op2:
Sure. My wife makes the marinade and it's little different every time as she often adds other ingredients depending on mood. But she uses this as the base marinade. This recipe makes big batch and should be good for more than 10 lbs of meat. What we do is make big batch of marinade and freeze what we don't use so we can have some in stock when mood strikes.One of the most educational posts I’ve come across here! Many thanks. Can you share your galbi marinade recipe?
The perilla...do you buy the leaves or grow it? Wondering what the plant looks like? We have whats called perilla mint on the farm, not sure if it's the same thing. Not good for cows if they eat it, causes respiratory distress and possibly death if they consume enough. We got dry hear the other week, and a farmer in neighboring county lost at least 7 cows from eating perilla. Ive tried looking it up to see if its the same thing before but couldnt really tell.
Awesome thread. I love Kalbi. Dad was stationed in Korea a couple of times and he introduced me to it and Bulgogi. I'm a picky eater, mostly just meat, so when I go to Korean restaurants, I pass on all the side dishes and just eat meat and rice. When I ran up a bill of $70+ eating Kalbi and Bulgogi one Tuesday at a local Korean restaurant, I decided that I needed to learn how to make both at home.
Thanks for posting the marinade recipe. The one I came up with is similar, but you listed some ingredients that I'll have to try.
I'm not a big Bulgogi person. I eat it but I don't love it. The marinade for Bulgogi and Galbi are very similar with bulgogi usually little sweeter. Bulgogi used to be grilled but now most people just cook it in a pan on the stove. I rather eat galbi. And the galbi I prefer is not the marinated kind I made here but plain version with no marinade. But marinated galbi is great too, just not as good as plain IMO. But in order for the plain version to work, you have to grill at table side and eat it right off the grill while it's hot. If you grill outside in big batch and bring it inside to eat, the plain galbi won't be as good since the meat will have cooled and dried out. The marinated ones don't suffer from this problem so it's better for outside grilling.
Most marinade recipe for galbi will have green onions. We tend to leave it out as I find the green onions tend to burn on the grill. We tried blending the green onions in a mixer but it has that slimy sticky feel when blended that I don't like. If I add green onions to the marinade, I just cut in large pieces and take it out of the marinade before I grill.
I kind of cheat and use the same marinade for Kalbi and Bulgogi. Basically, the difference to me is only in the cut of meat. Sacrilege? Perhaps, but I don't know enough about it to know the difference.
I like to do bulgogi over coals on my Weber (added crossed grate) when possible, but I often do it in a pan right at the table. My setup looks similar to this one
I sit down at the dinner table with the butane stove and that "Korean BBQ pan", a huge mixing bowl with 3 or 4 lbs of marinated meat in it, my Zoji rice cooker, some tongs and whatever accompaniments others might want, like seaweed squares, leaf lettuce, gochujang, cabbage kimchi, or whatever else.
After that, it's a free for all of sorts. Anyone can grab pieces of raw meat from the bowl and put it on the pan to cook. Each piece is kind of cooked to order. When a piece of meat is ready, grab it off the pan, add whatever you want and eat. While chewing, throw more meat in the pan.
This works for both Kalbi and Bulgogi. Bulgogi is what we usually do simply out of cheapness as top round or eye of round is often $3 per lb. Ribs around here are $6 to $8 per lb. Factoring in the amount of bone, top/eye of round is much more cost effective. It's the same when we go out to a Korean restaurant. We'll load up on 4 or 5 orders of bulgogi with 1 or 2 orders of Kalbi
Yeah, it's cheating. Definitely "Americanized" or "cheaped out" so to speak, but it works for me.