South Dakota Seoul Food

What do you get when you cross South Dakota and South Korea? A delicious meal! Last night (and many nights this summer) I made grilled buffalo and topped it with Korean sauces – it has been my go-to meal of the summer of 2012. While not a dish you would find in a bar in Murdo or a restaurant in Seoul – it is wonderful “Seoul” food. It is a beautiful melding of cultures – taking the best meat of the South Dakota prairie and finishing it with flavors of South Korea.

The back story behind this dish has two levels. My initial inspiration came a couple years ago in New York City when I first tried the wildly popular restaurant, Momofuku Ssam Bar (http://www.momofuku.com/restaurants/ssam-bar/). In my mind, it is everything a restaurant should be: big bold flavors, reasonable prices, comfortable and casual vibe, and absolutely delicious food – no wonder it is so popular. Until Momofuku, Korean food was one of the few cuisines I was not a fan of, but the combination of vinegar, soy, and chilies has gotten me hooked. Chef David Chang crafts amazing Korean-inspired dishes from to-die-for pork belly buns to the best ever Brussels sprout with fish sauce and mint leaves to delicious pork sausage with rice cakes. But their signature dish is bo ssam (the Korean word for wraps) which includes an 8 hour slow cooked pork shoulder, oysters, dipping sauces, rice, etc. all wrapped in bibb lettuce. I was always curious, but the $200 price tag and the fact it was for parties of 6 or more meant I never tried it.

Fast forward to this spring when a group of friends I have done a cooking club with for almost a decade decided to re-create the ssam dinner – with the help of some recipes in the New York Times – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/recipe-momofuku-bo-ssam.html  (also included below). One of the ideas of the cooking club is to make a more involved and complex menus than anyone one of us would typically do on our own. With a big thanks to chef Chang’s recipe, I have to say the results were spectacular.

The only problem is that I was craving this again a couple days later. While I love to cook, it is not often I have 8-hours to slow roast a whole pork butt for a week night dinner. But I realized the flavors could translate very well with an easy grilled steak sliced thin. Voila! The sweet earthy taste of the buffalo is an amazing match with these sauces. I go outside to the grill, and grill up a buffalo ribeye or NY Strip or top sirloin or flank steak – all have worked great. I cook it to medium rare, bring inside and slice thin. I then use that as the basis for a Korean-style rice bowl. I like to use Japanese style short grain rice (also called sushi rice). I fill a bowl with that and then place the thinly sliced buffalo on the rice. For toppings, I always will use the ginger scallion sauce – which takes less than 5 minutes and uses standard ingredients in any kitchen. The quick pickles I do about 80% of the time with it – and they provide a nice crunch and flavor contrast. The ssam sauce requires 2 ingredients you would find at a good Asian grocery, but once you have those it take about 3 minutes to make and provides some nice heat to the dish.

I continue to be amazed at how well buffalo fills in with popular dishes from all over the globe. I have done recipes for everything from Korean (ssam) to Chinese (stir fries and grilled with ginger, soy, scallions) to South American (skirt steak with chimichurri) to French (tartare) – using buffalo in place of beef or pork. So there you go: our buffalo dress up nice and can go from the Great Plains and fit right in with flavors from anywhere around the world.

Ginger-Scallion Sauce

• 2½ cups thinly sliced scallions, both green and white parts
• ½ cup peeled, minced fresh ginger
• ¼ cup neutral oil (like grapeseed)
• 1½ teaspoons light soy sauce
• 1 scant teaspoon sherry vinegar
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste

Ssam Sauce

• 2 tablespoons fermented bean-and- chili paste (ssamjang, available in many Asian markets, and online)
• 1 tablespoon chili paste (kochujang, available in many Asian markets, and online)
• ½ cup sherry vinegar
• ½ cup neutral oil (like grapeseed)