Korean BBQ and Rolls and Gluten-Free Friendly Foreign Cuisine

The Recipes: Korean BBQ

• My boyfriend's mom taught me how to make this. She just did it all from her head, so we had to write down the recipe. 
• Koreans often eat this for special occasions and holidays.
• Goes well with seaweed rolls and kimchi
• Serves at least 10, if not more.

The Ingredients:
9 lbs. beef short rib
1 peeled onion or Asian pear
1 ice-cream-scoop full of minced garlic
1 tsp. sesame seed oil
5 handfuls of sugar
1/4 c. red wine
2 c. gluten-free soy sauce or tamari


The Directions:
1. Rinse off beef under faucet, rubbing bones with fingers.
2. Cut off the fat. If you have thin fillets, move onto next step. If you have chunky cubes, cut like you are unrolling the meat to get to the juicy center, and it will be flat when you finish.
3. Pound the meat.
4. Blend 1 peeled pear or onion (we used the pear).
5. Mix gluten-free soy sauce or tamari, blended pear or onion, garlic, sesame seed oil, sugar, and wine in a large bowl.
6. Submerge each piece of meat in the sauce. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and marinade overnight in the fridge.
7. If freezing some of the meat, put it in a plastic bag and cover it with sauce. Put bag in the freezer. Take it out to defrost and marinade the night before eating.
8. Cover a baking sheet that has raised edges with aluminum foil. Put meat on the sheet and drizzle leftover marinade onto the meat. Broil on high for about 7 min on each side, or until thoroughly cooked. If the meat still doesn't look ready, broil it for about 3 minutes on the original side. *Note: We used chopsticks to pick up the meat to check it then flip it over. If possess less nunchuck skills than Napolean Dynamite, tongs would work well.
9. Cut into bite size pieces or strips by holding one end of the meat slice with chopsticks and cutting the other end with kitchen scissors. Or use a knife. If you buy the cut that has 3 bone slices in it, cut between the bones and leave the meat attached to create a square that you can hold by the bone and tare the other side off with your teeth.


Seaweed Rolls

• Served as a side-dish, packed lunch, or snack.
• Can add whatever you want as long as you can lay it in a thin row (such as cut up Korean BBQ and kimchi, additions that kick the flavor up a notch) or lay it in strips (such as the cucumber)
• Can dip in gluten-free soy sauce or tamari. 
• We made about 12 rolls, when most of our ingredients ran out, but there was still some rice left.
• If you are making this with Korean BBQ, start the rice before the BBQ.

Ingredients:
5 c. white rice
1 c. sweet rice
8 eggs (or however many it takes to fill your largest skillet)
4 carrots
a few tsp salt
olive oil
long plastic box of spinach
sesame seed oil
1/4-1/2 daikon radish
tbsp sesame seed oil
tbsp sesame seeds
tsp. salt
large seaweed squares (9"x9")

Directions:
1. Wash rice. Put water in pot with white and sweet rice. Massage rice with hands, then pour water out. Repeat a few times, until the water is not cloudy white. Put into rice cooker. Cook for about 30 min. or whatever your settings say.
2. Prepare eggs. Whisk eggs in a bowl and fry on medium in large skillet, flipping when the underside is done. Cut cut into 1/4"-1/2" thick strips.
3. Peel carrots, then julienne or cut carrots into 3-4" long, thin strips. Fry in a few tsp. salt and olive oil for about 5 min or until tender, stirring occasionally to turn the carrots.
4. Blanch spinach to make soggy (add spinach to a pot of boiling water, then pour into colander and rinse under very cold water). Squeeze handfuls of spinach to remove water. Put in a bowl and add salt and sesame seed oil to taste (avoid making it too salty).
5. Cut daikon (pickled) raddish into long strips.
6. Once rice is done, mix in the sesame seeds, sesame seed oil, and salt.
7. Place a large seaweed square on top of a sushi roller (made of thin strips of bamboo strapped together). You could try using aluminum foil or even paper towel instead if you don't have one. Spread a thin layer of rice onto the seaweed square, then add strips of the other ingredients 1" from the end nearest you.
8. Lift the free inch of seaweed paper over the other ingredients using the roller and clamp in. Repeat until rolled into cylinder. Then wrap fully in roller and squeeze along the whole roll with hands.
9. Cut into 1/2" pieces.
10. Continue making rolls until ingredients are used up.

Oriental to Oggle at

I was so into this yummy feast that I forgot to take a pic until after the leftovers were put away. Here are the seaweed rolls and uncut slabs of Korean BBQ.

This is how Koreans roll. Boo yah!

My Take on the Bake
This dinner was an adventure. My boyfriend had to translate about half of the directions his mom gave me because she only speaks a little English. And we only had time to marinate the meat for an hour, instead of overnight. It still tasted delicious, however. It was nice to have a flavorful variation on ribs without American BBQ sauce. I loved the rolls, especially the ones we added the kimchi and BBQ to. Anyone who thinks they wouldn't like authentic Asian food should try the rolls, and they would be instantly converted - they take stuff we eat in America, like rice and carrots, add a few Korean things like seaweed rolls, and put it all together in a comfort food way.

I'm now very interested in Asian foods because, among other reasons, Asian foods have little wheat. For many of the dinners I've been making lately, I've been making gluten-free substitutions with gluten-free flours and noodles to normally glutenous recipes. But Asian foods are more generally gluten-free. The main problem to watch out for is gluten in soy sauce, but there are many Asian dishes that don't use soy sauce at all. For example, if you keep reading my blog for a few posts, you'll find two naturally gluten-free Indian curry dishes.