Bap till you drop
In Korea, some foods trickled down from the Imperial palace and others have humbler origins. Bibimbap seems to be somewhere in the middle - a dish thought to have been introduced to Korean monarchy by the court of China, but also served to farmers in their fields.
This layered specialty consists of rice, meat or seafood, and seasoned vegetables, topped with an egg. It's as much a part of the Korean table as risotto is to Italy or paella to Spain. Unlike those dishes, bibimbap isn't made with uncooked rice, but rather with the cooked grains, which makes it more akin to Chinese fried rice. In this country, look on the menu of any Korean restaurant, and you'll find at least one version of bibimbap. In Korea, there are restaurants that specialize in the dish.
Ingredients vary according to region and season. Bibimbap can be served hot or at room temperature. A stone pot version, called dolsot bibimbap, is made in a well-seasoned stone bowl ($25 at Korean markets), which produces a crisp, crunchy bottom. When it's done, the rice continues to cook and crackle from the heat of the stone. Whatever the cooking pot, the dish always contains vegetables, which might include bean sprouts, carrots, cucumber, and spinach. After cooking, the ingredients are combined with a flourish and finished with sesame oil and spicy red pepper sauce. Hence the name bibim (mixed) bap (rice).
Every Korean mother prepares the dish. "Making bibimbap was a way for my mom to clean out the fridge of all the leftover side dishes," explains Kiki Oh, owner of the Bibimbab Cafe in London, made famous by Margaret Drabble's novel "The Red Queen," which starts in 18th-century Korea and ends with Drabble herself enjoying a bowl of bibimbap in Oh's cafe.
At home, bibimbap is a project. Unlike Chinese fried rice - where all the vegetables are stir-fried together and mixed into the rice - bibimbap's vegetables are cooked separately before they're added to the grains, which accentuates individual characteristics such as sweet, crunchy, salty.
Some cooks think mixing the dish at the end of cooking is important to how it tastes. At Seoul Food restaurant in Cambridge, the servers want you to enjoy the dish properly, so you may find your spoon pulled out of your hand and your dish folded together with the runny egg by one of the staff.
Boston University graduate student Kelly O'Leary is besotted with Korean food in general and bibimbap in particular. O'Leary, chef at the Bayridge residence in Back Bay, is in the Master of Liberal Arts program in gastronomy. "I just love the beauty of the dish," says O'Leary, who is writing a paper on bibimbap. "I eat a dish and then deconstruct it." Recently she attended a Korean food festival in New York, where a 500-pound bowl of bibimbap was served to hundreds of passersby in Manhattan's Koreatown.
To make the dish, use an old-fashioned American cast-iron skillet, which gives the rice its nice texture and holds in the heat as you serve it. Consider the presentation more relaxed than royal.
Debra Samuels is coauthor with Taekyung Chung of "The Korean Table." 