Randy, one of the moderators from one of my other sites, lives in South Korea and recently had a mouth-watering Korean delicacy called “chicken ribs”. Here are his words and photos:
…So here you have Chicken Ribs. Yes – I wrote “CHICKEN RIBS.” You’re probably wondering…who the hell would eat chicken ribs? What are chicken ribs? Is there really such a thing as a chicken rib?
The only answer that I can give you is that there are no bones in this dish. Why do Koreans call it “chicken ribs?” I have no idea – I need to ask though. My wife and I drove up to the city of Chun Chon last night (roughly 100 kilometers northeast of Seoul) – it’s famous for chicken ribs and there are literally dozens upon dozens of chicken rib restaurants there.
So it all starts with a huge load of stuff getting piled into this cooker in the middle of your table. It includes boneless chicken pieces, sweet potatoes, cabbage, rice cakes, hot sauce, and other things are added later.
You work it around to get things going…
Let in sit and cook for a bit…
Pretty soon the steam starts to rise off the cooker as the heat starts cooking the veggies
You work it around some more…
Let it sit and continue to cook…
Once the initial load has reached a certain point, they throw on another load of veggies – I think it’s stuff that would get burned up if it were in the cooker from the start. Basically just some green leafy stuff and some mushrooms.
So you get all the new veggies worked into the mix…
Strictly a voluntary thing – but you can also throw some kimchi into the pan to cook off to the side by itself (upper right). Kimchi fried in the juices of other dishes like this can really come out tasting great.
OK ~ work it around for a few more minutes…
And it’s time to start digging in!
So we’ve plowed through around half of it at this point…
And we decide to try one more option – turning it into fried rice. First you scrape the pan…
Then throw in a few bowls of rice, some more veggies, some cooking oil…
You work it around and then flatten out the rice to let it fry for a bit…
Then you work in the leftover chicken and what not…
You’ve got a few options at this point. You can shovel away with a spoon, or you can also try wrapping it up in lettuce, cabbage, or sesame leaves. Mrs. Guitard opted for the sesame leaf in this pic…
You wrap that bad boy up in a ball…and down she goes!
There was no f’ing way we were going to finish all that – so we asked them to box it up for us. They put foil down in a box and piled it in there.
A view from out in front of the restaurant. The “119” is kind of a joke. In Korea, you call 119 in an emergency (opposite of “911” that you call in America). So this restaurant is titled (roughly translated) “119
