I’m not sure if it was my brother coming to visit me from NYC this past week reminding me of my childhood or if it was FaceTiming with my parents while they were eating Korean food, but I had an insane craving for Asian cooking yesterday. One sad thing about living in Marin county is the lack of Korean restaurants in the area. We either have to go into San Francisco or to East Bay to get our fix, but I’m okay with it because it’s been forcing me cook Korean recipes at home for the first time. 

Cooking Asian cuisines always intimidated me because I wasn’t too familiar with the various fancy ingredients (I only ate the dish, I never questioned what was actually in them), but turns out, it’s not as difficult as I imagined. With a few tips from my lovely mother and some gluten free tweaks from online recipes, I can satisfy my craving for kimchi and Korean BBQ easily.

These Korean short ribs, called galbi, takes a long time to marinate but that’s when the magical flavors of umami are infused into the meat. The key to galbi is to get the right cut of the short ribs. I have seen them sliced Korean-style (thinly across the bones) at some grocery stores and farmers markets recently, but you can also ask the butcher to cut them for you. It’s pretty important for this recipe. You know you are doing it right when you can pick up galbi with your hand and hold the bone with your fingers to devour the meat off of it. This technique makes it taste 20x better. That’s just fact.