Meat Jun 육전

Any long time folks from Hawaii knows about meat jun and it’s found at most Korean restaurants there. My earliest memory having it was a plate lunch from a Yummy Korean BBQ sometime in high school. At my high school, seniors were allowed to go off campus during lunch break and there was a Korean restaurant across the street that had a student special. If I remember correctly, and this was back around 2004-05, they had a student lunch special for about $5-7. For those that knew about it and could go off campus for lunch, they’d collect cash from their friends and make orders to pick it up at the restaurant. I’ve heard some others would charge an extra dollar just to get it for you if you weren’t their friends.

When I left for college in Wisconsin, there was a year when I had a friend who was half-Korean and stayed on campus a few extra days after the dorms closed before I went home. I stayed at his place for a few nights. His mom was so nice and asked me if I had Korean food before and I told her I really liked it. I didn’t know much about it back then, so really my exposure to Korean food were about three things, meat jun, kalbi, bibimbop, and kimchi fried rice. She said that she would be happy to cook any Korean dish that I wanted and at first I felt bad and wanted to be polite and told her something that she didn’t have to go out of her way for me. But I was used to people wanting to feed me because of how skinny I am. By this point, I started to associate meat jun with coming home to Honolulu on break and hanging out with friends at late night Korean joints. So I told her my favorite Korean dish was meat jun and she was really confused and told me she never heard of that before.

I remember feeling really embarrassed. I couldn’t make sense that out my exposure to Korean places as a teenager and into my early 20s were restaurants that pretty much all had meat jun on the menu in Hawaii. And then being told by a Korean immigrant who had no idea of this dish that I thought was a Korean staple. I never asked her to make kalbi because even back then, I knew it was the most expensive item on plate lunch menus. But when I asked her to make kimchi fried rice, she said that wouldn’t do with such a simple dish, so I told her she could make anything she wanted and I’m sure I would like it. She made bulgogi and it was excellent.

After that, I assumed that meat jun must have been one of these uniquely Hawaii dishes. I’ve noticed since living in Chicago and going to Korean restaurants there, the dish never popped up anywhere. And any Korean friends I’ve made since then, if I mention meat jun, they too never heard of it as well. So for about the last 10 years, I thought this was a unique thing from Hawaii.

So when it came time for me to do some research about this dish, at first I was trying to find out it and came across this video. The woman in it says that meat jun is popular in the city of Gwangju and is a specialty from the Jeolla province and Koreans outside of that province might not know about this dish. But if you google 육전 like mentioned in the video, you’ll find recipes from Korea about it.

From what I could dig up, it appears that recipes in Korea do a few things slightly differently that the Hawaii recipes don’t do. For one thing, many more Korean recipes include a step of blotting the meat with paper towels or also soaking the meat in water (before blotting) beforehand to draw out any blood where as recipes from Hawaii tend to skip this. While not always, it seems to be more common that the Korean recipes season the beef with salt and pepper before dredging. Some recipes make a soy sauce based marinade and this the most common preparation in Hawaii. The last thing that I never seen before from anywhere in Hawaii was how some Koreans add a garnish to one side of the meat jun so it’s fried into the egg batter.

At the time I wrote this, I bought a small pack of ribeye thin cut for bulgogi from H Mart. You can save more money by the pound if you buy a larger piece of beef and hand cut it yourself, but I don’t eat beef too often already. If you hand cut this and your knife skills aren’t the greatest, you can also use a meat mallet to flatten the meat out more.

This is a very simple and comforting dish to make. It’s also just nostalgic for me, so for this recipe, I’ll keep it at that and make it more in the local Hawaii style. The proportions for the marinade is likely going to be a little sweeter than what’s found in Korea. Shoyu-sugar is just one of these classic combinations found in a lot of local Hawaii cooking.

RECIPE:

Ingredients for meat jun
1/2 lbs beef, thin cut (use what cut you can afford so long as the beef does not contain a lot of connective tissue which is better used for soup, stews, and braises)
1 garlic clove, finely minced
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tbsp sugar
1/3 c flour
3 Eggs
Neutral oil

Mince the garlic and add this to a large bowl. Add the soy sauce, and sugar. Mix to dissolve the sugar and taste to adjust seasoning.

Slice your beef thin if it hasn’t been pre-cut for you. You can use a meat mallet to flatten them to your desired thinness as well. It should be pretty thin, about 1/16 inch thick.

Add the beef to the large bowl with the marinade and mix to combine. Set this aside to marinate while you prepare the rest.

In a large plate, add the flour for dredging.

In a shallow bowl, add the eggs and whisk them.

You can use a non-stick skillet or cast iron skillet. Heat the skillet over medium heat. When the pan is hot, add neutral oil to it. (Note that this dish does need to use more oil so the egg does not stick. It’s nowhere near as much as shallow frying, but add oil as needed.) Then reduce the heat to medium-low.

Take about 4 pieces of the beef or however much it takes to fill the pan in a single layer. Dredge them one at a time in the flour and dust off any excess flour. Then dip them one at a time into the whisked egg. Before transferring to the pan, let any excess egg drip off each piece of meat.

Pan fry on one side for about 45 to 60 seconds. When you see some blood start to pool on the top, that means it’s ready to flip. Pan fry on the other side for about the same time until the second side is seared. Transfer to a cutting board.

Repeat and add oil as needed to the pan to cook all the meat jun.

Slice and transfer to a plate. Serve with cho ganjang on the side and enjoy!

Ingredients for cho ganjang
4 tsp soy sauce
2 tsp rice vinegar
1 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp water
1 tsp Sesame oil
1 green onion, finely sliced

In a bowl, combine the soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, water, and sesame oil. Mix to combine and taste. Adjust seasoning as needed. (Personally, I like adding a small amount of water to help reduce the saltiness of the soy sauce.)

Wash and thinly slice the green onion. Add this to the cho ganjang just before serving.