L.A. galbi festival

I should have gone to Costco to get my galbi for cheaper (if for nothing else, Costco is a great place to buy meat and cheese in bulk), but I was impatient, and I'd just received my salary from Dongguk, so I grabbed a large and expensive package of L.A. galbi (thick-cut Korean short ribs) from the local store and brought it home, along with a mess of pre-made banchan (side dishes). I tossed the meat into a marinade (described in a previous post) and left it in the fridge to soak up all the goodness overnight and well into the following day. Around 6PM today, I took the meat out, heated the oven up, cooked a batch of glutinous rice (chap-ssal), laid out my banchan, and broiled my galbi to desired doneness. My one great worry was that I'd lose track of time and let the meat burn to a crisp, but that didn't happen.* Things got a bit steamy, but that was all.

What follows are some pics of the prep and the final meal. I apologize if the pics are smaller than usual; the lighting was poor and my phone's camera had trouble focusing. Suffice it to say that I gorged myself on meat, and have plenty left over for a couple more meals.

Click on the pic below to enlarge it:

I had bought the galbi to celebrate my—our—success at obtaining a crucial document in my quest to acquire an F-4 visa. Normally, I wouldn't spend so much on myself, but this weekend, with a recent triumph and with the Dongguk semester so close to an end, I thought, Why the hell not? Now it's back to the grind.

My only complaint about the end result is that the galbi was a trifle salty, probably because I had let the meat sit for so long in a marinade made powerful by the use of Coca Cola, a potion that is strong in the dark side of the Force, and infamous for its penetrative, muscle-fiber-destroying potency. Soy sauce is naturally salty, so with the Coke's help, it got deep into the meat. To counteract the saltiness, I made a sweet glaze from the drippings of several batches of broiled meat; that improved things greatly. Next time around, I plan to use a lot less soy sauce—or I'll marinate the meat for a much shorter amount of time.

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*My studio has no fire alarm (this is, after all safety-conscious Korea, where we overload ferries and let innocent schoolchildren suffer the consequences), so it was up to me to make sure nothing got out of hand. Nothing did, which is good: I'm pretty sure that there are fire alarms in my building's hallways. And if one alarm sounds, I'm betting they all sound.


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