One of the best meals I had in San Francisco (and I had a lot of great meals) was the first one: tofu stew at a Korean tofu house in Japantown. As I promised at the time, I decided to replicate it tonight.

There aren’t many vegan recipes for soon tubu jjigae on the internet, in fact, I didn’t find any. Everyone seems to want to put clam juice, beef, and shrimp in it. And egg. But none of that stuff is necessary. The important features of soon tubu jjigage are 1) tofu and 2) spiciness, both of which I can produce in spades.

The first thing you need to consider is your tofu. I wouldn’t dream of making soon tubu jjigage with anything but homemade tofu. The tofu is just too big a part of the dish and I’m used to homemade. So I have to urge you to try making it yourself. I ordinarily make an extremely firm tofu, using as much coagulant as I can get away with without it turning bitter and pressing it under about 25 pounds. Because I wanted a much softer tofu for the stew, I cut back on the amount of coagulant I used (I used nigari as usual, but if I’d been thinking more clearly, I’d have used the calcium sulfate I have because it makes a softer tofu AND adds calcium), and I used just 1.5 pounds (a new bottle of agave nectar, to be precise) to press it.

If you simply can not be bothered to make your own tofu, buy fresh soft tofu from an Asian market if at all possible. If you can’t find fresh, buy the best soft tofu you can find at an Asian market. Sometimes it comes in tubes and it’s usually in the produce department. If you don’t live near an Asian market, you can resort to using silken tofu in a box.

Soon Tubu Jjigae

3 1/2 cups water
1 4″x4″ square kombu
1/4 cup dulse, snipped into bite-size pieces with kitchen shears (optional)
1 handful arame (optional)
2 tsp vegan chicken bouillon (or enough to flavor 4 cups of water at half-strength)
1 Tbsp Korean red pepper powder
6 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp sesame oil
1/2 cup cold water
3 Tbsp arrowroot
6 Tbsp gochujang (Korean chili pepper paste) (Susan V of Fat-Free Vegan has a substitute you can make if you don’t live near a Korean grocery store in this post, but get the real deal if at all possible.)
1 cup cabbage kimchi
2 carrots, julienned or shredded
1 pound soft tofu, preferably homemade
1/2 bunch scallions, chopped

Place the seaweed(s) in a soup pot with the 3 1/2 cups of water and simmer for 10 minutes.

Remove the kombu. (You can chop it up into bite-sized pieces and put it back in if you wish.) Add the garlic, red pepper powder, soy sauce, sesame oil, and “chicken” bouillon. Simmer for five minutes.

Mix the cold water and arrowroot together in a small bowl, whisking to ensure there are no lumps, then add to the soup. Add the gochujang, whisking to make sure it is dissolved. Simmer for another five minutes.

Add the kimchi and carrots.

Chop the tofu into 8 large pieces.

Add the tofu to the stew.

Stir the tofu into the stew, allowing it to break up a little bit, but mostly maintaining the chunks.

Simmer for 5 more minutes, then add the scallions.

Raise the heat a little and cook for another couple of minutes. In restaurants, soon tubu jjigae arrives to your table very, very hot, so let it get very bubbly.

I served the soon tubu jjigae in individual-sized cast iron pots, which even have lids to keep the stew warm while I run around taking photographs. Here’s one of the pots:

Mark was fascinated by the “little cauldrons”.

Serve with several banchan.

The verdict on this one was very good. Mark commented that he tasted “several layers of flavor, followed by a nice spiciness.” He proceeded to clean his cauldron, then steal tofu from mine. Afterwards he told me to announce it had the Mark Seal of Approval.

Brachtune doesn’t care much for tofu, or stew for that matter, but she does love chopsticks.

Tigger prefers red pepper.

(His fur is wet because he took a little shower in the kitchen sink. He’s very weird.)

Possibly the best parts of a Korean meal are the banchan, or little side dishes, that almost always accompany it. They usually include kimchi and pickled vegetables (and often tiny little dead fish). I could make an entire meal of banchan. I like to make my own, although since I like to serve four or five different kinds at a time, I often supplement my homemade banchan with a few ready-made items from Super H; they always have several vegan varieties (you do have to watch out for fish sauce). Tonight I made a bean sprout “salad” and a cucumber “salad”. I’m putting salad in quotes because I don’t really know what to call them. I spend enough time at Super H that you’d think maybe I would have picked up Korean by osmosis by now, but it’s still Greek to me. (I hilariate myself. (“Hilariate” is a perfectly cromulent word.))

Although I don’t know what to call these little dishes, they are very fast, easy, and even cheap. Throw them together before embarking on the preparation of a Korean meal, let them marinate while you make the main dish, and then everything will be ready at the same time. Easy!

Bean Sprout Banchan

2 cups bean sprouts
2 tsp seasoned rice vinegar
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
4 drop stevia (or 1 tsp sugar)

Place the bean sprouts in a bowl. Bring a kettle to boil, then pour the boiling water over the bean sprouts to cover. Let sit for 2 minutes, then drain.

Mix the remaining ingredients together in a small bowl …

… then toss with the bean sprouts.

Cover and let marinate in the refrigerator for at least half an hour before serving. Sprinkle with sesame seeds if desired.

Verdict? At dinner, Mark said he particularly liked the bean sprouts and seemed impressed when I told him I made the recipe up. Not that it’s a particularly difficult or involved recipe, in fact, it seems a little silly to bother taking credit for it. But it went over very well!

Cucumber Banchan

Imagine 2 cucumbers in this photograph.

2 cucumbers
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp seasoned rice vinegar
2 tsp Korean red pepper powder

Slice cucumbers as thinly as possible, on a mandolin if you have one. Toss with the salt and let sit for 15 minutes.

In a small bowl, mix together the remaining ingredients.

Squeeze the cucumbers dry, then toss with marinade.

Now, I’ve always just marinaded the cucumbers in the past, however, this time I decided to get fancy and use my new pickle press. If you don’t have one, just let the cucumbers sit in the marinade. But if you want to use a press, put the cucumber into the press and tighten it:

Then refrigerate for at least half an hour. Notice how the liquid has come up through the holes in the “presser foot” of the press:

Simply drain the liquid off before unclamping. Then serve!

Verdict? Nice and crisp, however, not spicy enough for my tastes. I might toss in some more red pepper after pressing next time. You could barely taste the pepper. But I like cucumbers, so it was good anyway.

My mother-in-law is staying with us a few days in conjunction with a family wedding. She and I were swimming today as I was thinking about dinner possibilities, which lead me to decide on one of my favorite meals, a sizzling Korean concoction called dolsot bibimbap. As I mentioned in my kimchi post, Mark’s parents lived in Korea for a while just before he was born, and they were responsible for introducing me to Korean food. It’s also a pretty easy meal to make and doesn’t take much longer than it does to make rice (although you have to work the whole time the rice is cooking). So I dragged myself out of the pool and was off to Super H to get a few ingredients.

Bibimbap is a pretty well-known Korean meal consisting of various things – usually including meat of some sort – stirred into rice. A dolsot is a heavy stone bowl that can be heated over fire. Dolsot bibimbap, then, is bibimbap that is partially cooked and served in a dolsot. In my opinion, dolsot bibimbap is much better than regular old bibimbap because a) it makes noise (it sizzles) and b) the rice gets crunchy. The problem some of you are going to have is finding dolsots. I’m fortunate to live in amongst many Korean stores, so dolsots were no problem for me. You may be able to find them online but you’ll pay a fortune in shipping if you do because they weigh a ton. I imagine you could try cooking the rice in a cast iron pot and then transferring it to a serving dish when it’s crunchy, although honestly that’s not nearly as fun. I have two smaller iron pots that are, I believe, Chinese that I used before I bought the dolsots, and while this worked somewhat, the result wasn’t nearly as good as it is in a real dolsot. Here is what my dolsots look like:

As far as the tray under the dolsot is concerned, you definitely need one and this is one of the very few times I’ll tell you you want the plastic kind over the wooden kind. I originally had wooden trays for my dolsots, but they were laminated and the hot dolsots stuck to them so now I have a plasticky goo on the bottom of my dolsots that smells really bad and gets all over my burners when hot. Bizarrely, the plastic kind doesn’t melt while the wooden kind does (at least the wooden kind I had).

One of the great things about vegetarian bibimbap, and making bibimbap at home, is you can put whatever you want in it. It’s good for using up leftovers, although I usually just go to Super H and grab some veggies there. The Super H near me often has prepared seasoned bibimbap veggies that save on prep time. I ordinarily wouldn’t buy prepared veggies like that except the packages they have contain traditional items like bellflower root and bracken fern that I can’t always find fresh and unprepared. But don’t be alarmed if you don’t have a Korean store nearby where you can get these items. You can put any type of veggie into your bibimbap as long as you can chop it up into nice pieces. So the following is really more a few suggestions than an actual recipe.

Dolsot Bibimbap

short or medium grain rice (I use sushi rice), one serving per person
gochujang (chili pepper paste) sauce: about 1/4 cup per person (recipe follows)

various vegetables and tofu, depicted above is:
1 large or 2 small carrots, julienned thinly
1 bunch baby broccoli: an example of a non-traditional ingredient that worked well for me
mung bean sprouts
bracken fern
bellflower root
cucumbers
Korean or Chinese chives (which I didn’t end up using because I had enough other stuff)
Korean radish or daikon
tofu, cubed

Also suggested:
spinach
zucchini
mushrooms if you can stand them
lettuce
kimchi
really any strange vegetables you see in an Asian grocery store and can’t identify

For the veggie marinade:
3 Tbsp seasoned rice vinegar
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
9 drop stevia or 1 Tbsp sugar

Prepare the rice according to the package. I use a rice cooker. While the rice is cooking, prepare the veggies. “Hard” vegetables such as carrots, radish, and zucchini should be julienned thinly. I used a julienne peeler on this carrot:

Leafy vegetables should be roughly chopped if necessary. Blanch veggies like carrots, broccoli, bean sprouts, and radish in boiling water for 30 seconds to one minute depending on how hard they are then rinse under cold water to stop cooking. Don’t overcook them.

Leafy items like spinach can be microwaved for one minute or lightly steamed. Zucchini can be lightly sauteed or just used raw. Chives, lettuce, and tofu can be used raw. I honestly don’t know know how to prepare mushrooms because I don’t eat those nasty things.

Stir together the marinade ingredients in a small bowl.

Keeping each vegetable in a separate bowl, toss each with a small amount of the marinade. If you like, toss in some sesame seeds:

Next make the sauce:

Gochujang Sauce

(Makes enough for three generous servings.)

1/2 cup gochujang (spicy chili pepper paste, available in Korean markets)
3 Tbsp seasoned rice vinegar
9 drops stevia or 1 Tbsp sugar
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1 tsp sesame oil

Gochujang is a very thick paste that looks like this:

We want to make it a bit more “stir-able”, so to it add the other ingredients:

Then whisk together. You’ll need a sturdy whisk.

Divide the gochujang into small individual bowls (I used Chinese teacups), one for each serving. Set aside.

Meanwhile, as the rice is finishing up, prepare the dolsots. Set each dolsot directly on a burner. Gas is probably really better but I don’t have a problem using my electric stove. Pour about 1/2 tsp sesame oil into each, then use a paper towel to rub the oil all over the interior surface, wiping away any excess oil. Bibimbap is not at all a greasy dish, but the sesame oil causes the rice to brown and turn crispy, so a thin layer is necessary. Turn each dolsotted burner on medium heat. Allow the dolsots to come up to temperature for a couple of minutes, then spread one serving of the cooked, hot rice into each dolsot, covering the bottom of the dolsot and partially going up the sides.

Allow the rice to cook in the dolsots for about 10-15 minutes, checking periodically that it is not burning. You can serve it in a range of states from lightly brown and slightly crunchy to golden brown and very crunchy. Meanwhile, as the rice is cooking in the dolsots, warm up each of the marinating veggies. I simply stuck each small bowl into the microwave for 30 seconds to one minute. You can also individually saute them for a minute or so each. They shouldn’t need to cook any further, you just want to warm them up a bit.

As you finish warming each veggie, distribute it amongst each of the dolsots. I always put the tofu in the middle (where, by the way, a raw egg would be cracked in a traditional dolsot bibimbap dish; it cooks as you later stir it into the sizzling hot rice) and have each of the veggies radiating out from it. Try not to place the same colors next to each other.

Here are all three dolsots that I prepared tonight waiting on the stove as I set the table and arranged the banchan (side dishes):

When you are ready to serve the dolsot bibimbap, use oven mitts to transfer each dolsot to its plastic tray, then carry to the table. They should be sizzling; the rice will continue to cook even after you remove it from the heat.

The pictures I took of the table were overexposed and not very good, but here’s an idea of what it looked like:

When you are ready to eat, each diner adds the gochujang sauce to their taste. It is quite spicy, so be forewarned. Mix everything together, then enjoy!

My mother-in-law said it was very good (and cleaned her dolsot), and Mark told me to think of the most horrible tasting food in the world and said that it was the exact opposite of that. Once you know what you are doing, it’s really a very easy and fairly fast dish to make, and it ranks as one of my all-time favorite meals.