$13 Korean Soup Vs. $88 Korean Soup

Andrew, we're back at Chosun Galbi. Where we were in our season one Korean barbecue episode. Lots of fans said that that episode actually led them to try Korean barbecue for the very first time. So we thought, why not introduce more people to more types of Korean cuisine. We're really lucky in Los Angeles to have a ton of amazing Korean food. So let's take it up a notch. Tomorrow, first thing. Korean soups. Today on Worth It, we're going to be trying three different soups at three drastically different price points to find out which soup is the most worth it at its price. The food I never thought we would get to do on Worth It. We are on our way right now to one of my favorite, if not my favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. It is called Hanbat Seolleongtang, and they specialize in one product, and that is seolleongtang. Ox bone Korean soup with a very beefy, delectable taste. We're going to speak with Jong about how they make their soups. Just to show you how much I love seolleongtang, I actually have an entire album on my phone dedicated to seolleongtang. Okay. Do you want to see it? Ooh, wow. They look exactly the same. This is also fun because I can see your skill in photography improving. Also, we're going to be meeting one of my best friends, Megan Lee there. She is an actor, singer, songwriter. She actually grew up eating at this restaurant. In fact, one of my first times there was with her, so you know, it's the circle of life. She's actually your soup grandmother, if you think about it that way. Whoa, yeah. Is that making you my soup daddy? Hanbat is my favorite restaurant in LA. How did Hanbat get started? So seolleongtang is ox bone broth soup. Yes. Hanbat only serves one dish. One dish. Seolleongtang. That's it. Why do you want to just serve one thing? This is Megan Lee. Hi, guys. I will order the mix. I'm going to get the brisket. You should do Jung's favorite, which is the flank. That's exactly what I want to do. Okay, let's do it. You also get complimentary barley tea. Cheers. Thank you. The rice. Oh, it's so fast. Hanbat is your spot. Yes. Me and my family used to come here all the time. It's so crazy now that we're filming here. Mix. Mix is for me. Thank you. It smells so good. When it comes to Korean food, the stinkier it is, the more delicious it is and richer it is. We forgot the cheers. Oh. That's okay. For such a simple recipe, it has this insane depth of flavor that I can't explain. It's beefy in a way that steak can't be beefy. The flavor that's locked in the bones and cartilage that's not in straight meat cuts. Wow, you guys are professionals at this. Dude. Yeah, so we have all these garnishes. What should I be doing here? I love adding pepper. How much is enough green onion? Yo, I add a lot. I like my green onion. We have two different kinds of kimchi. This is just regular cabbage kimchi. This is a radish kimchi. I personally think the radish kimchi is the best. Oh, the radish is great. Oh, man. Eating it after a hot soup. I think pickle and meat is the greatest partnership in all of food. Pickle and meat. Are you the meat and you're the pickle? He's definitely the pickle. I am what happens when you combine pickle and meat. What I like to do is actually get a little bit of the sauce here and then pour it into the soup. Oh, really? You do that like halfway through your soup? Kind of changing it up as you go. Liquid cheers. Come on. We're going to be having our next soup a little bit later on, but first we're going to stop for what I think is one of the coolest places in all of Los Angeles. It's called Baru. So we're going to be having some kombucha and some cookies. I'm Mina. I'm one of the owners. Baru is the Korean word for bowl that Buddhist monks carry. The food is steeped in Korean ingredients, but it's a very diverse menu. We ferment our own drinks here. This is a tepache. Fermented pineapples. And then today we have lemon verbena yuzu kombucha. The sunoko cookie. And then we have our everything mochi, which is kind of our signature sweet. Oh, cheers. Whoa, whoa, whoa, yeah. Whoa. It tastes like pineapple cider. Oh my god. It's almost low-key bread. Soup fact. In 2012, the late Jonathan Gold published his article on the 60 Korean dishes every Angelina should know. He lists numerous soups, which include blowfish soup, My head is spinning with soups. This is what Korea did. What is that? Can you eat it? We'll make it a soup. Next. We're now on our way to, honestly, one of my favorite restaurants. It's called Spoon by H. Yoon is going to show us her pork belly dumpling soup. This is actually a dessert cafe. So I know we just had a cookie, but we're also going to be having some dessert there. Spoon by H. is a dessert cafe. We do a lot of things. There's sweet stuff, and we also mix Korean food. Why did you put this soup on the menu when you really are trying to make really delicious desserts? We started out as a dessert cafe, and then the regular keep asking me, Can you make this? Can you make that? And you're just like, sure. Yeah, because we're a really small, tiny, humble cafe. So it feels like second home, maybe? So today we're trying your pork belly dumpling soup. So how is your dumpling soup different from others that you might find? Traditional way is anchovy, so it looks a little clear. We mix all together, oxtail, pork bone, beef bone. It takes forever. We've both actually had this soup before. It's so good, we had to have it again on the show. I made my glasses steamy. Dumpling. That's a good looking dumpling. It's full of flavor, Steven. It's so rich. One of the things I love is the size of the dumpling relative to the bowl that you eat out of. Check out the pleats. You can tell that it was made with love. It's pleading me to eat it. It's so tasty. For me, this definitely falls into a category of you could eat it every day. It's so encouraging to eat. The food is encouraging. It's like roaring you on as you're eating. It's like, yes, eat it. You know what they say to encourage people in Korea? What's that? Fighting. You can do it. Keep it going. Annie's saying it in the right way. Fighting. We're at a dessert cafe, we should have some desserts as well. It's like a flower bouquet. Of grapes. Yeah. A little bit of Nutella drizzle and then house-made ice cream. You guys make your own ice cream too? Yeah. Are you serious? This is ridiculous. Yeah, this is the perfect example of the attention to detail. One whole grape, tiny slice put into it, tiny sheet of paper inserted into that. Oh my gosh. The whipped cream dissipated and it's still being held in place like a stone arch. This is some Da Vinci shit. You can't eat this. It's frustrating. Oh yeah. Whoa, wait. This is not your typical waffle. What? This is my first time having this actually. Really? Yeah. Dude, it is somehow fluffy and crispy. It feels like something that a spider would make. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? Spider, you think crawly bugs, but then you see its web and you're like, how could nature produce such a perfect shape? Someone check Yun for a radioactive spider bite. Peter Parker. More like something that I don't know. Spooner Man. Sorry. It's not in the game because it's a soup episode. I love that soup. I love how it is just a family doing their thing, killing it, but it does mean that sometimes it takes a little bit more time because there's all this love put into the food. So if you want to check out Spoon by Age, please go with a little bit of patience. Soup fact. Haejangguk literally means hangover soup, and it is a rich, beefy bone broth dish that can be served at any time of day. Annie, didn't you say that your mom used to make you that soup all the time? Were you just constantly hungover? What's going on? I was not a drunk baby. Now we are on our way to our last restaurant. We're going to see David Chang at Major Domo. He is going to show us their whole boiled chicken multi-course soup dish. Because he's a friend of the show, he's going to be joining us for our meal. Also because it's quite a large meal. This is a multi-course soup extravaganza. Call him by his real name, Baby Food. I will not. Okay. I just want to acknowledge, here we are again. You are a friend of the show. We've worked with you. Yes. But you opened this restaurant in the time that we last saw you on the show. Oh my god, I totally forgot about that. That's wild. When we opened up this restaurant, it was very important to me that we represented the diversity of Los Angeles without it being patronizing. I know Koreatown very well, but I don't want to do anything that was like, well, come here to eat Korean food. And I looked at it as almost like a Venn diagram, and we needed to find that overlap. So does that occur in this dish itself? Yes. Chicken that we boil, we serve it in two ways. Just the poached chicken breast, and then we pick the dark meat and serve that as a soup that comes after the white meat. Jude Parasickles is the executive chef. Jude's going to be cooking the food today. I wanted to serve something that's boiled because I grew up eating boiled chicken. I have to figure out how to present a dish that is interesting and cool because it's not what people expect chicken to be. So I kept on thinking the image was a trust-roasted chicken, right? It's beautiful, golden brown, and it's probably presented in a giant copper pot. And I'm like, I should just serve it like that, but boiled. When we first did this dish, the biggest complaint that we had is it takes too long. So we're like, okay, I'm just going to show them the chicken. Pick the meat, and then if we put all the chicken meat in, it's too much chicken meat. If I just put the dark meat in, I now have this white meat. Is there another poached chicken that I like a lot? It's like, of course. I love Hainanese chicken. For somebody who has no idea what Hainanese chicken is, what is that? How would you define it? It's just a poached chicken and then served over chicken rice. That's cooked in chicken stock. It's popular in Singapore and Malaysia. It's crazy how good it is. It's always dependable. And there was another dish by Gabrielle Camara at Conchamar in Mexico. She has this grilled fish. One side is a red sauce, one side's a green sauce. I was like, oh, serve the chicken breast that way. So we have a chili black bean sauce, ginger scallion. What is this rice? Did you say this is chicken rice? It's chicken rice, but it's not. I want you to taste it. I'm really curious. Thank you. Cheers. Mmm. It's good. You know what that makes me want to do? In Malaysia, you see all these old guys that sit like this. You know when they're eating chicken rice? It makes me want to do this. I get uncomfortable. It's annoying that this breast is so tasty. I know. Why are we roasting chickens at all? It's such a pain in the ass. It makes so much mess. But again, this is the byproduct. We've taken the fat from the soup and mixed it in with the rice. That's crazy. So this isn't the main course. This is just the byproduct of the soup. This dish alone, I would be totally satisfied. Sorry, I'm finishing this food too. Go for it. I'm honored. My mom would literally just put a whole chicken in a pot of water and just bring it to a rapid boil. The more I learned about Korean food, the more I realized, oh, that's the basis of a lot of different dishes. So if you roll out pasta and tear the noodles and you just cook it in the broth so it gives it the thickness and it gets cloudy, it almost becomes like chicken and dumplings. In the American South, the dish that I grew up in Virginia, I love that dish. But it's not. It's Korean sujebi. So all of a sudden now, we're talking about four different dishes in this dish. If you roast chicken on a rotisserie, all that beautiful juice just goes away. But if you cook it in a soup, you get all of the goodness. We're truffling the soup right now. So why do truffles make sense for this dish? Wow. Can I? This is the worth it amount. Please be impartial to the amount of truffles when you're judging this in your mind. Why do truffles work in this dish? I think they need to be activated with fat and heat. Seasonally right now, we have fava beans. We have spring peas. We have some morels. Wow. Cheers. Oh, I wasn't expecting it to be as clean as it is. Pure chicken. The broth itself tastes precisely like my mother's chicken soup. And that's a Ukrainian chicken soup. What's the name of it? Resil. Wow. The chicken's been domesticated the world over for millennia and millennia. Yeah. There's only so many ways you can cook it. So chicken soup around the world is pretty much the same thing. So I wonder, have you made this for your mother? Here's the thing. If I make it for my mother, guess what I'm going to make her? What? I'm going to make her southern chicken and dumplings. Really? And she's going to be like, this is CJB. And you're like, yeah, mom. It's CJB. Best part of your show. What a superb day of soup. Which soup was the most worth it to you at its given price point? This is a hard one. I think of all the expensive restaurants there are in Los Angeles, Major Domo actually offers some of the best value. This may not come as a soup prize, but I have to pick Spoon by H. That place, truly one of the best restaurants in all of Los Angeles. Who is your worth it winner? My worth it winner goes to Hanbat Salongtang. The moment I moved to Los Angeles and went to that restaurant, I was in love. That was actually the moment I came to appreciate Los Angeles. Adam, what's your worth it winner? Spoon by H. Annie, who's your worth it winner? Wow. Next week, we have what is often seen close by to soup. I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh!