This stuff started to show up maybe 4 years ago. The owner (Blue Stone in Santa Clara, now closed, replaced by http://www.yelp.com/biz/chois-kitchen-santa-clara) told me it is a new thing and first showed up in LA.
There is no sauce marinated but you dip it into some seasame oil mix. Slices of pork belly is also available for grill. It is simple and very tasty and I went there like once a week until I found that you can just buy the meat and grilling plate from Korean supermarket and grill it at home. It is as tasty.
Hi Jan
What do you mean by “grilling plate”? Is it the stove-top metal thing with ridges?
Over the last couple of days I’ve taught myself Hangeul so now I can decode these signs, and I can see that it says “Chung Sol Bat” all over the front of this restaurant. I asked and they DO serve chadolbaegi here. When I went last weekend I didn’t know to ask for it. I think it’s possible that I will like their kalbi even more. At any rate:
Yes, it is.
I went to a Korean BBQ place in Campbell (I think) about 4 years ago. Do you know if it is still there? I don’t remember the name. It was amazing how much copper was in that place in the vent hoods.
While not known as a seafood place, Soot Bull Jeep on 8th in K-Town (L.A.) has great eel. They’re one of the natural charcoal places, so expect to smell like smoke when you leave.
Palace BBQ http://www.yelp.com/biz/palace-bbq-buffet-sunnyvale has a lot of copper vent hoods. It is in Sunnyvale. I don’t know any BBQ place in Campbell.
On most menus they put “beef brisket” for Chadolbaegi. I think i’ve seen it on almost every korean bbq menu around here. It’s easily my favorite thing to eat!
Some places use fatty pieces so you end up with way more fat than meat and it tastes kinda nasty, but if you find the right place it’s quite heavenly. To be honest I don’t even eat the marinated meat stuff, i just eat brisket/pork belly/Beef Tongue nowadays at the BBQ’s
I’m not Korean, but am a Chinese guy who loves some of that beef blood, beef tripe, random meat parts in a savory meat broth soup: hae jang gook. The other Korean standards like “korean tofu” are good too.
I forgot to mention, the plate has a “drain snout” to allow oil from meat fat to drip. It is not the regular stove-top metal.
Strangley, this kind of stuff (soondae , Korean blood sausage) is not seen too often. Here is one in bay area http://www.yelp.com/biz/jangtu-restaurant-sunnyvale
I had the hae jang gook at Sui Tofu in Santa Clara. I can’t tell if it’s a good/great rendition of it though.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/sui-tofu-yang-pyeong-sin-nae-seoul-hae-jang-guk-santa-clara" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Chinese New Year comes on Valentine’s Day this year, Feb 14 is Day One.
I have been thinking of making my own Duk Gook, Tteok Guk, whatever, Korean New Year soup.
새해 복을 가득 담아요~ 떡만둣국
Anybody make this at home? Here is a similar recipe
Has anyone had the “Crack pie” from Momofuku?
http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-crackpie11-2010feb11,0,3426496,print.story
Crack Pie: It’s love at first bite
She thought she didn’t even like sweets. But one spoonful of this rich, silky delight, and she was smitten.
By Rene Lynch
February 11, 2010
As a woman, I know I’m supposed to swoon at the sight of chocolate and lower my voice when I rhapsodize about chocolate truffles, souffles and bouchons, as if I were talking about an illicit love affair.
So the first time my then-boyfriend, now-husband brought me a box of exquisite chocolates for St. Valentine’s Day, I squealed with delight like I knew I should – and then promptly stowed the box in the back of the fridge. He found them a few months later – the cold and the cocoa butter had already rendered them dusty, and it was clear that I hadn’t eaten a single one.
He looked at me, he looked down at the box he held in his hand, he looked back at me – a look of utter shock on his face. I was caught. I had no choice but to confess:
I don’t like chocolate.
I’m actually not much for sugar at all. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have yet to turn down a dessert that is offered to me. But when it comes to cravings, I tend toward the salty and crunchy. Say, a plate piled high with twice-fried French fries. Or salty potato chips. Or salty pretzels. Or salty . . . well, you get the idea.
But then I met Crack Pie.
Sold at Momofuku Bakery & Milk Bar in Manhattan, this pie has taken New York City by storm, partly because of the audacious name, party because of the jaw-dropping price tag – $44 a pie, yes, $44 a pie – and partly because anyone who has tried it, including myself, CNN bigwig Anderson Cooper and the people who are buying the 60 to 90 Crack Pies sold each day or two, can’t stop raving about it.
Still not convinced? Out-of-town demand is so high that the bakery just started shipping the pie by FedEx. They’ve even sought trademark protection for the name.
Crack Pie is a twist on Chess Pie – an old-school dessert found in the “Joy of Cooking,” popular because it can be made with common pantry ingredients such as butter, eggs, sugar and vanilla.
But Milk Bar pastry chef Christina Tosi’s reimagining makes Crack Pie an original. Instead of just a humdrum pie shell that serves as a container for the filling, Tosi dreamed up a shell that begins with a homemade oat cookie blended with a bit more butter, sugar and a healthy dash of salt.
The result is a crust that is divinely rustic and unrefined – don’t bother trying to get a perfect edge as you press it into the pie plate. It just won’t happen.
Under Tosi’s reconsidering, the interior of this pie takes a glug of heavy cream, a bit of milk powder to help give the mixture body and egg yolks instead of whole eggs.
It’s baked at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, and then 325 degrees for about 10 minutes, just until the top is golden brown. The interior will jiggle when you remove it from the oven.
You will fear that the pie is undercooked.
But you must have faith.
It’s not an understatement to say that this pie defies description. But I’ll try. It’s ooey-gooey. Buttery and rich. Silky. Pillowy. I’ll wager that it’s not like any pie you’ve ever had before because that salty-sweet-crunchy-oaty crust is as much a part of the pie as the filling itself. In a weird way, it remind me of kettle corn, with that one-two, salty-sweet hit that keeps you coming back for more. And more. And more.
Now, Tosi says Crack Pie must be served cold. And this is where she and I disagree. Take it out of the oven and let it cool just a bit – otherwise, it’s like pouring molten lava on your tongue, and I tell you this from personal experience – but you want it to be warm when served.
Tosi and I agree, however, on how it should be eaten.
With a spoon.
While it’s still in the pie plate.
With your favorite someone.
It’s clear that I’m in love. I’m prepared to forsake all others. In my mind, I might as well be on a Crack Pie diet – reaching this level of dessert nirvana means I can happily pass up all other desserts forevermore. (This must be what other women mean when they say they will do anything for chocolate.)
As for my husband, he’s given up trying to guess what I want for Valentine’s Day. We’re at that “Here’s the credit card, just tell me what I bought you” stage. But that doesn’t mean romance is dead. I know exactly what I am buying for this holiday of love, and with whom I’m going to eat it.
And if you ask me for details, I’ll look around to make sure no one else is listening in, drop my voice to a throaty whisper – and tell you all about it.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
I just got in some Flannery skirts in his Korean marinade.
Do they count?
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Veronica – sounds like they use real “crack”…
Mark – I think Flannery can do no wrong, sounds like you are in for some good eating.
Wow, Frank! You are practically Korean! How did your soup turn out? Post pics!
To see my wife’s take, check out our new joint post on my blog, at http://bit.ly/st098" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts and suggestions!
Hi Alan
Instead of making the soup we ordered it at Chung Sol Bat. I thought it came out rather bland, it seems that Friday night is a slow night and I would bet that they didn’t have “the good chef” in back that night. Any soup can be made to taste good, if you taste it and adjust the seasonings. We also had a seafood pancake that was a bit rubbery and gummy, and jap chae that turned out kind of uninteresting. The BBQ was stellar as were the wines that Mark Ricca brought along.
At any rate ordering it took away my incentive to make my own. I did tell my class “happy new year” in Korean and several of the students said how surprised they were to hear that from a professor. Without going down the roster to check I would estimate that maybe 20% of my class is Korean. A much larger percentage is Indian, along with a healthy number of Chinese.
At any rate I have a good Korean cookbook – “Eating Korean” by Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, and lots of good ingredients nearby at the H-mart, so I will be experimenting in the future. I will surely check out the blog.
Hi Frank,
Nonetheless, I am impressed. Making it myself would never enter into my mind! What were the wines you paired with the food?
By the way, did you live in Korea or something? Or why is your knowledge of the food, ability to write in hangul, etc. so extensive? You’re making me look bad, dude. I can’t learn that darn Korean alphabet to save my life.
I got an iPhone app titled “Hangul” and had it down in about 24 hours.
For practice there is another iPhone app from Accela-Study called “Free Essentials” of Korean.
Because I use a Mac it is easy to type in any system from Arabic to Cyrillic to Hiragana.
It took me forever to learn the 90 Kana but Hangul is quite easy in comparison, more of an alphabet and less of a syllabary.
The hard part is arranging the letters in little square patterns…
I’ve never been to Korea, but I am surrounded by Koreans here in NJ, so it was a little bit in the spirit of “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em.” Not that I wanted to “beat 'em.” I did want to be able to know what the signs say along Route 1 and Route 27 in Edison…
For the wines, read here:
Korean BBQ with Mark -- 05 Kendric PN, 95 Summus, 05 Marsannay - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Thanks Frank! Perhaps this will help me do better than my previous admittedly lackluster efforts to learn it 