Jasmine Rice and Beef Skewers With Shishito Peppers and Angelica Shoots
Spring is finally here, which means not only a wealth of baby vegetables but the arrival of spring namul, or greens and herbs. The stuff namul is made of was traditionally gathered in the wild on the mountainsides in Korea as the weather began to warm and the earth started sprouting green.
My absolute favorite early-spring green is dureup, angelica shoots, which I just discovered last year. It was the first pitch I successfully made at the magazine, having never actually tasted it before. We traveled to Gapyeong, a place I love, which is famous for its dureup and its hanu beef — a happy coincidence, since they pair so well together.
Dureup is a little hard to explain. The chef I traveled with compared it to celery because of its lightly bitter flavor and possibly its appearance — when you remove the greens from their spiky wooden stems, they look very much like mini celery. But it reminds me much more of okra, a comparison the chef agreed with once I mentioned it — being Italian, he was less familiar with okra and referred to it as an Indian vegetable. I’m from the South in the US — okra is a hometown food for me. So much so, in fact, that there’s even an oft repeated family anecdote about the vegetable. Okra has tiny spines and grows on tall stalks that you have to pull down to pick from, two facts that conspired against my mother one day when she was doing just that. When she released the plant, it whipped back and slapped her on the neck, leaving behind a welt that looked a little too much like a hickey. She had a hell of a time convincing my grandparents that the red splotch on her neck was the result of an inadvertent switching and not a call for an intentional one.
Dureup has the same thick texture near the stem and a similarly subdued flavor, especially when it is battered and fried, which is my favorite way to eat it. It’s only available for a very short window of time from March to April and is sold still attached to its spiny stems, which the farmer we met said helps keep it from wilting.
Shishito peppers are (obviously) better known by their Japanese name. In Korean, they’re called ggwari gochu. They are easy to spot because of their curly, wrinkly texture and are often referred to as being sweeter than ordinary green chili peppers. They don’t taste sweeter to me, but rather milder — there is a delicate crispness to their flavor with bright tones that may cause the illusion of sweetness. That having been said, if you happen to get a hot one, it will be really, really hot. Apparently a single shishito pepper plant can produce peppers of wildly varying spiciness. Their flesh is thinner than that of regular peppers, making them a popular choice for jorim, or braising in soy sauce, because they can be braised in a shorter amount of time and therefore retain some of their crispness.
The yellow dust has been wreaking havoc on my sinuses, which has had me stuck inside the last couple of days, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy spring. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of fried dureup, but I was looking for a new way to combine it with beef without getting too complicated and overriding its flavor. I also had some ggwari gochu and mushrooms on hand, so I decided to make ggochi, or skewers. Since the skewers were going to be simple, I decided to jazz up the jasmine rice a little, adding ginger, mint and turmeric, as well as some of the peppers, thinly sliced.
Beef Skewers With Shishito Peppers and Angelica Shoots on Jasmine Rice
Ingredients
Skewers
- 200g beef chuck eye, cut into 1"x1" cubes
- 2 onions, cut into chunks
- 1 king oyster mushroom (새송이), thinly sliced lengthwise and cut into 1"x1" squares
- 8-10 shiitake mushrooms (표고), with the stems trimmed off
- 20 shishito peppers (꽈리고추), with the stems trimmed off and cut into half
- 12-15 stems of angelica shoots (두릅), removed from the wooden stem
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
Jasmine Rice
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 tablespoon ginger, minced
- 4 shishito peppers, diced
- 1 tablespoon mint, minced
- 3 teaspoons turmeric
- 1 1/2 cups jasmine rice
- 3 cups chicken stock
Instructions
- Cut the meat and vegetables to size and layer on the skewers as you'd like. Make sure each side lays flat so that the skewers will grill evenly.
- Heat the butter in a saute pan over medium high heat. Add the ginger, mint and diced peppers and saute for one minute to release the flavor. Add the rice and saute for two or three minutes until the rice has absorbed the butter.
- Stir in the chicken stock and turmeric and reduce the heat to a gentle simmer, stirring only occasionally to be sure the rice isn't sticking. When all of the liquid is gone from the pan (about 10-15 minutes), turn off the heat and allow the rice to rest for 10 minutes before fluffing with a fork and serving.
- In the meantime, heat a griddle or grill pan over medium high heat. Add the olive oil to the pan and make sure it is evenly coated.
- Place the skewers on the hot pan making sure the surface of each component is making contact with the pan. Allow to cook each side, turning every three to four minutes.
- Place the hot skewers directly onto the rice when they are removed from the pan to allow the flavor to be absorbed by the rice. Serve hot.
