A Beginner’s Guide to Korean Barbecue
Korean barbecue, or gogi-gui, is a soju and pork belly-fuelled delight that has recently started to take off in the UK. If a new K-BBQ spot has opened near you but you don’t know your ssamjang from your samgyeopsal, then this is the guide for you.
A Beginner’s Guide to Korean Barbecue
Korean barbecue, or gogi-gui, is a soju and pork belly-fuelled delight that has recently started to take off in the UK. If a new K-BBQ spot has opened near you but you don’t know your ssamjang from your samgyeopsal, then this is the guide for you.
One of the many joys of Korean barbecue, or gogi-gui, is that it always feels like a celebration. It’s hard not to be in a good mood when you’re several sojus deep and surrounded by the smoky smell of meat cooking on the grill. The meal centres around a tabletop grill, where you can cook slivers of pork and beef yourself, or with the assistance of your server. Like almost all Korean meals, it’s accompanied by copious amounts of banchan (small servings of light, vegetable-forward side dishes), rice and heaps of soju, the country’s favourite drink.
However, while gogi-gui isn’t exactly intimidating – there’s certainly no stiff formality or pomp and circumstance – it does feature a rather dizzying array of choices. What do you cook first? Should you have rice with the meal or at the end? What are all those lettuce leaves for? If you’ve never had it before it can all feel slightly overwhelming. So, we’ve put together a quick guide to help break things down.
The meat of the matter
While sides may be an essential component of Korean barbecue, no one can deny that the centre of attention will pretty much always be some form of meat. You can get vegetarian options for the grill – king oyster mushrooms, hunks of chopped onion and fried kimchi – but for the most part, it’s an unapologetically carnivorous affair.
You can think of the options of meat at Korean barbecue as forming something of a quadrant: beef or pork, marinated or un-marinated. In Korea, the most popular choice is unmarinated pork belly, also known as samgyeopsal. In contrast, outside of Korea, marinated beef bulgogi is probably the most popular choice. UK menus also sometimes include delicious but anglicised options – like halloumi, king prawns or chicken thigh – that are targeted at British consumers’ palettes.
Cuts of meat at Korean barbecue are often referred to in a mixture of Korean and English like ‘LA gabli, sirloin, chadolbaegi’. Korean butchers’ cuts don’t map neatly onto non-Korean ones, and their translations aren’t standardised. As a result, the English translations of Korean cuts of meat can vary from restaurant to restaurant. Deungshim is sometimes translated as rib-eye and sometimes as sirloin. Chadolbaegi (which is thinly sliced for grilling) is usually translated simply as brisket, but yangjimeori (which is in big chunks for braising) is also called brisket.
If you’re looking for something in particular, the Korean terms will generally be more consistent than the translated terms, but if the menu just has English you can always ask your server for some more information and recommendations. In Korea, you can find pretty much any quick-cooking cut of meat available on a barbecue, including collagen-rich pork skin, five-layer pork belly and different sorts of intestines. However, in the UK the options are usually a bit more limited. These are some of the Korean cuts and terms you are most likely to see on Korean barbecue menus in the UK.
Korean barbecue glossary
To make things easy for you when you're next looking at a menu, below we've summarised what some of the most common Korean BBQ terms translate as:
Galbi = short ribs
LA galbi = ‘lateral axis’ short ribs. These are short ribs that are cut horizontally through the bone, so they are mostly meat with a border of bone along one edge
Galmaegisal = Korean skirt meat (literally ‘seagull meat’)
Deungshim = sirloin
Chadolbaegi = thinly sliced brisket
Samgyeopsal = pork belly
Anshim = tenderloin
Moksal = pork neck
Yangnyeom = seasoned, so yangnyeom-galbi means seasoned galbi
Bulgogi = thin strips of marinated meat
Get cooking
Once the grill is hot, and your meat has arrived, it’s finally time to start cooking. All cuts on a Korean barbecue will be designed to cook through fairly quickly, but not at exactly the same rate. Deungsim and LA galbi are normally cut into pieces maybe half a centimetre thick, whereas chadolbaegi is cut so thin it is practically transparent. Samgyeopsal can be either cut into thicker, chunkier slabs or sliced very thinly. Once the thicker cuts of meat are almost cooked through, they are cut with scissors and tongs into small bite-size pieces, and then allowed to finish cooking all the way through.
Feel free to order a mixture of whatever appeals to you most, but it’s best not to order too much marinated meat. The sweet marinades can burn onto the grill, tarnishing the flavour of whatever you cook next. Start with un-marinated meat, and then finish with some marinated cuts. If your grill plate does end up being a bit of a sticky mess though, don’t worry – just ask your server for a new one.
You can also order some raw vegetables to cook on the grill, like onions and mushrooms. These are generally used as accompaniments to the meat, rather than as mains, and so portions are fairly small. Kimchi is also delicious cooked on the grill in the pork or beef fat left behind from the meat.
Two modern – and bright yellow – additions to Korean barbecue are corn cheese and egg cooked in a moat around the barbecue. The moat of egg generally goes in a metal ring around the barbecue, and can be scooped out once cooked. Corn cheese is pretty much what it sounds like – corn and cheese. However, the corn is often mixed with butter and mayonnaise, to make it slightly looser and richer. Usually this arrives on a dolsot (hot stone plate) but sometimes it’s cooked in a moat around the barbecue, like the egg.
Ssam, soups and sides
Once you’ve cooked your meat, the next task is eating it. You can absolutely just pick the meat off the grill and eat it plain, but one of the joys of Korean barbecue is making ssam.
Ssam, or wraps, are made by folding a bit of meat into a leaf of lettuce or kkaennip (perilla) and eating it, traditionally all in one bite. For most ssam, you would start with a little bit of rice, then some meat. This can be topped with some sort of slightly spicy raw vegetable – like thinly sliced raw garlic, gochu (Korean green pepper), raw onion, maybe some pajeori (spring onion salad) or kimchi. Finally, the wrap is finished with a dollop of ssamjang. Ssamjang is made from gochujang, doenjang (a miso-like soybean paste) and other seasonings.
As well as making ssam, you can also dip your meat into a simple dipping sauce made of sesame oil, salt and black pepper, which is also popular at Korean barbecues.
Banchan are often translated as ‘side dishes’, but they’re really a key part of any Korean meal. These tend to be made with refreshing, light ingredients like radish, cucumber and beansprouts, and are great to nibble on while the meat is cooking, or to add to your ssam.
Soups or stews are also often ordered as part of Korean barbecue. Like banchan, they’re an important part of a traditional Korean meal. Doenjjang jjigae (soybean paste stew) and sundubu jjigae (soft tofu stew) are favourites.
While Korean barbecue has existed in some form for centuries, this current incarnation is fairly new. Two of the most iconic elements – pork belly and gas-powered table top grills – only became established forty years ago. The popularity of samgyeopsal, or pork belly, mostly started in the 1980s, as beef became increasingly unaffordable. The documentary Pork Belly Rhapsody recounts how as recently as the 1970s, barbecue in Korea was all about lightweight grills with hinges for holding the meat over coals. New marinades, new techniques and new equipment are constantly moving in and out of fashion. Both inside and outside of Korea, barbecue is ever evolving and constantly delicious.
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