RECIPE: How To Make Dakgalbi

Spicy chicken stir fry dakgalbi hails from South Korea and is a really easy dish to make. We cook it regularly and it’s an excellent weekday dish, because it requires little effort – just chop the ingredients, mix everything together, let them marinate, and then cook. This is a dish that is warm, spicy and surprisingly sweet, and the multitude of ingredients ensure that it will have delicious complex flavours. It is often served inside salad leaves as ssam, which means wrap – whereby the dakgalbi is wrapped in the leaves. However, we often serve it with rice. We can usually cook the dakgalbi in the time it takes to cook the rice. Here’s our dakgalbi recipe.

These days we find it very easy to buy gochujang, the spicy fermented chilli paste that is characteristic of so many Korean dishes. Even our local supermarket stocks it. Gochujaru and rice syrup might be a little more difficult to obtain. We are lucky to have a Korean supermarket in our town but if you can’t find these ingredients you can easily substitute them.

Rice syrup, known as ssal-jocheong, is made from rice and barley malt powder which is cooked up with water to create a thick, gloopy syrup. It has a lovely sweetness which adds another dimension to the dish and complements the spiciness. If you can’t get this ingredient, you can use golden syrup.

Gochujaru is another quintessential Korean ingredient and basically comprises flakes of red chilli which provide the spiciness for this dish. If you can’t find it, you could easily substitute dried chilli flakes or even chilli powder, although chilli powder is much finer in consistency than gochujaru.

Dakgalbi Recipe

Serves 4

Dakgalbi Ingredients

1tbs gochujang paste

1tbs soy sauce

2tsp sesame oil

2 tsp gochujaru (use dried chilli flakes or chilli powder if you can’t get this)

1 tsp curry powder

1 tbs rice syrup (golden syrup if you can’t get it)

2 plump cloves of garlic

1 Carrot

1/3 white cabbage

1 onion

1 sweet potato

500g chicken breast or thigh (you can make this dish vegan by substituting the chicken for another 3 sweet potatoes)

Vegetable oil for cooking

Dakgalbi Recipe Method

Dice all the vegetables into similar-sized chunks – between ½ – 1cm cubed. The idea is to get them to the same size – and quite small.

Cut up the chicken into small pieces. If you are using sweet potato, chop into cubes, a similar size to the other ingredients.

Mix the gochujang, soy sauce, sesame oil, curry powder, rice syrup together in a large bowl. Crush or micrograte the garlic. Add the gochujaru chilli flakes. You can add more if you want your dish to be spicy, less if you want it milder, it’s up to you.

Add the chicken and vegetables to the mix and stir to ensure everything is coated. Leave for at least half an hour to marinate.

Heat up the vegetable oil in a pan. Add the mixture and cook on a high heat to start with, stirring regularly to make sure all the pieces of chicken are getting seared, then turn the heat to medium after about 5 minutes.

Cook for 15-20 minutes or until the chicken and veg are cooked through.

You can serve with rice, which we garnished with sesame seeds and Korean celery leaves, which is a lovely comfort meal. Or, for a lighter option, wrap it in lettuce or perilla leaves to eat as ssam.