Dak-hanmari (One Whole Chicken Hotpot) · Honeykki

Make the sauce first, and make it early: stir the gochugaru, soy sauce, minced garlic, sugar, oligodang, vinegar and mustard together in a container.

Cover it and put it in the fridge. Honeykki recommends a full day; at an absolute minimum give it an hour.

💡 This is the flavour of the whole meal, and it is the one thing you cannot rush at the end. Raw chili flakes taste dusty; an hour in the fridge and they bloom into the vinegar and mustard.

Trim the unwanted fat off the chicken and cut away the wing tips.

💡 The loose fat is what makes the broth greasy and cloudy rather than clean. In a dish this bare, that matters.

Cut the bird in half, as Honeykki does, or into serving pieces if you prefer.

Put the chicken in a pot with water, green onion, the ginger, the whole garlic and the peppercorns, and bring it up to a boil.

Add the rice wine — Honeykki used 1/4 cup of mirin because she had no 청주 — and boil for about 20 minutes.

💡 The wine is there for the smell, not the taste. It carries the poultry odour off with the steam as it evaporates.

Skim off any grey foam that gathers at the edges as it boils.

Cut the chicken into serving-size pieces and move it to a second pot — a shallow, wide one for the table.

Ladle the broth over it, add more green onion and the rice cakes, and bring it back to a simmer.

While that heats, make each person a dipping dish: a spoon of the rested sauce, half a spoon of minced garlic if you want it, and a splash of the hot chicken broth stirred in gently until it loosens.

💡 The broth is what turns a stiff paste into a dip. Add it a little at a time — too much and the sauce runs off the chicken instead of clinging.

Stir the buchu and shredded cabbage into each dipping dish.

When the chicken is cooked right through and the rice cakes have gone soft and chewy, eat straight from the pot, dipping each piece as you go.

When the chicken is gone, drop kimchi and the kalguksu noodles into what is left of the broth and boil them briefly.

💡 This is not an afterthought — the broth has been getting better the whole meal, and the noodle course at the end is the reason people order this dish.

Honeykki notes that the full course finishes with rice porridge in the last of the broth — she was too full to get that far.