Your new favorite drinking snack: Korean buldak
This Korean dish really combines the best of both worlds: spicy chicken and cheese. Buldak literally means fire chicken, so consider yourself warned. But if you like a bit of heat, you should definitely try this dish at least once.
In Korea, it’s standard café food: fire chicken, also known as buldak. It consists of chicken thighs marinated in a spicy gochujang sauce, topped with a layer of melted mozzarella. Add a beer and you’re ready to eat.
Different peppers
For this spicy chicken-and-cheese combo, you don’t have to travel all the way to a Korean café—you can easily make it at home. Different peppers are used in this dish to build up the heat. There’s Korean chili paste gochujang and chili powder gochugaru, which is also used for kimchi and can simply be found at an Asian grocery store. You’ll also need two red chili peppers. Mix them with chicken stock, soy sauce, sesame oil and rice syrup to create a sticky, spicy sauce.
With cheese
The chicken is traditionally grilled on the barbecue, but you can also prepare it in the oven or a pan. As a finishing touch, sprinkle mozzarella over the chicken and let it melt. The melted cheese takes the sharp edge off the peppers and, of course, adds wonderfully creamy deliciousness.
To turn your dish into a real spectacle, flambé it at the table, as Jen Phanomrat does in this video:
