The One-Pot Chicken Soup That Punches Above Its Weight
Let South Korea’s flavor trio—gochujang, gochugaru and garlic—do the work for you.
If you judge only by font size, the star of Mi-Ok Seo’s menu is bindaetteok, crispy-savory mung bean pancakes. Everything else at her Jeontong Nokdoo Bindaeddeok lunch stall in Seoul’s Pungmul Market gets comparatively diminutive billing. Even the embarrassingly good budae jjigae, affectionately known as army base stew for its fusion of Spam and kimchi.
I was there before the lunch crowd hit the cafeteria-like market, its walls populated with a dozen or so similar eateries. And I’m sure her bindaetteok is excellent. Likewise her multiple iterations of kalguksu, or Korean knife-cut noodle soup. But I was there solely on word of mouth with a plan to eat off menu.
That’s the way things work on Milk Street trips. Somebody somewhere tips you off to something delicious in an unlikely place. That leads you to another somebody with another tip to yet another with another and so on in an oddly delicious game of telephone. Which is how I found myself asking Seo if she’d consider making her dakdoritang a bit too early in the day.
You won’t find it on her menu—a long red and white banner that hangs above her stall—but if you know, you know. I knew, so I asked. And she somewhat reluctantly agreed to whip up the dish, the embodiment of Korean comfort food. “It used to be only for special days,” Seo said of the dish she learned from her mother. “But these days it’s more of an everyday meal.”
At its most basic, dakdoritang is a spicy chicken and vegetable stew. But that doesn’t quite do it justice. Like many Korean dishes, the cooking traditionally starts in the kitchen but finishes at the table. Seo stayed true to that, combining most of the ingredients—potatoes, carrots, onions, scallions, peppers, water and eventually chicken—in a large pot on the stove.
After a solid simmer, the cooking moved to a one-burner camping stove Seo had set on our table. That’s where things got real. The backbone of this incredibly simple soup is a powerhouse trio of ingredients used widely in Korean cooking—and used in abundance in dakdoritang: gochujang, gochugaru and garlic.
Gochujang, of course, is a fermented chili paste I liken in taste to a marriage of Sriracha and miso. Deeply savory, a little sweet and a lot punchy. Gochugaru is the seed-free chili flake that gives the many types of kimchi color and flavor. More fruity than spicy, gochugaru has a sweet earthiness unlike more common red pepper flakes. And the garlic. Lots of garlic.
The combination underscored a lesson we’ve learned around the world: When you let big, bold ingredients do the work for you, it’s easy to make a meal that punches far above what you would expect for so little effort. And when I tasted Seo’s dakdoritang—drizzled with toasted sesame oil—it did exactly that. One-pot simple that tasted anything but.
A meal well worth the game of telephone.
