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Light and spicy stewed monkfish with seafood in Busan

Let’s enjoy the soft and chewy texture combined with a thick sauce.

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When you think of spicy stewed monkfish, Masan comes into mind. Masan-style monkfish food is characterized by using dried monkfish. Raw monkfish, on the other hand, is used for Busan-style monkfish dishes. Since the 1970s, Busan-style spicy stewed raw monkfish and spicy stewed monkfish with sticky rice batter, which are different from Masan-style dishes, have become popular among gourmets. The development of dishes made with raw monkfish is attributed to large fish markets, such as Busan Cooperative Fish Market and Jagalchi Market, where fresh seafood can be found at a lower price than any other place.

Busan-style spicy stewed monkfish offers a balanced combination of soybean sprouts, natural seafood seasoning, and fish stock. This creates light and palatable flavors that can’t be found in other local monkfish dishes.

See ingredients for hot but plain spicy stewed monkfish neatly laid on a dish. The main ingredients of the Busan-style monkfish dish include fresh light monkfish fillets and offal, Styela clava, which is pleasantly firm to the bite, chubby prawn, which is everyone’s favorite, and a crab, which adds to the flavor, along with crispy soybean sprouts and water dropworts.

Boil all the ingredients with stock and seasoning, and put potato starch as a finish. Lastly, stir-fry the dish in a frying pan to reduce the soup. You may wonder why the stewed dish (called jjim) is stir-fried. The term “jjim” means boiling down a dish until lesser soup remains. When the seafood is almost cooked, and the flavor of the stock is absorbed in other ingredients, add red pepper powder, and stir-fry it once more to complete the spicy stewed monkfish.

Side dishes, such as garlic chive pancakes, stir-fried glass noodles and vegetables, seasoned vegetables, stir-fried anchovies, salad, and so on, are served on the table. Radish water kimchi can’t be missed either. The main dish, Busan-style spicy stewed monkfish, is placed in the middle of the table. At first glance, the mouthwatering, thick, and red seasoning, soybean sprouts, monkfish fillets, and water dropworts are well mixed together. It’s also fun to find some prawn, mussels, and Styela clava hidden between the ingredients.

Place a large monkfish fillet and some soybean sprouts packed with umami flavor on an individual plate. As you eat it with chopsticks, you can feel the soft but chewy texture and taste the spicy but clean flavor. Then, mix rice with the seasoning for more perfect flavors. After eating the monkfish fillets, put an extra order of noodles or rice in the seasoning to mix with the other ingredients, and enjoy the delicious food.

Another way of enjoying monkfish food is monkfish soup. A combination of white monkfish offal and fillets, soybean sprouts, and water dropworts creates the ultimate flavor. For this reason, monkfish soup is one of the top hangover soups in Korea.
Boil large pieces of monkfish fillets and radish, soybean sprouts, water dropworts, green onions, and chili pepper. Put the boiling dish in a hot pot separately, and boil it once more. This food has no fishy taste or other odors. You can simply enjoy the clean soup as it is, or add red pepper powder to achieve a spicier flavor as you wish. Moreover, to increase umami, add a little vinegar and red chili- pepper paste with vinegar (called chojang).

You can even enjoy the soup without worrying about the calories because monkfish soup features lean proteins. Moreover, you can enjoy the fillets and soup separately, dipping the former with chojang and mixing the latter with rice.