Melt Away the Pain of This Korean Fire Chicken With Cheese

I first laid eyes on cheese buldak, a mozzarella-cloaked Korean dish that translates as “fire chicken,” in a 24-hour restaurant off Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was very late at night, and a couple in a window table were pulling long strings of melting cheese off a sizzling platter that beneath its glistening white blanket revealed a steaming pile of bright red chicken drenched in a thick, fragrant sauce. The couple appeared to be in a kind of happy daze, eating silently, mopping their brows, checking the social media feeds on their phones and then returning to the cheese, the chicken, an occasional bite of rice. My ox-bone soup, light and restorative, seemed flat by comparison. I became bored by it, and clomped off into the darkness. I’d made a mistake in ordering and was filled with regret.

Now I cook buldak all the time, using an adaptation of a recipe that owes its deepest debt to Emily Kim, the Korean web star known as Maangchi. Her video recipe for cheese buldak has been viewed on YouTube more than seven million times and, thanks to subtitling by her fans, can be read in 24 languages. There are thousands and thousands of comments below it, mostly positive. One reads, “Can you be my mom.”

[Read more about Maangchi.]

Cheese has not, historically, played much of a role in Korean cuisine. With the exception of the processed American cheese that could be found across the peninsula in the wake of the Korean War, Koreans barely ate cheese until recently. It was expensive and rare. In 1970, researchers say, South Koreans consumed roughly five grams of milk and dairy products a year, per capita. (That’s about the weight of a nickel.) Then came, among other things, chain pizza. Pizza Hut opened in Seoul in the mid-1980s, with Domino’s and Mr. Pizza following soon after, flooding the nation with franchises. By 1990, per capita yearly milk and dairy consumption in South Korea was up to 50 grams. By 2018 it was 2.5 kilograms, or roughly 5.5 pounds. (Americans consume roughly 37 pounds of cheese a year, per capita.)

The same cheap, low-moisture mozzarella that tops a delivery pizza is what covers cheese buldak too. Its bland, rubbery sweetness helps temper the spiciness of the dish, which is built on a foundation of chicken set in a sauce of immense heat. The primary ingredients are gochujang, the Korean red-pepper sauce, and gochugaru, dried red peppers that are processed into something that is not quite ground, not quite flaked. Hooni Kim, the chef who owns and operates two beloved Korean restaurants in Manhattan and who is finishing work on his first cookbook, “My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes,” recalled his first time eating cheese buldak, 16 years ago, during a visit to South Korea to meet his future wife’s parents. “It was extremely painful,” he told me in an email, “but so, so good.” Kim told me melting cheese on top of the dish has an additional benefit, at least for Korean restaurateurs: It makes the dish appear a little more Western, he said, like a kind of spice-laden chicken Parm, which means it can be sold at a premium.