I only recently became aware of this soup through my friend Jennie’s nail salon. Jennie is Korean, but was adopted by a lovely German-American couple and raised in upstate New York. Suffice to say she did not develop a love of seafood there, something that the manicurists have a hard time accepting along with the fact that she doesn't speak Korean. When they found out that she was nursing her new baby, they insisted on giving her a container of this soup as well as some seaweed for making more. I ended up becoming the lucky beneficiary of their largesse due to the fact that I actually really like seaweed. Plus I seem to recall seaweed soup as being a traditional new mother staple for the women of the western islands off Ireland. I have a feeling that recipe goes more like, “Boil some seawater, then add some kelp and diced potatoes.” Not something you want to try to replicate when your local beach is the Long Island Sound and that stuff floating in the water may be seaweed or it may be toilet paper.
I checked with my friend Nicole, who is Korean-American, and she informed me that the soup is the number one food of choice for new mothers as well as students, children and the elderly because of its high iron and mineral content. Allegedly it is easy to make and keeps for a few days, so I thought it would be good to try this out ahead of the breastfeeding period and get it practiced to perfection so that even a sleep-deprived brain could throw it together.
Making this soup was my first foray back into cooking Korean food after a long hiatus. I do like eating Korean food, but making it puts me on very shaky ground. There aren’t as many reference points to the familiar as I would like, except when making pajon pancakes, which are very similar to omelettes. This point was driven home to me even more clearly after I visited two different local oriental markets,
Kam Sen in White Plains and
New Golden Village on Central Park Ave in Scarsdale. I had loose instructions on how to make the soup from Nicole and her mother, plus some vague recipes found on the internet, all of which were different, but none of them had specific brand names for the seaweed, something that turned out to be important later on. Maybe it was just these two markets, but I was able to find every type of Asian cuisine except for Korean. Thai soup stocks, Vietnamese fish sauce, Philippine coconut breads, Japanese jelly candies, Mystery “Jane-Jane” brand dried fish snacks that looked more like cat treats and Chinese everything, but no aisles of Korean products. Hmmm.
After some aimless wandering, I left New Golden Village with some New Year’s Rice cakes, which ended up not tasting nearly as good as they looked, an economy sized bottle of Tamari Soy Sauce and some pork & mushroom egg rolls. The egg rolls were a good call since they provided lunch for two days. Kam Sen was even more overwhelming, as it is twice the size of NGV, and my visit there was preceded by a trip to the DMV, always a frightening and exhausting experience. I ended up leaving Kam Sen with a
coconut bun and a jar of powdered fish, the former purchased mainly because I was glad to find something I recognized and the latter purchased mainly because of the juvenile reaction I had to the brand name.
Just visiting the stores made me tired, so I put off the actual soup making until today.
I started by soaking the seaweed I had in a bowl of water, as the one consistency found in all the recipes was to soak the seaweed ahead of time. What I did not count on was that I apparently had some sort of instant seaweed, which came to me via Jenny’s manicurist. Failure to understand Korean packaging strikes again! I put the first failure behind me and moved on to the next step, mincing three cloves of garlic and dicing the 0.97ths of a pound of flank steak I had into small cubes. The recipes all called for ½ lb of flank steak, but the store doesn’t sell packages that small, and I figured better to use it all than let it go to waste. I then sautéed everything in sesame oil in a stock pot until the meat turned grey/brown. Afterwards I added as much of the seaweed as I could (it was very gloppy and falling apart at that point), two diced green onions, one tablespoon of dried fish powder and a heap of salt. This was then cooked further with a bit of water until I added the rest of the water the seaweed was soaking in, about four cups, and brought everything to a boil and allowed it to simmer. I wasn’t too worried about the seaweed water having sand in it since clearly this was pre-processed seaweed.
The soup has now been simmering for thirty minutes, and I have to say, it is pretty spicy. Plus there is a tell-tale reddish tinge to the oil floating on the surface of the soup, which is odd since I don’t remember adding any chiles or hot sauce to the mixture. Now I am wondering if the seaweed or the fish stock had chiles added ahead of time. Ah. I see. It’s in the fish powder. Those sneaky Thai cooks. They have to make everything spicy.
Okay, well, the seaweed isn’t in identifiable strips, it’s more of a puree at this point and the spice is too much for my heartburn-y pregnant gullet. This may have to be the test batch that gets tossed. Shoot. Luckily I still have a month and a half to practice. Either that or start calling local Korean restaurants to see if I can get this soup as a take-out order by the gallon. I leave you with my friend Nicole’s recipe – anyone who can make this soup please send me digital photographs of the products so the functionally illiterate (i.e., me) can find the necessary ingredients.
(Nicole began her email to me by explaining why it will be awhile before this soup is necessary for her to start making…)
DUDE, my dad wrote in my holiday card, "This is the year of the golden pig, a very good year, children born of this year will lead successful prosperous lives"...and I was like, “Uh, Dad, it’s not happening this year okay?” And then he's like, “But not next year, it is year of the horse, a very horrible year to have children”.....then I was like, “Well looks like you might not have grandkids until 2009 then”.....and he wasn't very happy with that....
Ingredients
1 long bag of dried seaweed
1/2lb flank steak cut into cubes
2-3 cloves garlic, minced or ground into a paste
2-3 TB sesame oil
2-3 stalks of green onion, green parts diced
2-3 TB Soy Sauce or Salt
4-5 cups water
Put the seaweed in a bowl of cold water to soak for at least one hour. Rinse and cut the seaweed well, removing any sand and dirt. When I was little I liked to sort through some of the pieces, there's this one hard stem like piece that I used to hate and I would cut it out....anyways, my mom would rinse the now re-hydrated seaweed at least 4 times through, then you cut it down into more bite size pieces and set aside. Heat the sesame oil in a large stock pot over med-high heat. Add garlic and beef, stirring just until beef is browned, approx. 3-5mins. Add the seaweed, soy sauce or salt and ¼ cup water and cook for an additional minute or two. This provides the tasty base for the broth itself. There is a certain soup base soy sauce that they sell in the Korean stores that you add for more taste/flavor, if not just use sea salt. I think my mom said it’s the Haitai brand. (I didn’t find any Korean soup stocks, only Japanese ones) Then add the rest of the water and simmer for about thirty minutes to an hour. Just keep the soup at a low simmer; the longer you simmer the more flavorful the broth gets. When you're almost ready to serve, my mom adds some sliced green onions on top.
It’s really quite easy to make, probably 15 -20 min. to prep the ingredients then like 5-10 minutes to bring it all together, then just watching it as it simmers, and checking on the broth flavor.....
I like to add rice to the soup and eat it with kimchee....I can eat it all day long for days....but I've never had to, let alone eat it for weeks…
Well Nicole, I will let you know if I ever do make it the right way and manage to eat it for one day first. Then we’ll see about eating it for a month. Thanks for the invaluable head start girlfriend!
Jayce and Cosette, at the only point in time where they were the same size. 
