Kalbi: the best beef ribs you’ll ever taste

Or, my mom’s kalbi recipe (aka galbi)

My mom often hosts fellowship dinners for her Korean church at her house. The highlight of these dinners is the huge platters of grilled short ribs which are called kalbi or galbi in Korean. You can eat them plain off the ribs or cut off bits of the meat and wrap them with a bit of rice and kochujang (red pepper paste) in lettuce. One of our favorite ways to eat them when I was a kid was to take the meat off the bone and serve on a hoagie roll with a bit of mayo.

Kalbi is easy to make at home, the most difficult part will be finding the short ribs. There are two kinds of short rib cuts commonly available. If you can’t find them at your grocery store, ask at the meat counter if you can special order some.

Flanken style is cut across three bones and looks like a strip of meat with three eyes:

I’ve seen them occasionally at my regular supermarket and can reliably get them at the local Asian markets. You’ll want them sliced fairly thin, if it’s too thick the kalbi will burn before being cooked through. I would get about a 1/4″ thick rib if I liked my meat well done and up to about a 1/2″ inch cut if I liked it on the rare side.

The other way is simply beef ribs cut into 3 or so inch sections like this:

Note: you can sometimes find boneless short ribs that will look like the cut above, minus the bone (duh). You’ll prepare it much the same way. The bone in ribs require a bit of special cutting to be cooked on the grill. It’s hard to explain but basically you’re going to slice the meat away from the bone making it into a long strip that unfolds kind of like a Jacob’s ladder.

After you’re done cutting it will look like a bone with a long tail of meat.

See all that fat? You don’t want to eat that all the time, but man when you do, it’s good. This is the kind of meal that will leave you with satisfyingly greasy faces and fingers!

With either kind of rib, you’ll want to rinse them well before marinating because there can be little fragments of bone on the meat from when they were sawed. I did two different marinades for each batch, both are good and are interchangeable. As with all my recipes, feel free to adjust for your own taste! I am more a guideline type person than a rules type.

Kalbi Batch One:

8 lbs of flanken style ribs. I know this seems like a ton and there is no need for you to make this many! This amount fed my family two dinners (3 adults, 1 teenage boy, 4 small boys). My family eats a lot, though and my husband and oldest son hadn’t had these in ages and overindulged. Generally speaking, you’d have kabli as part of a larger dinner including rice and other sides, plus it’s quite rich and fatty. My mom always makes too much and then freezes a couple of meal sized batches right after putting in the marinade.

1 Cup Soy Sauce (we use Kikoman brand)

2 Cups Water

1 Medium Onion grated or shredded (can use food processor or box grater, you’ll want it juicier than you’d get from just cutting finely with a knife)

1/2 Tablespoon Black Pepper

1 Tablespoon good quality Sesame Oil (you might want to add more than this)

1/2 Tsp Salt (I’d wait to add this until after I mixed the rest of the ingredients and tasted)

1/2 Cup Brown Sugar (It does need to be a little sweet, but if you want to watch your sugar, start with 1/4 cup and then taste and add more. You don’t want it sickly sweet, but the sugar brings out the richness of the meat and counters the saltiness of the soy sauce)

5 Medium Garlic cloves, crushed

Mix all the marinade ingredients together, taste and adjust seasonings accordingly. Add meat. Marinate in refrigerator for at least 6 hours but we go overnight usually or even up to 48 hours (this recipe doesn’t have any ingredients like kiwi or cola that would really mushy up the meat so you can let the meat sit in it for quite a while)

When you are ready, prepare your grill and cook the meat over a medium hot flame. Beware of flare ups from the dripping fat! These cook really fast, probably 2 minutes per side. You’ll want bits around the edges to be charred but don’t overcook. Most Koreans I know like the meat well done, but my father and I like it medium rare.

Serve with hot Korean style rice (I use the calrose variety), kochujang, lettuce leaves for making bundles and any other Korean side dishes you can rustle up. Or you know, some steamed broccoli or something for nutrition. It’s all good.

BTW, one of the greatest kitchen tools known to mankind are kitchen shears/scissors. I use them to cut the meat into bite sized pieces for my little one or into bits to make lettuce bundles. It’s so much more efficient than trying to use a knife! Look for ones that pop apart and can be put in the dishwasher for easy cleaning.

Kalbi Batch Two

3 Lbs of bone in short ribs, meat cut away from the bone to form a tail (this would be enough for me, my husband and the 4 little boys – they could eat more but this would be sufficient!)

1 medium Asian pear, peeled

1 medium white onion

1/2 cup soy sauce

1 cup water

1/2 tablespoon black pepper

2 tablespoons sesame oil

1/3 cup brown sugar

5 cloves of garlic

Asian pear will add sweetness and help tenderize the meat. Other recipes I’ve seen call for kiwi to do this, but I’ve never tried it that way, maybe next time. I’ve also seen recipes that call for some sort of soak in soda to tenderize the meat, but again, I’ve not tried it. I don’t know, I think sometimes people forget this is meat and you’re supposed to need to chew it a bit to get it down.

Cut the pear and onion and garlic (if very large) into chunks and put them in the food processor or blender. Add all the other ingredients, whirr around until pretty much liquid and taste. Adjust seasonings if necessary and when it’s all good, pour over your meat. Marinate and grill as described above.

NOTES:

If you’d like, you can add 2-3 inch sections of spring onions to either recipe and cook them on the grill. They are so good!

If you don’t have a grill or don’t want to go through all the fuss, you can broil them or cook on the stove top on a grill pan. Beware, this will probably completely fill your kitchen with smoke unless you have a great ventilation system. You could also use something like a George Foreman grill.

You could use this same marinade for chicken.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this recipe for kalbi. Let me know if you have any questions or how it turned out! If you have a recipe for kabli, I’d love to see it!

Tagged as: beef, galbi, kalbi, Korean food, short ribs