Hey-mul Pajun
Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from restaurateur Jenny Kwak's book, Dok Suni: Recipes from My Mother's Korean Kitchen. Kwak also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page.
To read more about Kwak and Korean cuisine, click here.
It is said that because Korea was almost all surrounded by water, Koreans looked seaward for culinary inspiration. Hey-mul pajun, a simple and reliable treat, is a good example of this. My parents both spoke of this dish when I was growing up. My father ate it when his family had little to eat, and still to this day he enjoys it with a bottle of soju (sweet potato vodka). My mother told me that the aroma of the dish was so good that it would entice her neighborhood girlfriends to peek over the walls that divided the homes and ask, "Hey, can I come eat that with you?" And because the girls enjoyed the company as much as the food, they sat by the fire cooking up one pancake at a time, talking and eating until their mothers called them back home.
• These light, crispy pancakes should not be more than 1/4-inch thick. • For this recipe, use Korean or Japanese rice vinegar. • Korean red pepper flakes are available online at www.kgrocer.com. Common Italian red pepper flakes do not make a good substitution — their texture is too coarse.
Recipe information
Yield
Serves 3 to 4
Ingredients
Dipping Sauce:
Preparation
Step 1
1. Clean all seafood and slice thin. Keep aside.
Step 2
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, water, and eggs, and with hands, mix in a massaging motion. Then add the shrimp, squid, garlic, and salt, and with hands, delicately make 5 full rotations to mix in these ingredients to the batter.
Step 3
3. Add the oysters and scallions and make 5 more delicate rotations with hands.
Step 4
4. Over a medium flame, heat 1/2 teaspoon of oil in a frying pan. Then in heated pan, spread the batter, thinly covering the whole pan. Heat until egg is cooked. Continue this step until all batter is used.
Step 5
5. Prepare the dipping sauce by mixing in all the ingredients in a medium bowl. Serve the seafood pancake cut in manageable sizes for the dipping sauce.
