Susan Makes a Korean Rolled Omelet (Gyeran Mari)

It's like whenever I'm away,

the food that I crave is my mom's food.

My mom's food will bring me to my knees,

and it could just be something like this, an egg dish,

that has like two ingredients.

[bright upbeat music]

Hi, my name is Susan Kim,

I'm a contributing writer for Bon Appetit Magazine,

and today I will be showing you my version

of the Korean egg omelet, gyeran mari.

This is a really fun recipe, you can absolutely do this

with mostly things that you have in your pantry or fridge,

and you can find this recipe

in the March issue of Bon Appetit.

Gyeran mari, or a rolled egg omelet,

literally translates to that;

Gyeran is egg, mari is roll.

This is a dish that you can make with all kinds of fillings,

today we happen to be making it with parmesan

and toasted seaweed.

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We have here a nice chunk of parmigiano reggiano,

I'm gonna use a vegetable peeler and I'm gonna start

to just make some nice shavings out of this.

[Man] I feel like parm with a vegetable peeler

is very Bon Appetit.

Is it? Is it too restauranty?

I don't know, I think it's cool, right?

If you don't happen to have this

like nice chunk of parmesan in your fridge

and you have some nubbins,

like this is a perfect opportunity to chop it up,

use your grater, use a microplane,

to use every part of the parmesan.

Then we're gonna go into the gim,

that's the Korean word for dried seaweed.

So it's kind of like, what do you have in your fridge?

Let's make it happen.

I always have gim on hand, it doesn't go bad.

Today we're using five eggs to make this omelet.

Five is kind of what's always worked

for, one, the pan that we're gonna use

which is about nine to 10 inch non-stick pan.

A little bit of salt, always,

we're gonna add some white soy sauce.

White soy sauce is lighter in color,

it's also lighter in flavor,

and this is Mirin which is a sweet cooking wine.

I'm gonna take this cute baby whisk,

just breaking up the yolks,

we're not trying to whip any air into it,

we're just really combining all the ingredients.

I mean, I love whisks, you know?

[chuckles]

I feel like we're creating like a dating profile, you know?

We have like, what cheese is in your fridge?

What size whisks do you have?

How many whisks do you have?

I also say that for rubber spatulas.

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This is grape-seed oil, any neutral oil,

canola, vegetable, that's fine.

When it's ready you're gonna look for a nice sheen,

it's shiny a little bit, that means the oil is getting hot.

All right, let's start.

There's gonna be three different layers,

so we're dividing up this mixture into thirds,

and you're filling up enough to cover the pan.

I love cooking eggs too,

because I think this is like one of those things

that makes you more and more intuitive as a cook.

Right away, I know that the bottom of the pan is hotter

'cause it's cooking faster.

The one with the pan controls the heat,

you're swirling around so like the really runny mixture

is getting to the hotter side, if you will.

The egg mixture is wet but not running.

It's pretty much set, but it's not completely cooked yet.

We're gonna go in with a little bit of the parmigiano

and we're gonna put down one sheet of the gim,

the toasted seaweed.

I like to roll from the bottom up,

so we're gonna go ahead and roll up like this,

just press it down a little bit,

and then we're gonna bring it down to the base

where it all started.

Started from the bottom now we're here.

Okay, then let's go in with our second layer of eggs,

enough to cover the pan,

but roughly we're dividing this into thirds.

Swirling it around, the little lacy, edge parts,

you can just kind of prod to the center.

Korean food was always a part of my life

because I immigrated here when I was seven years old,

and I am lucky enough that my mom is an amazing home cook.

It's like whenever I'm away,

the food that I crave is my mom's food.

My mom's food will bring me to my knees,

and it could just be something like this, an egg dish,

that has like two ingredients.

All right, so this thing is also set, wet but not runny.

I'm gonna go ahead and roll again.

This is really like a nice yellow sheen

but if you get color don't trip,

we're not making a French omelet.

A little color is fine.

Let's do our final and third layer,

this is the rest of your egg batch.

Oh, wait, I just realized I didn't do the seaweed

for that second one, did I?

Okay, this is a great thing because at home,

like the rule in my kitchen is like, there are no rules.

You might not have as much,

you might only do it, you know, for alternative layers,

I mean, you really can't go wrong.

Let's get the final layer of fillings on,

let's get that seaweed on, the gim, boom.

Trusty rubber spat, just kind of moving it around the edges.

If you have a hole

and you still have a little bit of wet mixture,

you can just swirl it around so that it covers the hole.

If the egg has already kind of started to cook and formed,

so like right now I tore it right there, that's okay.

We're gonna go with it,

because ultimately this thing will be sliced

and we won't really notice the hole.

And we're gonna let it rest a few minutes.

The resting is just really for any like residual heat

any steam, it's gonna use those final minutes

to kind of tighten everything inside and cook everything.

This is a really great banchan,

and banchan is a Korean side dish.

My favorite part of going to any Korean restaurant,

it's like the stuff that they floor you with

when you sit down, it's your kimchis,

it's your egg dish like this,

there's different pickles,

maybe you get a little bit of the baby fish.

And that's kind of how I grew up eating at home,

it's called a bapsang, which is like the set table.

You can absolutely just slice it up

and eat it with your other components

or just have it with rice,

or, I guess, if you're on that keto kick

you can just have this.

Today we're gonna form the dosirak,

which is basically bringing all those banchan elements

into a box.

You can definitely like eat this

in front your like Zoom meeting or whatever you're doing,

but it also encourages you to like, take it out.

For me that would be like sitting on a bench outside,

going out to the fire escape,

'cause everything is transportable.

All right, so here we go.

It's been sitting for a couple of minutes,

it's still a little bit warm to touch,

and I'm kind of doing like half inch slices,

and, you know, whatever tears you have it's gonna be okay.

We have our layers of gim, we have our parmesan,

which some of it has melted,

and some of it is still in the shaving pieces.

It's cooked, but it's still a little bit soft.

We have this container,

the first thing that's gonna go in is this rice.

This is a mixture of short grain white rice,

brown rice, barley,

and what gives it this beautiful purple color

is the black rice.

I'm kind of into those colors,

it's like Lakers colors right now.

It's a really exciting time y'all,

when a lot of people have kimchi in their fridge.

This is white kimchi, this is seasoned with garlic

and ginger, some pears,

and then obviously the salt that makes it ferment.

This is silken tofu, I love it to make soups with

but it's also really amazing raw.

Chili oil, which, yeah, make your own,

but store-bought is great.

A little scallions to top,

a little sesame seeds too, why not?

Obviously, like, the chili oil goes into the rice,

all of it combining it's a good thing. it's a party.

The other recipe that's in the March issue;

quick vinegar pickles, we have some celery,

We have some daikon, we have some radishes.

I'm already getting excited at the colors

and the texture that's going on here.

It is now time for the gyeran mari to get in there.

You know, dosiraks to me are like little gifts,

especially 'cause there's like a lid component.

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Hmm, I really love the combination

of the dried seaweed and the parmesan together,

I'm getting like the nuttiness from both of those elements.

Again, eggs and rice are really good together.

These are the rice vinegar pickles,

super bright from the rice vinegar, really crunchy.

Yeah, choose your own adventure

on how you wanna eat your dosirak.

Both recipes, the egg omelet

as well as the vice vinegar pickles

are available in the March issue of the magazine.

Give yourself a gift of the dosirak.

[bright upbeat music]

The star is here everybody.

[Woman] It's her debut, it's her first video.

I wanna learn, I wanna learn from the best.

So yeah, we'll talk.