Recipes By Dave Kim

NYT Cooking

Samgyetang (Ginseng Chicken Soup)

This is a traditional Korean soup consumed on the hottest days of summer. Fancier Korean restaurants will often add extra medicinal herbs and aromatics, but the home-cooked, mom-approved samgyetang that Koreans know best has six indispensable ingredients: chicken, garlic, scallions, glutinous rice, ginseng (fresh is preferred) and dried red dates (jujubes). The last three items may be hard to find, but every Korean grocery stocks them. Many shops even sell samgyetang-stuffing kits, which come with a small packet of rice, a couple of dried jujubes and a nub of dried ginseng, with some brands offering additional, often arcanely named aromatics (like milkvetch root or acanthopanax) to fortify the broth. The soup is normally prepared for one, with a single small chicken or Cornish hen served whole in boiling broth. We doubled the recipe to feed two, but it can be easily halved.