Pizza at Home - Korean Bulgogi Pizza

Happy Sunday! We do love our pizza day. Today we're going to be celebrating our Korean heritage with a Korean Bulgogi Pizza! 

Chi has had a little bit of experience with this. Cutting up beef into thin slices in preparation for the marinade. 

That's quite a bit of meat! We'll use some for our pizza tonight and have the rest for dinner another night. 

While Chi prepped the beef, Theresa is making our marinade. Since the beef is so thin, it only needs an hour for the marinade to do its thing. 

Theresa's favorite beef bulgogi marinade recipe comes from koreanbapsang.com. 

It uses soy sauce, water, sugar, rice wine, minced garlic, sesame oil, pepper, and a grated pear. Yes, Theresa grabbed the cheese grater and actually grates a pear for this recipe. 

It smells so delicious. I pulled off enough pieces for my pizza tonight and put them in a smaller bag. The rest will go into the fridge for a meal later this week. 

Before I made the pizzas tonight, I need to at least partially cook the bulgogi. It's going to be in the oven at 500F for about 12 minutes, but that's not quite enough to cook the beef. I'm going to give it a head start. With some oil in a hot pan, I quickly browned the outside and then took it off the heat. 

Yum! I could so grab a bowl of rice and just eat this. I don't want all those drippings to soak into the pizza, but I'm not going to let them go to waste either. 

I thought a gochujang drizzle might be nice to give to pizza a little kick! The gochujang by itself is a little thick to drizzle, so I'm going to cut it down a little with the beef drippings. 

If this is a Korean pizza, we can't have just any sauce for the base. I was originally thinking a gochujang base, but Theresa rightly informed me that it would be too spicy. Instead, she found me a recipe for a Bulgolgi Pizza Sauce from mykoreankitchen.com. It uses brown sugar, soy sauce, water, rice wine, oyster sauce, minced garlic and sesame oil. 

All that gets mixed together in a bowl, then put into an already hot pan. It almost immediately comes to a boil. 15 seconds later, I added some corn starch and water to thicken it. That goes into the fridge to chill for a few minutes.

Uh... this is a super tiny amount of sauce. I should have read the instructions more carefully. It's for a 10 in pizza. Mine is more like 13.5". That's about 80% larger surface area! 

Despite the small amount of sauce, I was able to spread it well. 

Just a light sprinkling of cheese. 

I had a few options for this Korean Bulgogi Pizza for toppings. I'm going with red onion, olives, and our bulgogi meat cut into strips. Other possibilities included corn and mushrooms, but we decided against them. 

That looks like a pretty delicious pizza! Into the oven it goes for 12 minutes at 500F. 

It's smelling wonderful! Wash up everyone! The pizza is ready! Let's eat!

On top of the Bulgogi pizza I added some fresh green onions from Chi's garden. 

And just in case not everyone likes the Korean Bulgogi pizza, I've made a plain Pepperoni pizza as well. 

What do you think Theresa? It doesn't have a tomato sauce base, so she's already a fan. She thought it was really tasty! Once I stop doing new pizzas, this one can go into the regular rotation of her favorites. 

My plate tonight.

I decided to try my gochujang drizzle. It's tasty, but man that gochujang it powerful. It nearly overwhelms all the other flavors. For my second slice, I had it without the gochujang, and even though I like spicy, I prefer it without. The Korean Bulgogi meat and the tasty sauce base go great with the red onions. It's a really tasty crust too, so I'm saying this is a favorite of mine as well. 

And in a surprise move, Alli made this one of her favorite pizzas too! She loved the flavor of the beef and the olives. Total she had 4 of these size slices! She asked if she could trade back her slice of pepperoni for more of the bulgogi one. 

And if leftovers are an indicator of how much people liked the pizzas tonight, there's 1/16th of the bulgogi pizza left, and 3/16ths of the pepperoni. Tonight was a great pizza night!