Gom Gook - (꼬리 곰탕)

One of my readers asked me to find them this recipe (hey h!) and I’m currently working hard to move all my pictures onto Picasa.  The quality of the pictures seems to be a lot crisper and cleaner than where I had them loaded previously. 

Yes, it’s time consuming.  I realize now that I have over 100 recipes on this blog.  =O  When did I cook so much?!

Anyhow, this is a really old post, but I can’t seem to make it go BACK there without deleting all the comments.  =(  I truly do *love* your comments and read each and every one of them.  I know it’s not easy commenting on a stranger’s blog, so I’m all the more thankful for them. 

So here’s my old recipe as a *new* post.  =)  Enjoy!  

I went and bought about 2.5 lbs. of ox tails and 2.5 of sa-gul (cow bones with bone marrow). I ended up using half that bag of sa-gul and I'm going to use the remaining for PHO sometime next week.



Begin by washing and draining your bones and meat. Let it sit in cold water for about an hour (or more) and change the water out every 15 minutes or so.  This is to drain all the blood out.


 
Add the bones to a pot of boiling water and just let all the gunk rise to the top.  Boil it for about 15-30 minutes…

..remove it from the pot and rinse the bones and meat CLEAN.



Then place it back into the pot and fill it almost to the top with water and let it come to a strong boil. It took an hour for all that water to start boiling. After it's boiling, reduce the heat and let it boil softly for 2 hours.



Meanwhile I use my trusty teabags and stuff it with 2 small sprigs of ginger, 15-20 garlic cloves, and 1 spoonful of whole peppercorns.



I also washed and peeled about 1 lb. of moo (daikon radish) and 2 large onions.



After about 2 hours of boiling time, all the oil and fat from the meat starts to rise to the top...



...just skim the excess oil and discard it.



At this point, add all the vegetables pictured above. Let it boil for an additional two hours or so… 



After 2 hours, remove ALL the vegetables. If you cook it any longer, it will start falling apart in the broth and you will lose all the pieces.



This step is optional. I like my broth to be WHITE, and in order to achieve that, I remove ALL the meat (after about 4-5 hours of boiling)…



I then preserve all the meat from the ox tails and all the tendons from the bones and place it into a smaller pot for easy access when serving.



I make sure the bones are clean and then add ONLY the bones back to the pot.

Once you have all the meat out and the bones back in, lower the heat just enough so that it’s *barely* boiling.  Confused?  You want to make sure there are little bubbles coming up, but not too strong where it’s a rolling boil.

 

 
Let it cook overnight.  The longer the better.  Seriously.  Look at how white the broth is. It's been simmering for about 14 hours or so and I'm going to continue to do so until the broth is thick and milky.  On average, I let my gom gook cook for almost 24 hours.  =P  I will start taking some of the broth out the next morning to make dduk gook and moo gook or whatever else gook, but I will leave the rest to keep boiling.



When you’re ready to serve, add some meat and broth and top it off with green onions.  Salt to taste!  I actually cooked it even longer so the *real* final product was a much whiter broth.

You can let the broth cool down and then FREEZE some of it in ziplocs for later use.  Tastes pretty darn good!

The gom gook was perfect for the ggak ddoogi from the other day.