Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
This week, I’m continuing my deep dive into the final foundational sauce of California Cuisine: soy sauce. Today, I’m featuring a delicious soy sauce-based demi-glace to go with a Korean comfort-food classic, hamburger or “Hambak” steak.
Years ago, I tutored a lovely woman who was of Chinese and Korean descent. She was an avid cook and we regularly swapped recipes. She gave me a recipe for hamburger steak and said that Korean cooks were very proud of their hamburger steaks. This confused me because when growing up, “hamburger steak” meant a pound of hamburger that mom had doctored with some salt, pepper and probably Worcestershire sauce and fried in its own fat in a skillet. She usually served it with mashed potatoes and frozen green beans. It was perfectly fine, but she made it on a night when she had no time to cook and needed something basic, easy, fast and most importantly, would fill up her three hungry children’s stomachs on a tight budget.
I made my student’s hamburger steak recipe and it was delicious, but not at all what I had grown up with. Instead, it included a mix of pork and hamburger, breadcrumbs soaked in milk, sautéed onions and, of all things, ketchup. I have long since mislaid her recipe, so I looked up Hambak steak recipes and found that most, if not all the recipes, include ketchup in the mix. This was very puzzling to me and I decided to do a little research to understand why Koreans were so fond and proud of their Hambak steak and, honestly, why they always include ketchup–a condiment that to me is a bit of a toss-away–I don’t even keep it in my house. My research led me down a little rabbit hole, but an interesting one:
Toward the end of, and just after, the Korean war, American military serving in Korea, who were homesick for food from their home country, introduced hamburgers to the Korean population. They caught on, but beef was scarce and expensive in Korea, especially at that time. Desiring to enjoy hamburgers more widely, the Korean people substituted more readily available meats, like pork, or even surplus SPAM rations, along with bread crumbs (or flour), milk, onions and basically anything to stretch the meager and costly amount of beef they could get, and made hamburger, or Hambak steak. While the American military slapped the beef patty between two buns and added condiments such as mayonnaise and ketchup, the Koreans traditionally served the meat patty with a scoop of rice and topped it with a fried egg and sauce–either ketchup/tomato-based or, as with the recipe I’m sharing today, with a soy-based demi-glace. Needless to say, hamburger steak in post-war Korea, was a luxury food and probably only eaten on special occasions. It has enjoyed a resurgence in nostalgic popularity in the recent decades and is now a comfort food staple for Koreans.
My student took me shopping for the ingredients before I tackled her recipe and introduced me to an Asian market where they sold ground pork and ground beef packaged together in a hamburger steak meat kit. She carefully examined the ground beef to make sure it contained the proper fat content–at least 80/20, but 75/25 was actually better.
Hamburger steak should have a soft texture–many of the recipes I found described the texture as “melt-in-your-mouth,” which is quite different from our American expectation of a hamburger patty, which tends to be more firm because it includes few fillers. I made several versions of hamburger steak and found that I prefer a slightly firmer texture–softer than meatloaf, but not as soft as at least one of the recipes that I tried.
This is a fun, tasty and easy weeknight meal. It is sort of an individual meatloaf patty, but has a smoother texture and is a decidedly more elegant and elevated take on either what we think of as a hamburger patty or meatloaf. And the demi-glace gravy is a lovely top-off to this comforting meal. Enjoy it with rice and steamed, fresh green beans.
Join me again later in the week when I will share more fun menus from my California kitchen.
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
