Abalone & Seaweed Soup · Jung Ho-young

Clean the abalone: scrub the shells, prise the meat out, and separate the innards from the flesh, keeping both.

💡 Keep the innards — that dark green sac is not waste. It carries most of the abalone's deep sea flavour and it is what will tint this soup and give it its guts. Just work gently: burst it against the shell and you lose it.

Roughly chop the innards and the flesh of one abalone. Leave the second abalone whole — it is for the garnish.

Roughly chop the onion (1/4개) and the garlic (1알).

Film a pan with olive oil — about three turns round the pan — and sweat the onion and garlic over gentle heat for 3–4 minutes, until soft and translucent but not coloured.

💡 Gentle, and no browning. Any caramelisation puts a sweet, roasted note into a soup that is meant to taste of clean sea and seaweed — and once it is there you cannot take it out.

Tip the pack of miyeok-guk into a sieve set over a bowl and let it split into solids and liquid. Keep both.

💡 Separating them is what lets you control the final thickness. Blending the whole pack at once would leave you with a thin, sloshy soup and no way back.

Add the seaweed solids, the chopped innards and the chopped abalone flesh to the pan and fry for 2–3 minutes, until the innards darken and the pan smells strongly of the sea.

Pour in about half of the reserved miyeok-guk liquid and bring it to a simmer for 3–4 minutes.

Blend it completely smooth, then pour it back into the pan.

💡 Blend it longer than feels necessary. Seaweed is fibrous and stringy — a soup that is 95% smooth still reads as gritty on the tongue, and that is the difference between a velouté and blended soup.

Add the milk (6큰술 / 80ml) and the butter (10 g) and let it reduce gently over low heat for a few minutes, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon.

Stir in the heavy cream (2큰술 / 30ml) last and reduce for just a moment more.

💡 Cream goes in at the end and barely cooks. Boiled hard it splits and you get grey soup with fat beads on it — and around this much salt and seaweed acid, it splits easily.

Taste it now, then add salt only if it needs it.

💡 The miyeok-guk pack is already seasoned and the abalone brings its own sea salt. He puts salt last and calls it optional for exactly this reason.

Sear the reserved whole abalone in a hot pan for about a minute a side, just until the edges firm and curl and it takes a little colour.

Ladle the soup into bowls, slice the seared abalone and lay it on top, and finish with a few drops of sesame oil and a grind of black pepper.

💡 The sesame oil at the very end is the tell that a Korean cook made this. A French velouté would finish with more butter — this one goes home with one nutty, unmistakably Korean note on top of the cream.