Chicken simmered in water is hard to get wrong, so don’t be nervous about this one.
Buy one pack of cut-up chicken, simmer it 30 minutes, and you’re done.
Put mild mustard in the dipping sauce and it tastes like the dak hanmari restaurants serve.
Then cook instant noodles in the leftover broth instead of kalguksu… ah, it’s good.

At a glance

Ingredients

  • 1 chicken, cut up for dakbokkeumtang
  • broth vegetables (onion 1, potato 1, whole peppercorns 20, scallion 2 stalks)
  • seasoning (soy sauce1, salt1)
  • dipping sauce (chicken broth4, gochugaru2, soy sauce2, vinegar1, sugar1, plum syrup1, minced garlic1, mild mustard to taste)

Prep

  • wash the broth vegetables and cut them big

Cooking

  • simmer the chicken and the broth vegetables 30 minutes until tender
  • once tender, pull out the onion and scallion
  • add soy sauce and adjust with salt

Ingredients (serves 4)

Main

  • 1 chicken, cut into pieces — one supermarket pack of the cut sold for dakbokkeumtang
  • If you don’t like fat, pull the skin and fat off
  • For a boneless version, use chicken thigh meat

Broth vegetables

  • onion 1, potato 1, scallions 2 stalks, whole peppercorns 20

Seasoning

  • soy sauce 1, salt 1

Dipping sauce — numbers are tablespoons (1 tbsp = 15 ml)

  • chicken broth 4, ladled straight out of the simmering pot
  • gochugaru 2, soy sauce 2, vinegar 1, sugar 1, maesil-cheong 1, minced garlic 1
  • yeongyeoja 0.5 — add it a little at a time, tasting as you go
  • Mustard powder works in place of the paste.

Maesil-cheong is Korean green plum syrup, sold at Korean groceries; honey substitutes reasonably well.
Yeongyeoja is Korean mild mustard paste — Japanese karashi is the same thing. English mustard is close but sharper.
Gochugaru is Korean chili flakes, at H Mart or online.

Prep

  • Wash the broth vegetables and cut them into large pieces.
  • Put the whole peppercorns in a broth bag or a stainless mesh ball and you won’t have to pick them out later.

Cooking

  • Put the chicken and the broth vegetables in a pot, and add water until the chicken is just barely showing above it.
  • Bring to a boil on high, then drop to medium-high and simmer 30 minutes until tender.
  • When it’s done, fish out the onion and scallion.
  • Add soy sauce 1 and adjust the salt with salt.
  • If there’s too much fat on the surface, skim it off with a ladle.
  • Lift out the chicken and eat it with the dipping sauce and kimchi. Eat the potato too.

Notes

Water only until the chicken shows

Don’t pour in enough to submerge the bird. You want it poking slightly above the surface.
In a big pot, water reduces more slowly than you’d expect.
Add too much and the simmering drags on far longer than it should.

Season after the 30 minutes, not before

The soy sauce and salt don’t go in at the start.
How much the broth reduces while simmering varies enormously from pot to pot.
Season early and it ends up too salty or too flat. Look at how much liquid is left at the end and season then — that’s reliable.
And a slightly under-seasoned broth is fine, because you’re dipping the meat in sauce anyway.

The mild mustard is what makes it dak hanmari

The sauce gets both maesil-cheong and yeongyeoja.
The plum syrup brings a rounder sweetness than sugar alone can.
The mild mustard is the signature ingredient of a dak hanmari sauce. Without it, it won’t taste like the restaurant version.
Half a tablespoon is about right, but since you can always add more, it’s safer to go in stages and taste.

The onion and scallion come out at the end

Scallion and onion are essential to the broth, but they’re a stumbling block for children who won’t eat vegetables.
So they simmer long enough to give up their flavor, and then get fished out and thrown away before anyone eats.
The potato gets eaten with the meat or with the noodles, and the whole peppercorns either get picked around or go into a broth bag from the start.

Even my three boys, who normally won’t touch kimchi, put away a good amount of well-aged, crisp winter kimchi when dak hanmari is on the table.
It’s a perfect match. Don’t be stingy with the kimchi.

When the meat is nearly gone, cook instant ramyeon noodles in the leftover broth — like dessert.
Traditionally dak hanmari takes kalguksu, the hand-cut wheat noodles. But kalguksu takes a while to cook and soaks up a lot of the broth.
It’s fresh noodle, too, which is awkward to keep on hand. Switching to instant noodles solves all three at once.
Add a little of the dipping sauce, and some nights this is the part you’re waiting for.

For another soup, there’s Meat Doenjang-jjigae.