Dolsot bibimbap

For many years, my cooking and eating was firmly rooted in Europe - Italy, to be precise, with a few English, Irish and French smatterings. The gorgeous, fragrant simplicity of Italian food won me over when I was learning to cook, and I slept with Marcella Hazan's The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by my bed.

About a year ago, however, the balance was set a-jangling by a sudden, ravenous need for various Asian cuisines - a need set in motion by the great Fuchsia Dunlop and her book Every Grain of Rice, which I'll discuss more fully another time. Chinese was at the forefront - but closely followed by Japanese and, particularly, Korean food.

Not long ago, I wouldn't have had the faintest idea what to say if you'd asked me to name a single Korean dish. But Busan, a lovely little Korean restaurant in Islington (Highbury Corner, to be exact), changed all that. I went on my friend A's recommendation, in her company, and tried their yukae dolsot bibimbap, which is the raw-beef-hot-stone-bowl variation of what is apparently Korea's signature dish, a bowl of rice topped with various vegetables and Korean gochujang (chilli paste).

The dish comes, quite literally, in a phenomenonally hot stone bowl; you stir the raw beef, raw egg yolk and vegetables into the rice and chilli paste beneath them, and the heat of the bowl cooks the beef and egg as you eat, leaving you with what I can only describe as a creamy, spicy, savoury, beefy sort of rice pudding. Fragrant with sesame oil, the hot bowl ensures that the rice develops a crunchy, golden and truly addictive crust on the bottom - the ultimate prize of the whole dolsot experience.

I've had dolsot bibimbap many times since, mostly at Busan but also in New York on a recent visit to my boyfriend's family there. I wished I could recreate it at home - it really is wonderful winter-warmer stuff - but without a stone dolsot bowl and a great deal of courage, I wasn't sure where to begin. Some googling (as ever) gave me the solution, as outlined in this article over at the Kitchn. I gave it a go in my enamelled cast-iron sauté dish the other day, and I'll never look back. Busan need not fear losing my custom - but dolsot bibimbap is now firmly on the home-cooking menu, too.

Dolsot bibimbap - informed by helpful guidance from The Kitchn

• Cooked rice - I am going to be supremely unhelpful and adopt US-style measurements here, which I usually find INFURIATING AND NONSENSICAL. In this case, I do talk in cups, because I own a rice-cooker (and I don't exaggerate when I say that this appliance has transformed my cooking life), and I just load it up with ratios of rice and water. I made about 2 cups of (uncooked) rice - I think this is about 200-250g.
• An egg yolk, raw
• Korean gochujang - at least 2 tbsps, but you may well wish to add more
• 1 tbsp pure sesame oil
• 1 tbsp cooking oil

The next ingredients are basically just a medley of whatever vegetables you fancy. I used:

• 300g of chestnut mushrooms, sliced and briefly stir-fried with a drop of light soy and half a clove of sliced garlic
• 2 carrots, grated and stir fried with the mushroom mixture
• 2 scallions, sliced
• Half a sheet of nori seaweed, cut into strips (this is by no means necessary, so skip if you don't have any)
• half a bag of baby spinach from the supermarket, washed and shredded (although you can tell from the photos that I didn't shred it with great efficacy)

To assemble your dolsot bibimbap:

1. Take your pan - really, it needs to be an enamelled-cast iron sauté dish or casserole, or a cast-iron frying pan. You COULD, however, try it in a stainless steel pan (I wouldn't recommend non-stick as you will need to heat it to a very high temperature, and non-stick isn't suitable for this). Add the two oils - sesame and cooking - and heat the pan over a medium heat until the oils are hot, smell fragrant and coat the base of the pan evenly.

2. Add the cooked rice and smoosh it out over the base of the pan to cover the whole thing, as in the photo below:

3. The rice should sizzle and sound like it is frying nicely in the oil. Next, arrange your vegetables on top in nice little separate quarters:

 4. Cook for 5-7 minutes over the heat, so the vegetables warm through a bit and the rice has a chance to develop that gorgeous, golden crust. Take a peek at the end of this time under the rice to see if this is underway - if not, give it another couple of minutes.

5. Once you are pretty sure the rice is ready, bring to the table (make sure to use a heat mat below the dish - it will be HOT! So keep little fingers etc away) and top with the egg yolk and gochujang.

 6. Stir it all together, ensuring the egg is in contact with the heat from the pan to cook, and that you distribute the gochujang evenly. Spoon individual portions into rice bowls and gobble.

NOTES: yeah, you can probably tell that I over-cooked my rice crust and burnt it a bit. Just keep a close eye! Also, obviously, don't feed this to the elderly, children, pregnant women or anyone who has a compromised immune system as it includes raw eggs (and if you are going for the yukae version, also raw meat). I made a vegetarian version as I couldn't be bothered faffing around with meat and it was *almost* as gorgeous as Busan's meaty one (though not quite).