One of the most interesting and fun tabletop dishes I’ve been exposed to is dak galbi, with dak meaning chicken and galbi meaning rib, but it’s not chicken ribs, it’s more of a spicy chicken stir fry. For years, we could not find a restaurant in the greater Boston area or in all our travels that served this dish. So, we learned to make it on our own, with a little help from Maangchi and our own creativity and recollections.
This dish has a lot of moving pieces: there’s a marinated chicken, a sauce, a plethora of veggies, rice cakes, and the thing that makes dak galbi so distinct and enjoyable is the perilla leaves. While perilla leaves are a bit hard to find outside of Asian grocers, it’s definitely worth the drive to find them, but basil leaves (particularly Thai) will do the trick.
The key to proper cooking is to slice the vegetables thin, and in a diagonal. That maximizes surface area, and gives the dish more texture.
To get the full Korean experience, we cook this dish in a very large cast iron skillet on a NuWave induction burner, on the dining table. As it’s a multi-layered dish, we gather the ingredients, assemble it bit-by-bit, put the lid on, and let it cook down into a scrumptious feast. The end of the meal is definitely the best part: once most of the stir fry has been eaten, the pan gets deglazed with rice and eggs, to make the perfect crispy finish.
That’s not to say that the dish can’t be cooked on a stovetop. Of course it can! The stir-fry also reheats pretty well, if there’s extras.
You can buy the ingredients you need for the dish, including the NuWave Induction burner, in the Waygook Kitchen.
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Combine the chicken and marinade ingredients, refrigerate.
- Make the sauce by combining the garlic, ginger, soy sauce/tamari, water, gochugaru, rice syrup or sugar, and black pepper in a bowl. Mix well.
- In a cast iron skillet, begin assembling the dish. Start by spreading the cabbage, then onion, then mushrooms, then peppers, then carrots, then sweet potato, then rice cakes.
- Completely cover the surface of the veggies with perilla leaves.
- Add the chicken to the center, and pour the sauce on top. Add ½ c water.
- Place the skillet on the tabletop burner or stove, cover, and cook on medium high heat until the dish starts boiling, about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium, and stir with a wooden spoon.
- Cover and continue to cook, stirring frequently, about 15 minutes, until the chicken and sweet potatoes are cooked through.
- Reduce the heat to low, continue to stir, and enjoy straight from the skillet.
- Once most of the dish is gone, turn the heat back to medium, and deglaze the pan with the rice, egg, and kimchi. Mix well to get the rice crunchy and flavorful. Enjoy the last treat!
