Jasmine Rice and Beef Skewers With Shishito Peppers and Angelica Shoots

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beef, skewers, jasmine rice, shishito peppers, angelica shoots, recipe, korean food

Spring is finally here, which means not only a wealth of baby vegetables but the arrival of spring namul, or greens and herbs. The stuff namul is made of was traditionally gathered in the wild on the mountainsides in Korea as the weather began to warm and the earth started sprouting green.

angelica shoots, dureup, shishito peppers, korean food

My absolute favorite early-spring green is dureup, angelica shoots, which I just discovered last year. It was the first pitch I successfully made at the magazine, having never actually tasted it before. We traveled to Gapyeong, a place I love, which is famous for its dureup and its hanu beef — a happy coincidence, since they pair so well together.

Dureup is a little hard to explain. The chef I traveled with compared it to celery because of its lightly bitter flavor and possibly its appearance — when you remove the greens from their spiky wooden stems, they look very much like mini celery. But it reminds me much more of okra, a comparison the chef agreed with once I mentioned it — being Italian, he was less familiar with okra and referred to it as an Indian vegetable. I’m from the South in the US — okra is a hometown food for me. So much so, in fact, that there’s even an oft repeated family anecdote about the vegetable. Okra has tiny spines and grows on tall stalks that you have to pull down to pick from, two facts that conspired against my mother one day when she was doing just that. When she released the plant, it whipped back and slapped her on the neck, leaving behind a welt that looked a little too much like a hickey. She had a hell of a time convincing my grandparents that the red splotch on her neck was the result of an inadvertent switching and not a call for an intentional one.

Dureup has the same thick texture near the stem and a similarly subdued flavor, especially when it is battered and fried, which is my favorite way to eat it. It’s only available for a very short window of time from March to April and is sold still attached to its spiny stems, which the farmer we met said helps keep it from wilting.

angelica shoots, dureup, shishito peppers, korean food

Shishito peppers are (obviously) better known by their Japanese name. In Korean, they’re called ggwari gochu. They are easy to spot because of their curly, wrinkly texture and are often referred to as being sweeter than ordinary green chili peppers. They don’t taste sweeter to me, but rather milder — there is a delicate crispness to their flavor with bright tones that may cause the illusion of sweetness. That having been said, if you happen to get a hot one, it will be really, really hot. Apparently a single shishito pepper plant can produce peppers of wildly varying spiciness. Their flesh is thinner than that of regular peppers, making them a popular choice for jorim, or braising in soy sauce, because they can be braised in a shorter amount of time and therefore retain some of their crispness.

The yellow dust has been wreaking havoc on my sinuses, which has had me stuck inside the last couple of days, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy spring. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of fried dureup, but I was looking for a new way to combine it with beef without getting too complicated and overriding its flavor. I also had some ggwari gochu and mushrooms on hand, so I decided to make ggochi, or skewers. Since the skewers were going to be simple, I decided to jazz up the jasmine rice a little, adding ginger, mint and turmeric, as well as some of the peppers, thinly sliced.

beef, skewers, jasmine rice, shishito peppers, angelica shoots, recipe, korean food