Our Favourite No-Fail Korean Spicy Beef Soup (Yukgaejang) 韩式辣牛肉汤 Korean Gochugaru Soup Recipe

Hi and welcome to Spice and Pants. Today we'll be cooking Korean spicy beef soup. So let's start cooking. In collaboration with Horse and Pants Culinary Studio, we are launching an incredible cooking course featuring our loved recipes. Join us in our exclusive local Chinese delight course. Sign up with the link below or scan this QR code. See you there! Before we cook the beef, we need to prepare it first. Try to remove the membrane as much as possible. Using a sharp knife, just slowly cut it off or you can ask your butcher to help you with it. I'm leaving behind a little bit because I like the texture that it gives. I have with me over here 500 grams of beef shin, shank. You can also use brisket or even flank steak. Brisket is normally used for this dish but it's a little bit too fatty so I prefer to use shin. So for this, you will need to cut along the grain itself because later after cooking this we just need to pull them apart. We want that kind of texture. So all you have to do is just cut them in halves like this so that it'll be cooked easier or faster. Just to show you what I meant by along the grain, as you can see the grain is like this. So I just cut it this way. Now for stir-fried beef or you want your beef to be a little bit more tender, you cut across the grain. But for this dish, we need the texture. After you cut the beef, we'll just soak them in water. This will remove the excess blood so that your stock or your soup will be much better. So I'll just continue with all this and I'll show you the next step after this. So I have a basin of water here. Just tap water will be fine and just put all your beef inside. We'll just soak this for approximately 20 minutes to get rid of the blood and after that we'll just make them into the stock that we'll be using for our soup. I'll see you back in a while. Now we'll prepare our soup. Heat up two liters of water. Make sure it's boiling. We'll add in our beef. Make sure you wash and rinse it up a little bit. Put everything in. I'm using medium high heat right now. You can do the same. Add in also one whole onion cut into halves. Eight pieces of dried shiitake mushroom. I've just washed them. I did not soak them. We just put everything in. This will flavor up this soup very well and to add a little bit more flavor to the soup, I'm adding in one whole cube of beef stock. Put it in. Of course if you do not have beef bouillon, you can always use stock. Now we don't reduce the heat. We'll let this come to a boil and as you can see there are some scum on the side. We'll remove them before we simmer it. I'll let this come to a boil and I'll show you the next step after this. Do not cover it up because this will be pretty fast. Once it's boiling, remove all the scum. Remove as much as possible so that your soup will look so much better. Now if you want to blanch the beef separately, you can also but we have already soaked this in water to remove most of the blood so you don't have to do that step. Once you have removed the scum, put the lid back on. Turn the heat to low and we'll simmer this for one hour. If you like the beef to be a little bit more tender, 1 hour 10 minutes, 1 hour 20 minutes will be good. All right, I'll see you back in a while. While we wait for the soup to be ready, let's prepare the spice mix. I have with me over here 3 tablespoons of Korean chili powder, 1 tablespoon of black pepper, 2 teaspoons of salt and about 4 to 5 cloves of garlic minced. Mix them all up first. Once you have mixed them all up, we'll add in 1 tablespoon of soy sauce. For the extra umami, add in 1 tablespoon of fish sauce. Now if you do not have fish sauce, you can just use 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and also add in 2 tablespoons of sesame oil. Mix them all up together. As you mix, you can actually smell that this is really really very fragrant. Now if you like it more spicy, you can add in a little bit of chili but not chili powder. Otherwise, your soup will have this very powdery kind of a taste or feel. Once you have mixed them up well, I'll show you how I mix them with the vegetables. Over here, I have 200 grams of soybean sprouts like this and 2 whole scallions like this. For the stem, I've actually halved them. Add the spice mix into the vegetables. Using your hand, just gently mix them up. The reason why we are mixing this up is also because we want to give a little bit more flavor to the vegetables that we are having here and of course when it heats the soup, it will dissolve much easier. Now traditionally for this dish, you will use fern brick which is a kind of edible roots from a bracken fern but I don't have that so I'm just using this. The flavor from the bracken fern is supposed to be a little bit more earthy so that's also the reason why we add shiitake mushroom in our soup earlier on. Once you have mixed them up well, we'll set them aside and when the beef is ready, we'll remove the beef and we add this in. I'll show you the next step in a while. We've been simmering the beef for an hour or so and now it's time to remove them. Smells really good. Remove everything from the soup. We'll need to tear apart the beef and need to cut the mushroom later but we'll wait for it to cool down a little bit before we do that. Once you have removed everything, we'll add in our vegetables. Put everything in. Don't waste all these spices, just take a little bit of the soup put inside here and just give this a light stir and just pour everything back in. Now we'll turn the heat back to medium high and wait for this to come to a boil. You can put the lid on if you want. I'll see you back in a while. Once the soup is boiling, put the lid back on. We'll turn the heat down to low and we'll simmer this for 15 minutes before we add in our beef. I'll see you back in a while. Now we're going to prepare all these ingredients before we add them back to the soup. For the mushrooms, we are going to slice them. For the beef, just use your hand and just pick them apart. Now normally for the onions, we don't add them back in the soup but we don't want to waste this so you can just roughly cut it up and throw them back in the soup later together with the beef as well as the mushrooms. So let's start by cutting the mushrooms first. For this dish, I'll be using the stem also but the stem is actually a little bit tougher compared to the mushroom itself so if you do not want to use it, you can cut it off also but I'm going to put this back in the soup. So we just slice them thinly like this, continue with the rest and I'll show you the next step after this. Now I'm just going to strip this apart. Just tear them like this into small pieces. It's very tender right now so this is super good. Continue to do everything up and I'll show you the next step after this. 15 minutes is up. Let's have a look. Oh smells really good. Now we add the rest of the ingredients in. This is going to be so so good. Once you've added everything in, we'll simmer this for another 15 minutes before we add in our Korean glass noodles. Put the lid back on and we'll cook this for another 15 minutes. I'll see you back in a while. 15 minutes is up. Let's have a look. Wow look at how pretty this is. Before we add in our glass noodles, let's just give this a stir. Taste it and season it according to taste. Oh very good but I can use a little bit of salt. Maybe one and a half teaspoon of salt. Give it a stir again. Bring the soup back up to a boil before we add in our glass noodles. This looks so good. There's veg, there's beef. Really really fantastic. Once the soup starts to boil, we'll add in our glass noodles. I have with me over here 30 grams of glass noodles before I soak them in water. I've soaked them in water for about 40 minutes until they are soft like this. We'll just add them in. You can use a little bit more or less, no problem. The water must be boiling so whatever heat just now you put on to wait for the soup to be boiling, we'll just add this in. These are Korean glass noodles. Basically they are made from sweet potato. We just need to cook this for another three to five minutes or until they are soft and then it's time for our lunch. Five minutes have passed and look at this beautiful soup that we have over here. This is our lunch. Now the dish is done, let's have a taste. Smells really really good. Let's try the beef. Super tender. You don't even have to bite on it. Just using the tongue, push the beef to the top of your mouth. Then you just rub it and it just disintegrates. This is really good. Let's try the soup. A slight hint of spiciness, peppery, very beefy. This is really really good. So ladies and gentlemen I hope you like our video. Do click like on our video and do subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching and now it's time to go. See you, bye-bye.