Budae Jjigae

 

So I got my second batch of Kimchi made and I loved how it came out. Just perfect for my needs.....not too spicy or overly fermented. The stuff I usually buy is just..OK, but it is quite fermented so it has a bit of a "fizz" to it.

Anyway, now I need to eat the Kimchi. Obviously I enjoy it as-is, but it also can serve as an ingredient in other dishes, one of which is Budae Jjigae, or Korean Army Stew. The link is to the base recipe I followed, and the lead-in graphic is pretty much what I actually used. Cool thing is you don't need to follow either recipe perfectly....

The proteins

I am not even boasting when I say that this dish came out beautifully. I was beyond thrilled how this tasted.....it was better than the last time I had it in Korea at a restaurant. Granted I might be biased, but since I bought the ingredients I was able to tweak things to my personal liking, so it should have been better. Things like choosing all-beef hotdogs and upping the amount of my Kimchi.

Added mushrooms

With my (technically old) job I got to go to Korea for two weeks. The company I worked for was kind of a PITA when it came to travelling because they seemed to not want us to use the company credit card to pay for meals, even though it literally was the reason we were issued one. Their rules were almost draconian and a buddy & I went to this one Korean restaurant for dinner where we had a version of Budae Jjgae. The dinner for two of us was pretty much the price of dinner for one everywhere else, but I was paying for dinner with my company card and we knew the company would loose their shit that I was paying for two....that's just how they rolled.

Kimchi and Sauce

When the receipt came it was completely in Korean! This wasn't actually common on this trip as many receipts were either dual-language or in English. We both got way too much of a laugh thinking about how pissed the ladies processing our travel vouchers were going to be with South Korean Won and Hangul.

Now I would share the recipe here (outside of the recipe card I already did), but since I got it from another site, you should go there instead. Cool thing is on that site you can print out a recipe card and change the serving sizes easily. I would just reiterate that you can be a bit fast & loose on this as you like....it should still be good.

Finished Dish