Hot pot dumpling stew: mandu jeongol
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Mandu jeongol, the Korean dish I crave every winter
It was last winter, and there is one Korean dish that comes to mind automatically as soon as the weather turns cold: mandu jeongol. It is a big, bubbling hot pot with broth, dumplings, mushrooms, vegetables and meat all cooked together at the table. In Korea, this kind of shared pot dish is called jeongol. At first glance it can look like somebody has simply piled everything into one pan, but once you taste it, you understand why Koreans like it so much. The whole point is that the juices from the dumpling filling melt into the broth, making the soup deeper and richer as it cooks.
I grew up eating mandu jeongol at home whenever winter came round, but having it in a restaurant has its own charm. On this day I went with a friend to a mandu jeongol place in Daejeon, a city in central South Korea. That restaurant has since closed, so rather than reviewing the shop itself, I’ll focus on the dish. Mandu jeongol is an easy Korean winter food to find across the country, usually at hot pot restaurants or places specialising in mandu-guk, Korean dumpling soup. You will not normally see it in a basic snack bar or everyday set-meal restaurant; you need somewhere with a separate jeongol section on the menu.
This is what mandu jeongol looks like
This is the dish. It comes in a wide, shallow hot pot with a soy sauce-based broth underneath and all the ingredients arranged in a circle on top. The exact ingredients and broth flavour vary from place to place. In the middle, there were three or four handmade dumplings, with a green tinge showing through the dumpling skin. Around them were large pieces of white tofu, enoki mushrooms, carrot, spring onion and Cheongyang chilli, packed in so tightly that it looked as if the pan would be empty once everything was lifted out. The leafy green piled over the top is ssukgat, or crown daisy, a fragrant Korean leaf vegetable. At this point the heat had not been turned on yet. Once the table-top gas burner starts, the broth comes to a rolling boil and everything cooks together.
The dumpling skin is this thin
I pulled the dumplings closer for a photo. The wrapper was so thin it was almost like paper, and you could see the colour of the filling through it. Judging by that clear green, there seemed to be quite a lot of chives inside. The second photo is even closer; it really is just one thin layer of dough. Half of the dumpling was sitting in the broth, so the surface had that glossy sheen you get just before it fully softens.
Turn on the heat, start boiling — and there was beef hiding inside
Once it started boiling, the pot became completely different. The broth bubbled up, the ingredients shifted around, and the dumpling skins soaked up the soup and puffed out more than before. Then I noticed something tucked between the dumplings: beef. As soon as my friend lifted the lid, he said, “Oh, they put meat in this too?” As the beef cooked and lost its redness, its juices seeped into the broth and made the colour noticeably deeper, which you can see in the photo. A lot of mandu jeongol restaurants add meat after the vegetables and dumplings have already cooked, but here the beef had been laid in from the beginning with the vegetables. That meant the meat juices kept working their way into the soup while it boiled. The enoki mushrooms had collapsed down, the crown daisy had lost all its fresh height and sunk into the broth, and the edges of the tofu had turned slightly brown. That is usually a sign that the broth has become properly rich.
The broth changes the longer it boils
This was after it had been boiling for a while. You can tell from the ladle in the pot that this is about the time to start eating. The colour of the broth had changed completely from when it first arrived. The beef juices and everything that had come out of the dumpling filling had melted into it, so the soup was thicker and much richer. You can just see a plate of kimchi on the left, and on the right edge there was a separate earthenware pot of steamed egg we had ordered as well. In the close-up, the courgette and carrot look fully cooked and their colours have deepened. This is what I like about mandu jeongol. The first spoonful and the spoonful you take halfway through do not taste the same. It is the same pot, but the broth keeps changing as time passes.
The dumpling burst — but that is not entirely a bad thing
One of the dumplings burst. It happens when you keep boiling it. I lifted it with the ladle and the wrapper split, so the filling spilled out into the broth. My friend had said we should take the dumplings out earlier, and honestly, we should have. I was too busy taking photos and missed the timing. A bit annoying, really. But a burst dumpling is not all bad, because the filling loosens into the broth and makes the soup taste even richer. Inside the pan you can see courgette, carrot, enoki mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms and rice cakes all thoroughly cooked and tangled together, with steam rising from the pot. The empty bowl in the background is for serving the solids and soup into before eating.
The real look of mandu jeongol after a long boil
After boiling it for longer, the inside of the pot was complete chaos. There was no trace of the neat arrangement from the beginning. The broth had gone from clear soy brown to a thicker, darker brown, and although a few dumplings still held their shape, others had burst and released all their filling. A little chilli powder was floating on the surface, giving it a gentle spicy warmth, while spring onion and crown daisy stems were tangled everywhere. It did look a bit messy, but the taste was not even comparable to the first spoonful.
How to eat mandu jeongol — serve it into a small bowl
If you eat straight from the pot, you will burn the roof of your mouth. How to eat mandu jeongol is simple: use the ladle to move the ingredients and broth into a small bowl, then eat from there. In this bowl there was one dumpling, a piece of tofu and a spring onion stem sitting in the soup. The broth was a deep brown with chilli powder floating on top, so it looked warming before I had even tasted it. You serve one bowl, blow on it, eat it, then go back for another. That repeated rhythm is basically how jeongol is eaten.
With beef, timing is everything
The beef is all about timing. If you boil it for too long, it turns tough. This piece, held up with chopsticks, was the sort of brown colour where you want to lift it out quickly if you want it tender. With meat in a hot pot, you almost have to think of it in two roles: the pieces you eat, and the pieces that flavour the broth. The ones you plan to eat should come out early; the rest can stay behind to enrich the soup.
Mandu jeongol price — 24,000 won for two
On this day, for two people, one mandu jeongol plus bowls of rice came to about £13.50
Mandu jeongol is usually served for two people. It is not the cheapest soup dish, but given how full the pot is, the price makes sense.
After eating — an honest verdict
Mandu jeongol is a dish that changes as you eat it. The broth starts fairly clear, then the dumpling filling and beef juices melt into it as it boils, making it deeper and richer. Watching that happen is part of the fun. The one downside is that the dumplings burst more easily than I expected. If you miss the timing even slightly, the filling comes loose, but then again, that also improves the broth, so it is hard to complain too much. The beef also gets tough if you do not lift it out quickly, but once you are eating and chatting, it is surprisingly easy to forget and leave it in the pan.
Usually, mandu jeongol is finished with kalguksu sari, which means adding knife-cut wheat noodles to the rich leftover broth and boiling them at the end. We did not order it that day. I was already absolutely stuffed. As we were leaving, my friend said, “Next time, we have to do the kalguksu as well,” and honestly, that was exactly what I was thinking too.