
6 - Add the 6 cups of water, bring to a boil, and reduce the heat to medium-low and let simmer for up to an hour. You can adjust the flavor with more gook ganjang.
7 - Sprinkle salt, pepper to taste.

Recipe 2 (courtesty of maangchi.com)

Ingredients:

* 4 cups of soaked miyuk (1 cup of dried seaplant)
* 16 cups of water
* 4-5 tbs of gook ganjang
* 200 grams of beef brisket
* 1 tbs of minced garlic
* sesame oil

1 - Soak 1 cup of dried miyuk in a big bowl for at least 30 minutes.
2 - Drain the water from the sea plant and cut it into bite size
3 - Place the soaked sea plant(about 4 cups) in a big pot and add 16 cups of water and boil it over high heat for 20 minutes.(later you may have to add more water if the soup is too thick)
4 - Cut the beef brisket into bite size pieces.
5 - When the water starts boiling (about 20 minutes later), add the beef and 1 tbs of garlic. Boil it again for another 20 or 25 minutes over medium heat.
6 - Add 4 or 5 tbs of ganjang(add more or less depending on your taste) and drizzle a few drops of sesame oil before serving.

With recipe 2, I ended up needing more ganjang than the recipe called for. I thought if I cooked it longer the flavor would come out on it own without having to add any additional ganjang but I cooked and cooked and still needed to add more ganjang. However, all that cooking made the meat super tender - so good!

Conclusion: Recipe 1 was easier to make - mostly because I didn't need to cook it as long. Recipe 1 it is!

Update: So I had some meat and mi yuk left over so I tried to do an abridged version of Recipe 1. The meat had already been cooked in a pan (there was too much meat for the original pot) so I skipped ahead and just sauteed the mi yuk. However, when I started pouring the water, the soup stayed a dark brown color - which meant too much soy sauce even though I only put half the soy sauce in. I tried cooking the soup longer, hoping the meat would naturally enhance the flavor but no such luck. I ended up adding more soy sauce to give it a little more flavor but it was never as good as the original pot. Moral of the story: there are no shortcuts to good mi yuk gook. Also, the dried mi yuk packets are way too big for any one pot.