Bulgogi, any way you slice it
In a decades-old spiral-bound police community cookbook, Songza Park’s recipe for “BUL KOGI (Barbecued Beef )” calls for 2 pounds of sirloin steak that you have to slice “very thin on the bias” before scoring each piece with an X.
In 1965, when Park immigrated to the United States from South Korea, she had no access to Korean grocery stores, where today entire cases are dedicated to presliced meat often labeled “bulgogi beef.”
“Back then, you couldn’t just buy bulgogi beef like you can now,” she said. “You got a chunk of meat and had the butcher slice it for you.” Or, if there wasn’t a butcher, you did it yourself.
For Park, a forensic chemist who has since retired, bulgogi was a weeknight workhorse, even without the convenience of presliced meat.
An adaptable staple of Korean cuisine, bulgogi is most often made from thin slices of marinated and grilled beef (though sometimes pork and less commonly chicken). If you grew up in a Korean household, then the dish wasn’t just occasional barbecue; it was dinner on the regular, a quick pan-fry on the stovetop.
Just as there is no one way to make kimchi, there is no one way to make bulgogi. Versatility is a chief characteristic of the dish.
Variations on the original grilled preparation hint at the many ways in which bulgogi has, over the years, become culinarily both as a noun (referring to a specific dish) and an adjective (summarizing a flavor profile). As an adjective, bulgogi describes the combined taste of soy sauce, garlic, ginger and sugar, among other ingredients, depending on how you cook it.
This expansive definition has made room for delicious innovations. Where bulgogi is a noun in bulgogi cheese steaks, it’s an adjective in bulgogi eggplant, which coats its main ingredient with a garlicky, soy-tinged sauce, sticky with sugar. Bulgogi means “fire meat” in Korean, but vegetarian alternatives allow the sweet and salty flavors of the heirloom dish to sing in any application, even meatless ones.