I wrote last week about namul, green vegetables and herbs that are traditionally gathered from the wild in Korea. One of my absolute favorite bom namul — or spring greens — is dallae, Korean wild chives, a kind of tiny wild onion that is native to East Asia.

Whenever dallae was soon to come into season, I tried to get my co-editors to let me do a story on it, but they felt that dallae just wasn’t interesting enough. I beg to differ, and now we’re on my turf. It’s my blog, and I’ll write about dallae if I want to. And this time, I don’t even have to pretend to be a chef.

Let me back up for a minute and tell a little story. One of my clearest memories from early childhood is the scent of wild onions. My great grandmother lived in a wooden house by the railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere, Alabama. My grandmother used to take me to visit her once or twice a year, and some of my best childhood memories are from that time — bobbing for green apples we plucked off the trees in the yard with my third cousins, fishing in the pond out behind the house with rods we made from young tree branches, catching fireflies in a jar to keep by my bed at night, and watching my great grandmother’s weathered hands as she used the fat she collected off the meat at dinner the night before to make the best biscuits — by miles — I’ve ever had in my life, moving her fingers around the bowl of flour with the expertise that comes from repeating a task every morning for 70+ years.

One afternoon in early spring, I was sitting out in the yard with my grandmother watching the trains go past, when a powerful smell blew over on the wind. Since grandmothers know everything, I asked mine where it was coming from. She walked me over to the nearby hillside and showed me where clusters of scapes were growing up through the grass. “Those are wild onions. That’s what you’re smelling.” Wild onions? Onions just growing in the grass? I hadn’t been around for many years at that point, but I’d met enough onions by then to know that they didn’t smell like that. “No, these are different. They taste so strong that you can’t even eat them.”

What I remember the most is not being able to tell if I liked the smell or not. It was pungent — overpowering — but also intriguing. There was something dangerous about it — just repellent enough to be somehow enticing.

It was not unlike the smell of kimchi, or any number of other Korean foods. Maybe part of the reason why I’ve fallen so much in love with Korean cuisine is because so much of it has that same quality. Cheonggukjang (fast-fermented soybean paste), gochujang (red chili pepper paste), garlic and chives — it all seems a little forbidden, like maybe it’s a bad idea, but you’ll never know unless you try.

When I stand over a bowl dallae, shucking the outer skins on each tiny bulb, that same smell wafts up toward me and takes me back to that time. The scientific name for dallae is Allium monanthum. As a member of the Allium genus, it’s a relative of garlic, onions and chives. The scapes are like a more potent version of garlic scapes or chives, while the bulb resembles a teeny, tiny onion. They are extremely aromatic, but not as overpowering as wild onions. The bulbs are shucked, and they are usually seasoned and eaten raw, added to a simple soy sauce concoction, or used in place of chives in soups like doenjangguk (fermented soybean soup).

Traditonally, bom namul is seen less as food and more as medicine. It’s meant to help the body recover from a long, cold winter of minimal nutrition. Dallae is still attributed with restorative properties, and is also said to be good for stomachaches. Boil some in vinegar, and you have a treatment for bug bites or abscesses.

My favorite way to eat dallae is in a simple muchim. The verb muchida in Korean means to mix in, or season, and this muchim sauce is good for pretty much any green vegetable. A combination of soy sauce, red pepper flakes, sesame seed oil, sesame seeds and maesil cheong. Now, hang on — what is maesil cheong? You know the beautiful flowers that bloom across Korean in early spring that most people call plum blossoms in English? Those are maehwa, the beginnings of what will later become maesil, an East Asian fruit usually referred to as Chinese plums or Japanese apricots (poor Korea — how many times am I going to have to refer to a native Korean plant by its Chinese or Japanese name?). In fact, the tree is related to both plums and apricots, but is not strictly either one.

I was lucky enough t0 get to do a story about maesil last year, and it was probably one of my favorite all year long. We went down to Gwangyang to meet Hong Ssang-ri, who is commonly referred to as the mother of the maesil, and she sent me packing with a huge bag full of maesil products. Now I always have a bottle of her maesil concentrate in my cabinet.

If you can’t get your hands on any maesil syrup, don’t worry — you can replace it with sugar. But if you can… I really recommend it.

Back to the muchim. Every time I make this sauce, I’m tempted to just sit with the bowl under my nose for hours. The roasted scent of the sesame seed oil, the spicy richness of the red pepper flakes, the syrupy sweetness if the maesil, and of course, we all know the flat, salty tones of the soy sauce — it’s an incredible combination, and when you mix it in with a big bowl fresh dallae, it doesn’t get any better than that.

Continue reading Dallae Muchim: Korean Wild Chives in a Spicy, Savory Sauce