A Korean Pork Dish That Looks Excellent

Looks really good too. Might have to give that a try.

I really want to cook this one day. I've talked about doing that for years.

This dish was absolutely amazing!


anyone else try it?

You can make fresh kimchi that doesn't need to ferment or you can just buy the jar that is in every grocery store veg section. Not that crazy of an ask

And yes Otis, Bo ssam is fricking fantastic. I could drink the ginger scallion sauce

Well then, I'll have to make this.

Ok here goes.

Got a 7 lb butt. Rubbed it down with the 50/50 sugar/kosher salt mixture and let it sit to cure over night.



Next day, wiped off the excess salt/sugar and placed it in an aluminum baking pan. It is important to wipe off the salt otherwise the outside will be inedibly salty. Now I wasn't a salt nazi about getting every little bit of it but I did do a good wipe.



Went into the oven at 300 degrees. The recipe calls for basting every hour but I found that there wasn't significant amounts of juice until after several hours as the curing drew much of the liquid out of the meat already. The recipe called for an 8-10 lb butt to be cooked at 300 for 6 hours to yield a collapsed hunk of meat. This is way too short of time imo. We gave it 7 hours and the meat was of good consistency - not mushy like how some pulled pork can be yet still fork tender. I imagine a 10 lb butt would require up to 10 hours.



At this point I took the butt out and let it rest for about 45 minutes. You can prepare the sauces now but I prepared mine ahead of time. I had to amend the recipe for the sauces just a little bit.

First the ssam sauce. You'll need to find a good gochujang (korean chili paste) and a fermented soybean chili paste. I could not find the korean version of the fermented soy bean chili paste but the chinese version was just fine.



The David chang recipe calls for a half cup of sherry vinegar, half cup of oil, two table spoons of soybean chili paste and a table spoon of gochujang. I had to substitute red wine vinegar for sherry vinegar and found that the sauce was a bit tangy. I then cut the amount of oil and vinegar in half, and the ssam sauce tasted much more balanced. Really a great sauce. I see myself using it on more dishes than just this one.

Next, the important ginger scallion sauce. I'll tell you right now that the recipe listed in the article has way too strong of a raw ginger flavor for the western palate. My wife and I are asian and it was a bit much even for me. Instead, use the following recipe (a classic tried and true chinese ginger scallion recipe; Credit).

1 bunch of scallion, chopped
1 ounce ginger, minced
1/3 cup of neutral oil (i used grapeseed)
salt and very very little soy sauce if you wish
Heat oil to screaming hot and pour over chopped scallion and minced ginger. This relish is so good that you'll probably use it on many many recipes. The hot oil cooks the ginger enough to release wonderful aromatics and appropriately dulls the raw ginger flavor. The uncooked ginger scallion mixture is shown below.




Last step is putting the 7 table spoons of brown sugar all over the butt and blasting it on high for about 10 minutes or until the fat is bubbling. This bark will be amazing with super sweet and savory flavors.



We served this with red leaf lettuce. You put a small bed of rice on the lettuce, top it with meat and both sauces. Throw a chunk of the bark in there and you have yourself a small bite of heaven. You can add a little kim chee to it also but I found that it didn't need it.




I wish i took better pictures of the final lettuce wrap but this picture below is all I got. I was too busy stuffing my face after that to get any quality photos. With all the sauces and juices it will be a messy meal and who has time to grab a camera with a mouthful of bo ssam.

Very nice!

Is there a keto friendly version?

I'm doing this for my birthday in two weeks. Will report back

damn son, quality post.