Korean buldak or ‘fire chicken’ is a delicious dish of spicy, quickly braised chicken meat. Cheese buldak takes the deliciousness to maximum covering the chicken with a layer of melted, bubbly cheese.
What is buldak?
Buldak means ‘fire chicken’ and it is quite fiery indeed. This Korean dish is a relatively new addition to the global cooking consciousness, as it became popular in South Korea in the early 2000s.
So if you were visualising Sunja, the protagonist of Pachinko, cooking buldak on her market stall in the 1930s, you’re not quite right. She might well have been cooking spicy chicken, but did not call it buldak.
Buldak is chicken cut into bite-sized pieced, barbecued or braised with hot spicy sauce. It is supposed to be super-hot, as the name suggests, but if you make it less so, according to your taste, it will still be a buldak – as long as the Korean spices are used.
Stock up on Korean spices!
The spices are gochugaru, the red chilli powder and gochujang, the red chilli paste with fermented soybeans.
They are both becoming popular in western cooking, and deservedly so. Especially gochujang, the paste, is extremely versatile and depending on the brand or variety, it doesn’t always have to be unbearably hot.
Buldak chicken, origins and options
It started with food trucks and real fire pits, over which chunks of chicken in the hot and spicy sauce-marinade were cooked in the streets of Seul.
No fire pits are required when cooking it at home, obviously, but just a frying pan that can be also used under an oven grill.
The dish is often augmented with Korean rice cakes, teokgukyong-tteok, and melted cheese. The latter addition, obviously, makes it completely irresistible. A skilletful of spicy chicken chunks covered with bubbling, molten mozzarella? Oh yes please, every day!
My version is not too oppressively spicy and sadly without the rice cakes which are nigh on impossible to obtain in the UK. But I’ve added mushrooms instead which work very well. Because the only thing better than spicy cheesy chicken is spicy cheesy chicken and mushrooms!
Also, I have to admit that the dish is known in my house as ‘cheese bulldog’. How could I resist such a wonderful malaprop?
How to make my cheese buldak?
It is such an ingenious way of cooking chicken. Chicken breast chunks, the usually dry and boring meat, are both marinated and sauced up with the mix of spices and aromatics, cooked in a frying pan but with a splash of water so they don’t burn.
The sauce-marinade is made by mixing gochujang paste with grated or pressed garlic, fresh ginger, brown sugar and soy sauce, and chilli powder or flakes.
Gochugaru should be used for authenticity, but if your stock of Korean ingredients only stretches to gochujang (which admittedly is more versatile unless you make kimchi at home), replace gochugaru with chilli flakes and red pepper flakes for a balanced mixture.
That combination serves to coat and marinate chicken chunks and, per my choice, mushrooms cut into similar sized pieces.
They don’t need to sit in the marinade but can be cooked straight away: in a frying pan suited to also go under the grill.
Cooking will take all of ten minutes, followed by covering the pan with cheese slices and transferring the lot under preheated grill.
Three minutes should be enough for the cheese to melt, as the pan was hot to start with. A sprinkling of spring onions, a bowl of freshly steamed rice on the side and an amazing feast is ready.
Cheese for buldak
Cooking (low moisture) mozzarella is recommended by both the popular Korean cooking YouTuber as well as New York Times.
But other types of melty and stringy cheeses will be fine too, such as asiago, fontina or provolone. Cheddar is going to be too runny and too sharp in my view but gruyere or edam – why not.
More Korean recipes
Gochujang chicken, spicy and sweet Korean stir fry with gochujang, fermented chilli paste based sauce. Gochujang is your next go-to store cupboard ingredient, and this stir fry will become a firm fixture in your menu.
Korean BBQ-style oven baked meatballs with sweet and salty glaze, super easy and mega tasty. With old fashioned Ritz crackers to bulk out the beef mix!
Basic kimchi is made with Napa cabbage, called Chinese leaf in the UK. To make kimchi, you salt the cabbage, then add spice paste made from gochugaru, the Korean chili powder, fish and soy sauce and leave to ferment for up to a week.
More spicy chicken recipes
Orange chicken, spicy, fresh and sweet, ready in twenty minutes including all the chopping, is an easy stir fry lighter and healthier than the orange chicken from American Chinese restaurants. Especially delicious if you top the dish with caramelised orange segments.
Oven cooked chicken shawarma, fragrant with spices, is made from chicken thigh pieces marinated overnight and threaded on skewers. Serve with a warm flatbread for the home-cooked equivalent of beloved Middle Eastern street food.
Easy chicken Creole with chicken breast chunks and homemade Creole seasoning, it is best served with rice or plain tortilla chips.