Damn Delicious Korean Beef Bulgogi

Pre-marinaded Whole Foods Beef Bulgogi served with overpriced kimchi is one of the meals I cook on an embarrassingly regular basis. Would I say Whole Foods sells the best bulgogi in the world? Of course not. Is it still really tasty, though? Also no. But might I claim to enjoy it on the occasional night where all I can manage is throwing something in a pan and hoping for the best? Only for certain definitions of the word “enjoy”, and never with my hand on a bible.

This bad habit of mine is what led me to try a Korean Beef Bulgogi recipe from Damn Delicious. I wasn’t exactly enthralled by the 4/10 photo at the top of the page, but the soul and detail with which the author captured her mother’s weeknight routine pulled me in close. For a brief moment, her childhood became my childhood. In quick succession my nose was hit by the scents of sweet sauces, the sting of chlorine, and the smoke of a hot grill. The piece included a specific acknowledgment on the quality of her mother’s cooking, and how it was all but lost to the author as a member of the Korean diaspora, but I was a bit too white to fully appreciate it. It also included a basic explanation of what bulgogi was at all, which I was not quite white enough to require. Her battle-tested tips and tricks gave way to a simple recipe, which was just a few sentences long after paragraphs of preamble and a dozen ads.

The actual meal was pretty good. Hard to go too wrong with saucy beef. Since then I’ve already purchased more pre-marinaded bulgogi from Mr. Bezos, because I’m incurably lazy and this recipe took longer than the 0 minutes Jeff’s meat takes to be ready for action.