Korean Fire Chicken | Recipe | Buldak | 불닭 | Easy Asian Home Cooking

This recipe is easily my favourite Korean dish of all time. I can't even tell you how many times my friends and I on a Saturday or Friday night have sat around eating plates and plates of this incredibly, incredibly spicy chicken. I call it fire chicken but the Korean name is Buldak. For this recipe I'm using the Le Creuset Shallow Casserole from the Colours of Spice range and that colour is really going to match the vibrant red of this fire chicken sauce. This is a really good pot to use for this dish because the cast iron is going to give me very even heat. Cast iron's not just for slow braising, that even heat because we've got a lot of different sugars that are going into the sauce here, the even heat's so important to make sure we don't get hot spots that are going to burn that sugar and caramelise too early. These are my ingredients here. Firstly I've got a whole chicken that I've cut up into pieces on the bone. The bone's really good to keep it nice and juicy and a couple of little ingredients to marinate that with. Just some soy sauce, some sake and then some black pepper as well. The real action though is in the sauce. It's this incredibly delicious complex sauce that matches a couple of different areas of heat with a couple of different areas of sweetness for a beautiful complexity. Two ingredients you may not have seen before are this and this. This is gochujang, this is a Korean fermented chilli paste and this is Korean red pepper powder, very important as well. You can find this in both mild and hot varieties and you can use that to determine how hot or mild your dish is. I prefer it quite hot so I'm using the hot variety here. This is what they look like. That's the gochujang, the chilli paste and this is the Korean chilli powder. It's got a really vibrant red colour and that's what I'm looking for in this dish. A few more areas of chilli and sweetness to go through this because it gives you those different layers of spice and also of sweetness as well. I've got a bird's eye chilli here, you can use one, two, three, as many as you like or even leave them out altogether. Some honey, sesame oil, a bit of sugar some soy sauce. This is hot English mustard, you can use Japanese karashi or Korean mustard as well. Some onion, nashi pear and also some garlic as well. So you can really see where the complexity comes from here. If you look at sources of heat, I've got the bird's eye chilli, I've got this Korean chilli paste, the chilli powder as well and of course the mustard that's going to give us a good heat to it. There's also some heat coming from the pepper that we're going to use on the chicken to be honest and then you look for the areas of sweetness and you've got sugar, honey, the pear here is going to be a really nice vibrant sweetness to it and when you layer all of those layers of flavour on top of each other, the complexity is exactly what you're looking for. So let's get started. I've got the whole chicken here on the bone and all of that can just go into the bowl. Some soy sauce, a bit of sake, you could use vodka as well and then quite a bit of ground black pepper. Let's get a glove on, give that a really good mix around. Just leave that to one side and now we're all about the sauce. Just cut this pear and onion into a few chunks to help it in the processor. Garlic and all you've got to do is just throw the rest of it into the blender and now it's time to cook. Now I want to get this shallow casserole really hot first before I start cooking. So just on a medium high heat, leave that on for a few minutes so that nothing sticks to it when I put it into the pan. A touch of oil going in. Now I can start with these chicken pieces. Cooking on the bone really does give you a huge amount of flavour and texture. It keeps everything nice and moist. It's nicely brown now so I just need to grab my fried chicken sauce and I'll throw all of that over the top. Turn the heat down a little bit because I don't want it to burn too quickly because it's quite a thick sauce. Just keep rolling that chicken through it. I just need to cook this just for about five minutes until the sauce turns a really deep red. You can moisten it with a bit of water if you need to. It starts to catch a little bit around the pan. That's pretty much done. Just scatter with some spring onion. Then I like to serve it with some shredded cabbage dressed with some mayonnaise, some perilla leaves as well and maybe a bit of pickled daikon radish.