When I travel I like to bring home cooking souvenirs; a palella pan, saffron, and many tins of paprika from Spain, duck fat and preserving jar rings from France, Marlborough flaky salt harvested from shallow pools near the Archivist's Grandad's house in the South Island of New Zealand; cookbooks too. A trip to Korea is not on the cards any time soon, so a mission to Koreatown at the south end of Sydney's Pitt St was necessary to acquire some new regional cooking tools.
After visiting every Korean grocer between Golburn and Bathurst Streets, admiring fermented stuff and purchasing a variety of chilli products, I finally found two stone pot bowls, made of smooth Korean granite, $25 a piece. Pressed for time I carted my booty to the Opera House to enjoy Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings and then back to Central Station for an uneventful bus trip to Canberra.
The stone pot is essential for making the delicious scorched rice that characterises dolsot bibimbap (돌솥 비빔밥); a current food obsession of mine. My Korean cookbook - The Korean Table by Taekyung Chung and Debra Samuels - advises that you can also get crispy rice by preparing bibimbap in a pre-heated cast iron pan - but this isn't such a great solution if you want individual servings and to enjoy the ritual of breaking the egg yolk and stirring the artfully arranged namul (나물) through the rice as it sizzles.
Preparing the Stone Pot
To season the stone pot before it's fist use, fill the bowl 1/3 with salty water and heat in the oven at 200°C until the water boils. Then carefully remove the bowl from the oven, tip out the water and place the bowl on a heat proof surface. Paint the inside, rim and outside of the bowl with sesame oil or any other edible oil until oil no longer permeates the stone. Wipe off the excess oil with paper towel.
To make dolsot bibimbap, preheat the oven to 230°C, then heat the bowl for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush with sesame oil, press cooked rice against the bottom of the bowl and assemble the dish.
DO NOT put hot stone pot into cold water, granite is sensitive to sudden temperature changes and will fracture.
For bibimbap topping ideas and assembly instructions check out these videos
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