ALLCAPSCOOKBOOK: Spicy Korean Chicken and Pastry Soup (Patreon)

Spicy Korean Chicken and Pastry Soup

So you know how it’s super annoying to have to scroll through someone’s life story just to get to a recipe WELL HA HA THIS IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS YOU HATE.

But I have to explain why I made this frankenrecipe!

I’ve been home visiting my parents with the Smallest One over the last two weeks, and it is one of Those Houses where the TV is on for background noise/radiation all the time. So there I was, I say, there I was a-flipping through the shinny-channels looking for some quality Daniel Tiger shit, when I come upon some frumpy folk (the kind where everyone has the same color hair in the same bun, male or female, and that color is a decisive bronde, cooking in some kind of sad overcast disappointed-in-life uncle version of the Great British Bake Off tent. 

Oh, yum, that actually looks pretty good, thinks I, thinks I. I love chicken. I love pastry. I love soup. Match made in meaty heaven. And yet. 

AND YET.

LOOK. I don’t want to get into any racial stereotypes. This is an INCLUSIVE PATREON. Everyone’s culture is good and interesting and has a right to exist on this planet we all share. 

BUT YOU GUYS.

Nowhere in this recipe for chicken and pastry soup was there ONE FUCKING SINGLE SPICE. Technically, there was “salt and pepper to taste” but when Team Bronde said it, you kind of knew they meant “if you must put salt and pepper on it, it is allowed, but please don’t feel like you need to stretch your comfort zone with that kind of piquante flavoratory. That business is for city folk.”

So I came home wanting to make this soup, because it’s still THE GARBAGE PART OF WINTER and everyone is sick and chicken soup is all of the right things for that. But I kept thinking to myself…self, how can we, without offending anyone, make this soup, I don’t know, less a white people soup?

This is my hybrid solution. IT IS MINE NOW BECAUSE I MADE IT BETTER. I ended up here rather than somewhere else along the spice spectrum on account how how much I love me some spicy Korean beef soup (although full disclosure: I accidentally typed the name of this soup as “Spicy Karen Chicken and Pastry Soup" WHICH IS AMAZING and probably should actually be its official name) and happened to have a fat ol’ tub of Gochujang paste in my fridge. 

I should note that my partner and I had had a bit of a squabble while I was making this soup, and upon eating it, he remarked that it was so good, it had gone back in time and made me right, so he withdrew his argument. 

IT’S THAT GOOD.

Now, one final note. I made this by boiling the pastry, according to the original recipe. That’s fine, if you plan to eat all the soup in one night and frankly, that’s a lifestyle choice I support. But it does not reheat well. The pastry just sucks up all the soup and sits there like a dumb fat swollen dink until it slowly disintegrates out of shame. If you want leftovers, I suggest making everything up until the pastry boiling section, and then baking or frying the pastry instead, adding it individually to the bowls of soup and storing it separately for next day nomming. Bonus: ADDED CROMCH. 

HERE WE GO.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

SALT AND PEPPER TO TASTE LOL

1 teaspoon curry powder

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon cayenne

1 teaspoon brown sugar

1/2 cup milk

2 tablespoons melted butter

A bunch of chicken thighs, bone in and skin on, as soup must

4-5 cups chicken broth

1 cup water

1 onion or fennel, diced

1 stalk celery, basically destroyed, as small as you can dice it

2 red peppers

5-8 cloves garlic

1 small knob ginger, diced fine

3 tablespoons gochujang hot pepper paste

1 tablespoon Penang curry paste

Green onion to garnish

Optionals: egg, bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, mushroom, etc

DOING IT

Combine dry and wet ingredients in two separate bowls (flour, baking powder, spices/milk and butter) and slowly pour wet into dry, mixing with a rubber spatula until just starting to come together. Add a little more butter and milk if it seems too dry to want to make a dough ball (I had to.) Turn dough out on a floured surface and knead until it looks all dough like. Don’t over-knead. Put that bub in a bowl, cover in plastic wrap, and set aside.

Dry chicken with paper towels, season with salt and pepper, and fry skin-side down in butter or oil (your choice, I don’t judge). 3-5 minutes a side. If you ever cook anything, you know the drill. Remove to a plate. 

Scraping up that good brown stuff, add onion/fennel, celery, and red peppers. Sauté on medium until soft, then add ginger, garlic, and delicious pastes. MUSH IT ALL UP. Return chicken to pan, add broth and water, bring to boil, then simmer on low for about 35 minutes. 

While THAT’S ALL HAPPENING, roll out your dough into a 12-inch blob, fairly thin, maybe 1/8-1/4 inch. Cut dough lengthwise, then diagonally (I INCLUDED A PROCESS PIC OF THIS FOR YOU DON’T SAY I NEVER HELPED YOU OUT) to make pretty diamond pastry bits. 

Now, here you have a choice to make. Well, sort of here. You can have a soup with all the veggie fiber in or a clear red soup with just the chicken and pastry. Either way, take the chicken out of the soup, put it on a big plate to cool down. Then, FLOWCHART TIME. If you’re boiling the pastry because you plan to eat everything right now, strain all the veggies out of the soup. If you leave them in there they will bang into and stick against the pastry and you get a mess. You can add them back in at the end or not, depending on your soup type preference. If you’re baking or frying the pastry, skip this step if you want the clear soup, or just leave it all in if you want chunky.

If boiling pastry: add pastry diamonds to soup on low heat, cover, and simmer until pastry is tender and slightly puffed, 15 minutes or so. If baking, bake pastry at 350 for 15 minutes, then keep checking every 5 minutes until done. If frying, I’m pretty sure you can figure that out.

Remove skin and bone from chicken and shred the meat. Return whatever combination of veggies you want to soup. If you want to add any of the optionals now is the time (I like to fry mushrooms in a separate pan and add to soup at the last minute for extra toothsomeness)—highly recommend swirling an egg or two in there egg-drop soup style.

Garnish with green onion, and serve. If you made the pastry separately, add a handful to each bowl.

IT’S AMAZEBALLS. GO TEAM BRONDE.