10-Minute Miyeok-guk (Seaweed Soup) · Kim Jin-sun

Rinse the dried seaweed once in warm water.

Cut the seaweed up as small as you reasonably can — smaller than feels right.

💡 She says 최대한 작게 — as small as possible. Small pieces have more cut edges, and edges are where flavour gets in during the fry. Long ribbons of seaweed just slide off the spoon and taste of nothing.

Pour 500 ml of water over the cut seaweed and leave it to swell.

💡 That water is an ingredient, not waste. It is already full of seaweed flavour and it goes into the pot at step 11.

In a small pot, bring 1 L of water to a boil, add 10 spoons of cold cooked rice, and boil it for 10 minutes.

💡 This is the headline trick, and it is why the video's title says NOT to use rice-rinse water. Ssaltteumul is thin and only mildly starchy. Cold rice boiled out gives you a far starchier, milkier liquid — the body that normally takes an hour of simmering, made in ten minutes.

Lift the soaked seaweed out of its water and put it into a larger pot. Keep the soaking water beside the stove.

Add the sesame oil, guk-ganjang and tuna sauce to the seaweed, and stir-fry it over HIGH heat as though you were braising it rather than stirring it.

It will start to catch. When it does, splash in 5 spoonfuls of the seaweed soaking water and keep frying. Do this three times in total.

💡 Deglazing three times is what builds the flavour. Each splash lifts the browned layer off the pot and drives it back into the seaweed. Add all the water at once instead and you are just boiling — the fry never happens.

Keep going for about 10 minutes of frying in total, until the seaweed is dark, glossy and smells deeply toasty.

💡 Ten minutes of frying feels far too long the first time. It is not — this is where the soup gets its 간 (its seasoning driven into the seaweed itself) instead of just floating in salty broth.

Add the beef and keep frying until it is completely cooked through — no pink left.

Once the beef is done, pour in ALL of the seaweed soaking water and ALL of the cold-rice water.

💡 The cold-rice water is what her description calls the 쌀뜬물 here — it is the replacement, poured in whole, rice and all.

Boil for 10 minutes over medium-high heat, until the broth turns milky white and no longer tastes of raw soy.

Partway through, stir in the minced garlic and let it steep for 1 minute. Taste, and serve.

💡 Garlic goes in near the end on purpose. Boiled from the start it turns flat and slightly sour; one minute at the end keeps it fragrant.