Food Ink 24
Last gukbap pop-up tomorrow! Plus, a recap and a teaser...
(5 minute read)
Hello food friends!
September has been a wild month with my gukbap pop-up series going on. Last Friday was the third installment in our September series where we're serving gukbap, a traditional Korean dish of rice served in hot broth with thinly sliced meat, scallions, and other toppings. Our featured topping has been a chili crisp and the combo has been a big hit! Tomorrow is our last run of the series, details below...
But first, let me tell you about last week. It was our first time serving pork gukbap - pork broth with thin slices of pork shoulder. People loved it! Including the chili crisp maker himself, James Park. He and his friends, all food writers/producers, absolutely LOVED the food and raved about it to me for a good 10 minutes! It was so validating (and relieving 😮💨) to hear, and the enthusiastic praise made me feel much more confident about where this is going.
Here's a couple photos they took:
Again, tomorrow (Friday, September 29) will be the last run of the series! We're doing pork one more time, and I'm not sure why but I'm even more excited for this one. Maybe it's because I was able to dry brine the pork shoulder for two whole extra days!!! It's going to be so tender and flavorful 😋
If you haven't been able to make it yet, this is your last chance:
Korean Gukbap x Chili Crisp Pop-Up
at Filthy Diamond (679 Knickerbocker Ave)
Friday, September 29
7pm till late
See this Instagram post for all the details, plus more mouth-watering photos from last week:
I've learned a lot throughout this experiment and it's helped me operationalize some components of the broth-making. Preparing the gukbap dish each week, though not the main focus of my Heart & Seoul Food Co project, has been a great forcing function through which to optimize my kitchen time (I'm currently writing to you from the kitchen, taking advantage of some inactive cooking time while my pork shoulder slow-roasts in the oven).
Tuesday was another fun experiment: our first ever market test! We were invited by Our New Way Garden to be part of an indoor farmers market they organized at the Pepsico office in Purchase, NY, where over a thousand employees report to daily.
We set up a broth station offering a sipping seolleongtang, our Korean-style beef bone broth, as well as a creative new matcha drink we made using our broth as a base. Broth and matcha might sound strange together, but it is strangely delicious! Though we'd only recommend it with our style of broth, which has a rich umami without any seasoning so it complements the sweet earthiness of a good quality matcha really well. Add coconut milk, vanilla, and raw honey (from just down the street) and YUM! It was really fun to see people's quizzical reactions from "broth-based matcha" turn to happy surprise once they tried it.
Here's a couple photos from the market:
Finally, I'm not QUITE ready to announce this yet but wanted to give you all a teaser / first peek... After James so thoroughly enjoyed my pork gukbap, and a container of beef broth I sent him home with, he threw out some big ideas on how to promote my Korean broth, showcase its versatility, and get it out there. One idea was a big broth-themed event where we would invite chefs and other food brands and have them incorporate our broth into a dish for people to try, and then attendees would vote on the best dish. I'm trying to figure out if/how/where we can make that happen, so if you have any ideas, please send them my way!
As part of that same conversation (where James said he wanted my broth on subscription 😂) I thought that I could at least start to do some hyper local delivery or pick-ups while waiting on the permitting to fully commercialize the product. It may not be a subscription, but I'm thinking pre-orders online to sell out each batch I would produce, and then working out some sort of delivery or setting up pick-up locations.
If you are interested in buying my Korean bone broth, made from 100% grass-fed cows raised on lush, open pastures in New York, sign up with your email at the bottom of this page and you'll be the first to know about pre-orders.
That's all for now!