LA kalbi
a quick weeknight dinner of korean-style beef shortribs
✨ Welcome to Singapore Noodles, a newsletter dedicated to celebrating Asian culinary traditions and food cultures. Every Monday, you’ll be receiving a tasty mix of food history, stories, and recipes straight in your inbox. Archived recipes and other content can be found on the index. This newsletter is 100% reader-funded; each paid subscription supports the writing and research that goes into the newsletter, pays guest-writers, and gives you access to all content and recipes. Thank you for being here and enjoy this week’s post. ✨
It’s officially barbecue season here in the Netherlands and, even though we don’t have an outdoor grill, our favourite mode of cooking dinner now is to marinate a protein, sear it, and bring the pan sizzling to the table to emulate the experience. The shortribs, or kalbi 갈비, is our current favourite, bringing to mind one of the best things we ate while on holiday to Germany: a hotplate of kalbi — sticky and caramelised in its soy and apple marinade — from a Korean restaurant in Frankfurt.
Traditionally, Koreans barbecue with English-style shortribs; that is to say that each rib comes as a thick chunk that is attached to a bone. To help the ribs cook quickly, cooks butterfly the meat to form a continuous long and thin strip, sprinkle over the seasonings, then roll it back into its original shape (popular Korean food Youtuber Maangchi demonstrates this in a video). When Korean immigrants who had moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s couldn’t find what they were used to, however, they improvised with what was available: flanken-cut shortribs, or shortribs cut in the German-Jewish style. These are cut across the rib bones into thin strips that come with three or four short sections of bone, allowing for the meat to be able to cook much quickly than English-cut ribs. When Korean cooks brought this ingredient into their kitchens and prepared it with their traditional marinades and seasonings, a Korean American dish known as “LA kalbi” was born.
Shopping and prepping the beef
If you’re looking for flanken-style shortribs, your best bet to find them would be at an Asian grocer or Korean supermarket. Otherwise, Hispanic butchers would have them, where they go by the names “asado de tira”, “tablitas”, or “costilla de Res”. That said, any butcher that sells short ribs should be able to cut them flanken-style for you.