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 kalbi. 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 seem 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 flanken 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'd be Los Angeles-style Kalbi, 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 flanken 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 "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 half an hour. Frankly, I really doubt that's
gonna 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 kinda 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 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 this side of the bone makes a better hinge. Then, I'm gonna
do this the really easy way, which is just do one more cut to make the remaining meat
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 will often do like three or four cuts to a get a much thinner ribbon of meat. I've
tried that. I don't do it for three reasons. 1) It's really hard and I'm not very good
with a knife, I don't know about you; 2) 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 too long, why not just cut in half, Adam?" Well, 3) 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've 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 gotta make sure 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.
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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 gonna 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 Bosc 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 could chop this all up fine, maybe grate it, but I'm gonna use the food processor.
Everything in. Then, for this much stuff, I would guess maybe half a cup of soy sauce,
like 100-150 ml. 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 gonna skip the mirin 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 we 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 for flavoring 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 gonna 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
gonna be fine. The recipes for this marinade differ so much. I'm just synthesizing various
ideas that I've read. Alright, here's two of our water-soaked flanken 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 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 could
even wash it off in 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 burned 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 Insta post.
Meat 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 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'll also probably dissolve some
connective tissue, like when you braise short ribs.
There's that blood that we supposedly drew out of the bones by soaking. It's 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 will 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's 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 gotta turn your heat way down, and even then I can
see some sugar starting to burn in the bottom of that pan, and gah, get it off!
I'll let it cool for a sec, and 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 this 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 gonna 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 in a bowl of water, lifted it out so the settled
sand stayed at the bottom of the bowl, and then dried with my salad spinner. I love these
things. You could totally be lazy and buy a bag of pre-washed, pre-cut greens instead.
And once I've given them some nice dry heat on them, I'm gonna 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 gonna balance
the bitterness of the greens.
Little bit of rice 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, used 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 that chard next do it. And you can put one of the rib cuts on whole, or you could
slice them up. It's really common to cut or snip the flanken 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, 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. If you cut those at steep
angle they look especially pretty.
You could be nice and eat that with a knife and fork, but come on, these flanken 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 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.