Pork Gukbap Made by Adding Sliced Boiled Pork to Slow-Simmered Bone Broth, and Suyuk from Pork Belly
Pork Gukbap Made by Adding Sliced Boiled Pork to Slow-Simmered Bone Broth, and Suyuk from Pork Belly
Gukbap takes many forms.
At the broadest level, you have the clear, gomtang-style soups; the milky-white broths built on bones simmered for ages; and the red, seasoned varieties—yukgaejang, or that Gyeongsang-style spicy beef-and-radish soup.
And from there you can break it down even further.
Everything shifts depending on what you put into it.
Sundae-gukbap, made with blood sausage.
Dwaeji-gukbap, made by adding sliced pork suyuk to the broth.
Naengjang-gukbap, made with pork offal.
Seolleongtang—so named because the meat was said to be tossed in so freely, seolleong-seolleong.
Bbyeo-haejangguk, boiled with whole spine bones and ladled out as a hangover cure, and its close cousin, gamjatang.
Kongnamul-gukbap and ugeoji-gukbap, which have no equal as hangover remedies.
Seonji-haejangguk, made with congealed blood.
Ttaro-gukbap, where the rice and the soup arrive in separate bowls and make a meal all their own.
And beyond those, there are countless more I haven't even named.
It's a dish that can yield hundreds of recipes, depending on the technique used to draw the broth and the ingredients you choose to steep in it.
They say a true gukbap lover can eat it three meals a day and never tire of it.
That isn't an exaggeration.
Considering the sheer number of variations, at least.
But the defining quality of gukbap doesn't lie in the sheer variety of recipes.
It's the sharp, peppery kick that hits you when you spoon rice into that boiling-hot broth and scoop it up with the hearty solids.
A single bite of kkakdugi alongside the warm, empty-stomach-blessing broth, and you can feel like the richest person alive.
Especially on a bitter winter day, when the wind slices at your skin like a blade.
When you've taken the whole cold season straight to the body, shoved your frozen self through the door against your will, and finally lift a spoonful of barely-boiling gukbap broth laced with salted shrimp, perilla powder, and seasoned sauce—
Craaack.
There's nothing better.
Toss in a glass of soju from the night before, and it's absolute perfection.
Admittedly, this wasn't a freezing winter day, and I hadn't touched a drop of alcohol the previous night, so I couldn't expect quite that level of transcendence.
The condition of the meat's good enough to make up the difference.
I glanced over at the pig-bone broth already at a rolling boil.
Gukbap wasn't an official menu item at the restaurant, but I always made sagol-guk from the leftover bones after every hunt.
It's one of those cheat-code cooking ingredients: make a batch, portion it out, stash it in the freezer, and you can keep using it for ages. Who in their right mind would throw it away?
On my way home after work, a container of sagol-guk and a single decent side dish is a health tonic in its own right.
So unless I'm deliberately freezing some bones aside for an uncertain future dish, everything goes straight into the sagol pot.
The pig-bone broth currently bubbling away hadn't come from the wild pog Veronia had brought down today. It was from the pig Andrea had hunted earlier, and I'd simmered the bones a few days ago.
The milky-white broth churned at the boil, putting out an outrageous aroma.
The deep, nutty, rich scent of bone broth—without a trace of gaminess—spread through the air.
There it was. The real thing.
Next to it, I looked over the suyuk cuts I had boiling alongside: front shoulder, neck, and pork belly.
Suyuk was the absolute core of dwaeji-gukbap.
Most of the time, the cut used for the suyuk that goes into the soup itself is pork shoulder. The right amount of fat and generous lean meat blends perfectly with the broth.
Samgyeopsal and neck-meat suyuk, on the other hand, are best served as separate suyuk dishes.
Belly can turn a little greasy if you drop it straight into the soup.
Why serve the lean-heavy neck meat separately, then?
Because it feels like a waste to hide meat that's good enough to eat on its own inside a bowl of broth.
Making suyuk is a battle against time.
You blanch the meat once, then return it to fresh water and bring it to a furious boil with bay leaves, whole peppercorns, soju, cooking wine, and finally green onions and onion.
The bay leaves, peppercorns, and soju are all there to kill off any off-odors in the meat.
Some cooks use doenjang instead of soju, but for this world's palates, boiling with soju had the edge.
Doenjang was already a polarizing ingredient around here, after all.
Not long ago, I'd heard the villagers talking. Doenjang-jjigae, among them, was a little...
Maybe I should think of it like malatang in modern Korea?
A dish some people absolutely loathe and others adore fiercely.
When the liquid had boiled down by half and the onion and green onion had gone soft and translucent—
I lifted the meat out and set it aside to rest.
While I was doing that, I caught pieces of Lancelot's earnest lecture to Ivan about the restaurant.
"A true knight, I tell you. Even in modest food, he must recognize his own path and seek a way to open it anew. The food in this place is precisely..."
"It smells excellent."
"Haha, indeed. The broth made from those simmered bones is remarkably fine. The result that emerges from the cook's long patience as he boils them—it symbolizes the discipline of the knight..."
Ivan listened to Lancelot's words while taking in the restaurant's interior.
While I had been boiling the meat, Andrea and Lancelot had double-checked the first-aid dressing on his wrist. Lancelot treating the injury again and again made his devotion to his student plain enough.
As I sliced the cooked shoulder across the grain and stacked the pieces, I glanced at the sagol boiling away.
The broth I'd simmered long and strained clean was churning like milk, throwing up white bubbles.
Combine this sagol broth with the liquid the suyuk had just boiled in—a one-to-one ratio—and bring it to a boil once more, and you get a flavor distinct from ordinary sagol-guk.
Thicker sagol means deeper flavor, but some people find that intense milky richness from the bones a little too heavy on the nose.
This recipe was for them.
The broth is clearer than standard sagol-guk, but the savory depth from the onion and green onion steeped into it gives the flavor real body.
If you tossed noodles into that broth, you'd get meat noodles.
Granted, I'd never actually cooked real meat noodles before, so I couldn't vouch for the accuracy—but if it tasted good, wasn't that what mattered?
In any case, what I was about to send out was not meat noodles.
It was dwaeji-gukbap.
Freshly boiled and sliced pork shoulder went into individual earthenware pots, and I ladled the sagol broth in for one final boil.
This step was essential. The meat absorbed the deep flavor of the sagol only during this last boil—skip it, and the meat and broth would sit apart from each other in the bowl.
Over the boiling gukbap, I gave a final brisk chop-chop-chop of fresh green onion.
Four bowls of dwaeji-gukbap, complete.
I set the finished pots onto their trivets and called for Andrea.
"Done! Take it out!"
Already set on the table were the crimson kkakdugi, the napa-cabbage geotjeori, and the long-sliced chive muchim.
A perfect dwaeji-gukbap table spread was in place.
Alongside for seasoning: salted shrimp, a red seasoning sauce, minced garlic, perilla powder, and thin-sliced spicy peppers.
"Ah, nearly forgot."
I sliced the samgyeopsal and neck-meat suyuk into pieces and sent those out as well.
Leaving out the suyuk would've been a damn shame.
"Dwaeji-gukbap."
"It smells wonderful. Haha."
Already well acquainted with this kind of milky-white broth from his earlier encounters with sagol-guk, Lancelot smiled and looked down at his pot. Ivan sniffed cautiously at the fiercely boiling gukbap.
"It's very hot, so let it cool as you eat. The seasoning sauces here—add them to your taste."
Lancelot, practiced by now, deftly stirred salted shrimp and seasoned sauce into his bowl.
"Andrea, let's eat too."
"Yes! Thank you for the meal!"
Before adding the seasoning, I took a spoonful of the sagol broth by itself.
The gaminess had been stripped out completely; the soft, clean broth simply moistened my mouth.
The warmth slid down my throat, into my stomach, spreading heat.
I could feel my stomach warming and waking up.
"Good. This is it."
With the salted shrimp and seasoning sauce in, I added a little minced garlic, sliced pepper, and finally the chive salad—the whole lot.
Only once everything was in could you call it truly finished.
I lifted a spoonful of the steaming, red-tinged broth and ate.
Now the flavor had bite, a sharp edge the clean broth alone lacked.
"Kha! Perfect."
As I savored the broth, I could see Ivan's gaze fixed on me.
Eyes full of suspicion.
Only after meeting my eyes did Ivan finally lift his spoon and eat.
A spoonful of broth together with some shoulder meat, and his expression shifted.
Good, isn't it? I don't care how stubborn you are.
Looked like I'd just created another gukbap addict.
***
Ivan could not understand his master Lancelot's persistent need to drape everything about this restaurant in chivalry.
He knew Lancelot was a knight of renowned honor and strength, worthy of respect—but his master also had a habit of launching into these high-flown, intangible speeches. Especially in front of someone who had insulted his sword.
Lucas was using the Sword of the Lake—Lancelot's own treasured blade, a renowned weapon counted among the finest on the continent—to butcher animal bones.
So Ivan had challenged him, a duel for honor.
What he'd encountered had been an immense iron wall.
Before Lucas drew his sword, he hadn't given off that impression at all.
The fundamentals were there, but the whole picture seemed riddled with gaps—weak.
Master gave the Sword of the Lake to someone like this?
He hadn't been able to comprehend it.
But in the moment he'd charged in to meet Lucas's blade—
He'd lost sight of him.
No, to be precise, he'd lost sight of his hands.
One instant his attack was being blocked; the next, the counter was already coming.
Even when Ivan swung his sword at the fastest speed he could manage, Lucas replied as though he'd known the trajectory from the start.
And at the very end—hadn't the man cleanly aimed for his wrist alone and struck?
"On this continent, those who can truly face you will not exceed three."
His master had told him that.
That he was already a warrior of considerable prowess.
And yet he had lost.
So decisively clean.
After beating him, the man had said "sorry about that" and offered him a meal.
Every single gesture dripped suspicion.
Was he going to poison the food?
No—someone that powerful wouldn't resort to poison.
But if his master was so far gone that he was dressing up food in the language of chivalry—
Something's been done to him. That's certain.
The thought crossed his mind that some kind of brainwashing might be at work.
A cook with strength that didn't match his station.
Swordsmanship full of holes once you looked past the fundamentals.
And on top of that, keeping an elf as an employee.
The suspicious signs piled up.
The aroma drifting in from the kitchen was genuinely appealing—he'd grant that much. But that was a separate issue.
Could this smell itself be part of the scheme?
His difficult past had left Ivan deeply unable to trust others, and his suspicion ran bottomless.
Even after the food arrived, even watching Lancelot eat, he couldn't bring himself to taste the gukbap laid out before him.
The smell was good. There was no denying that.
A mellow, deep meat fragrance swept lightly across his senses.
Living alone in the forest, he'd gone without proper meals more times than he could count. Hunt wild game, roast the carcass, eat. That had been the shape of his life.
Meeting Lancelot had reduced the frequency, certainly. But had the food itself actually gotten better?
That was another matter entirely.
Eat well so you can fight well. Make sure you take care of yourself.
Every time Lancelot visited, he'd brought butchered meat, flour, all sorts of provisions, but Ivan had been an atrocious cook since the day he was born. He burned food routinely; just as often, it came out half-raw and fishy.
Ivan was the type who thought: isn't it more efficient to blast it over high heat for ten minutes than to nurse it over medium heat for thirty?
That was his entire cooking philosophy.
For a man like that, a single bowl of scalding-hot gukbap prepared by Lucas was tormenting him with an aroma he'd never breathed before.
Maybe this is the brainwashing device.
He only managed to lift a difficult spoonful after watching Lucas eat his own bowl with Andrea at the other table.
With his clumsy left hand, he did as they had done: added seasoning sauce, pepper, salted shrimp, and the chive salad on top, then tasted the broth.
Slurrrp.
The moment he spooned up the meat and the broth together—
Pababababang!!!!!
Fireworks detonated inside his mouth.
It was a flavor he'd never experienced before.
"Huh...?"
Ivan looked down at his bowl, his guard entirely shattered.
It was delicious.
A supreme flavor, unlike anything he'd tasted in his life.
The rich, deep meatiness of the silky sagol broth and the sharp, punchy kick of the seasoned sauce merged into a single whole and began to toy with his senses.
—Your first time tasting something like this, isn't it?
—A country boy like you probably never got the chance, did you?
He could almost hear a teasing voice inside his head. In ordinary circumstances he would've bristled at it, but somehow...
It felt more like a voice laced with the affection of someone looking after another person.
He didn't dislike it.
The broth slid down his throat, and he chewed the remaining meat.
It was neither tough nor hard. It was a perfect state. No—it was a state he'd never even known existed.
Until this point, meat, for Ivan, had only ever been either burnt or raw.
But his instincts told him clearly.
Perfectly cooked meat was, right now, in its finest possible condition.
To him, food had always been simply a means of survival. A way to solve the problem of hunger.
So what was this taste?
"Eh? What...? Huh...?"
The words wouldn't form. He simply scooped up another spoonful.
Slurrrp.
Puh-buh-buh-bang!!!
The sensation riding up through his tongue soaked his brain in heat.
A subtle, spreading warmth.
A deep, palpable heat filled Ivan's taste-starved body.
"This is..."
"You understand now, don't you? What I've been telling you."
At Lancelot's words, Ivan looked at the gukbap once more.
That claim—that the food in this place contained chivalry itself.
He felt as though he was beginning to grasp what it meant.
Before he even realized it, he was eating the rice steeped in broth as though possessed.