Korean spicy beef

Korean-style stir-fried beef steak is spicy, sweet, tender, and incredibly easy to make at home. Fresh vegetables, flavourful stir-fry sauce, and tender beef all together bring the mouthwatering result!

If you want to try something new from Chinese dishes or something with a kick of spiciness, this dish is a perfect choice for you. Serve with a bowl of steamed rice. Super delicious!

Korean Beef

If you watch K-Drama and Korean Mukbang shows, you’ll notice Korean people love beef. Beef is one of the most expensive meats in Korea and it is served at their special occasions and family dinners as a special dish.

Korean people also enjoy eating BBQ and this beef dish is originally a grilled/BBQ beef cooked with the sauce. To save time, people later just use non-stick pans or cast iron pans to cook the beef and later stir with the sauce in it.

I love it over other sweet beef dishes since I personally like hot and spicy food. The smell of this dish cooking always makes my whole family hungry. I always cook it less spicy first for my son and later I add more Gojuchang to make it spicy for the rest of the family. 

Ingredients explained

Beef – Any tender steak cut can be used for this recipe. I usually use ribeye, rump, sirloin steak. The beef will be cooked quicker if you slice it thin.

Sauce - This dish is very easy to prepare and you don’t need many ingredients. From all the ingredients, Gochujang would be the only ingredient that might not sound very familiar. It is a Korean traditional fermented chilli paste that includes rice and soybean.

People often ask if Thai chilli paste Sriracha is the same as gochujang and the answer is no. These two don’t have the same ingredients in the making or the same taste. But Sriracha can be used as a substitute for a chilli paste if you do not have anything else. You can prepare this dish more or less spicy by adjusting the amount of Gochujang you add. 

Here is my Quick Fix Gochujang Recipe you can try out: For 1 tablespoon of Gochujang paste substitution, mix 1 tablespoon of paprika/cayenne powder,  ½ teaspoon of light soy sauce, and 1 teaspoon of sugar syrup or honey. Mix well and make it into a paste. The taste won’t be exactly same as a unique fermented taste like Gochujang. This quick chilli paste can bring a spicy, sweet, and smokey chilli flavour to your dish.

Garnish – Green onion and roasted sesame seeds go well with this dish. If you prefer you can spread finely chopped fresh chillies on top too. 

How to serve the dish?

Korean meals are served with a lot of sides and they are called Banchan.

For this dish, perilla leaves, lettuce, napa cabbage, kimchi, radish pickles, fresh chillies and garlic are usually served together. I like to wrap the beef, garlic, kimchi and more gochujang in the perilla or lettue and eat! If you cannot find the perilla leave, you can just use the lettuce or napa cabbage for wrapping. 

Some days I serve it with just a steamed bowl of rice and homemade kimchi. The type of rice I use is Thai Jasmine rice. You can use any rice of your choice. 

To prepare a full course family dinner, you can pair it with other dishes like kimchi fried rice or Japchae and Corn soup to chill down the hotness.

More of our viewer's favourite Asian beef recipes, you may also want to check out:

• Korean Beef Bowl
• Cumin Beef Stir Fry
• Mongolian Ground Beef
• Chilli Pepper Beef ( Ground Beef )
• Crispy Chilli Beef (with Sweet Chilli)

Simple Cooking Steps

Cut the beef into thin slices, against the grain. Mix and marinade with garlic paste, onion paste, soy sauce, gochujang, potato starch, and baking soda. Marinade for 30 minutes to overnight in the fridge.

Prepare the vegetables, cut the garlic, onion, and spring onions into thin slices. Julienne the carrot.

Gather all sauce ingredients in a bowl and stir well until everything dissolve.

Heat the pan into high heat, add the garlic slices and stir for few seconds. Add the marinated beef, flatten and spread the beef in the pan. Let it cook the beef for ⅔ mins until the beef gets a nice color and turn side and cook for another ⅔ minutes.

Add the onions and carrots, stir for few seconds and add the chillies follow by stir-fry sauce.

Allow to simmer for a minute. Add spring onion slices. Mix all the ingredients well with the sauce until well combined. Serve with a bowl of steamed rice. Sprinkle some tosted sesame seed on top. Enjoy!

Watch how to make it

📖 Recipe

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