Can you make Korean sweet and sour pork with Chicken McNugget dipping sauce?

Oi, clowns!

I was originally going to go with a different idea this week, but one of the ingredients I ordered is taking an extra long time to get here for some reason. Turns out dehydrated unicorn milk is much more rare than I thought. Sometimes I think I’d rather get punted in the goodies than have to come up with a new idea nearly every week, but this is the life I chose. A life of deliberately eating garbage, and then searching for more garbage to eat, then telling you about it.

So I looked into the mirror and said, “Dannis Ree, you are widely regarded as the greatest food writer in all of history. Do not stress out. You can think of something. You should draw inspiration from…yourself.”

Then I looked at myself in the mirror and realized, “Wait a second! You’re Korean! You should talk about that in your newsletter. Plus, being Korean is cool as shit right now. Look at BTS. You better cash in on your genes, buy a bunch of weird cryptocurrency, and get rich that way, because writing about food is obviously not doing the trick.”

So, this week, I have decided to write about a dish that many Korean people enjoy, called tangsuyuk.

Tangsuyuk is a Korean version of sweet and sour pork, derived from Chinese cuisine and modified to Korean preferences. I wrote a little primer over at my day job about it. I do not have a moving James Beard Award-winning essay inside me about how sweet and sour pork shaped the massive success I am today, I am just here to tell you that it is absolutely delicious. It is double-fried battered pork or beef doused in a thick vinegary and sweet sauce, along with some vegetables tossed in for good measure. If you like the Chinese takeout version of sweet and sour pork or chicken, then there is no doubt you would like this.

But still, some people think that Korean food is scary and that we eat raw bog monsters or something. As a Korean, apparently it is my burden to educate everyone else we in fact do not, eat thinly sliced bog monsters, since a simple Google search of “Do Korean people eat bog monsters” is too much for anyone to do.

So I figured that the easiest way to explain tangsuyuk is by making it with fast food.

In order to do the least amount of cooking possible, I decided to get my fried pork from Culver’s in the form of a breaded fried pork tenderloin sandwich, and that I’d get my sweet and sour sauce from McDonald’s.

Vegetables in tangsuyuk are typically some combination of onions, carrots, cucumbers (or pickles), pineapple, bell pepper, and wood ear mushrooms. I went to the Korean grocery store, found out they were out of dried wood ear mushrooms, and immediately forgot to pick up canned pineapple.

This is the kind of attention to detail it takes to become history’s greatest food writer.

In case you’ve never seen or tried them, this is what wood ear mushrooms look like (I got the photo here). They are not thinly sliced Korean bog monsters.

Wood ear mushrooms are chewy, have almost no flavor, and also have the peculiar nickname of “Jews ear,” which sounds potentially terrible, but was never intended to be antisemitic. You get them dried and all you need to do is soak them in water for a while before you cook with them.

Tangsyuk’s sauce is simple, and it gets its tartness from plain old vinegar and its sweetness from a lot of sugar. There’s also a little soy sauce in it too.

McDonald’s sweet and sour sauce, popular with children, gets its sweetness from apricot puree concentrate and sourness from vinegar. It even has a little soy sauce in it. Really, the flavors aren’t that far off from the Korean version, and in fact, they even have a similar color.

I was not looking forward to ordering a large quantity of sweet and sour sauce in the McDonald’s drive-thru today.

I couldn’t bring myself to order just sauce by itself, so I pulled up and said, “Can I get a ten-piece order of McNuggets?”

The lady over the speaker said, “And what kind of sauce would you like with that?”

I gritted my teeth and said, “I’d like ten sweet and sour sauces, please.” There was a long, predictable, silence.

“Excuse me,” she said, “Did you just say ten?” I paused, feeling my face get red.

“Yeah…ten. I know it’s weird. Don’t worry, charge me for all of them."

The lady busted out laughing. I mean, what was I supposed to do? If I had tried to explain the newsletter and all of you to her, I would have sounded like a space alien. She probably muted the headset for a second, motioned to the mic, and said, “Hey, this clown just ordered ten sweet and sour sauces.”

She re-read my very short order to me and said, “So that’s a ten piece McNuggets and…ten sweet and sour sauces. Ten.” I could hear her laughing again.

“Yes,” I said. She told me to pull up to the window for payment and I heard her bust out laughing for the third time. “I can hear you,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I started laughing too. She definitely heard me.

Again, if I were angling for another James Beard Award, I’d write a long and weirdly suggestive essay about how freshly plucked produce from the earth makes me feel.

But really, let’s just admire the fact that this carrot resembles a penis. That’s an award in and of itself.

I chopped up the vegetables using my amazing knife skills.

Actually, don’t tell anybody, but my knife skills are horrendous. It doesn’t help that my kitchen tools are also old and extremely busted. I’m the worst food professional ever and am baring my soul to you today. As long as the knife is capable of wounding me in some fashion I consider it sharp enough to use.

I let the vegetables sautee in a saucepan on medium while I prepared the pork part of the very authentic fast food tangsuyuk.

By prepare, I mean…I took the pork tenderloin off the sandwich and chopped it up.

Davida and I are big fans of Culver’s. I’m a big enough fan of Culver’s that I decided to wield my giant food writer stick and say that I think it’s better than In-N-Out Burger, which got a lot of people very mad at me on the internet.

I am going to say, though, that this pork tenderloin sandwich is not my favorite thing on the menu. I really love the burgers, the fish sandwich, and the shrimp, if you need to know. That being said, I picked Culver’s because it’s the only fast food place near us that serves any form of fried pork. Now, the pork in the Korean recipe is nothing like schnitzel, but…at least this is, uh, fried?

I opened up most of the sweet and sour sauce and dumped it into the saucepan.

Cucumbers get a little gnarly when they’re cooked, so I just stirred them in last once the sauce was hot. They eventually soak in some of the sauce and take on a nice pickled flavor.

So, there you have it, a stunning shitty rendition of a Korean classic.

The apartment smelled terrific, and after my first bite, I was very proud, which was a strong compliment to myself, considering I barely did anything that resembled cooking. It’s a wonder what a bounty of penis-shaped vegetables will do to make a dish taste fresh and delicious. I loved the sweet and sour sauce mixed with the vegetables, and despite the fact that the schnitzel-like tenderloin was nowhere near the Korean version, it was still delicious to me, and I’d happily eat it with a bowl of rice and thinly sliced bog monster.

Davida took a bite and said, “Eh, it really doesn’t taste like anything. It’s okay.” Okay, fine. The real thing does have a lot more flavor, but to be honest, this fast food concoction did feel like a weird miracle to me. Who’d have thought to mix fried pork with a delicious sauce, right? So exotic.

And there you have it. I accept my new title: “Dannis Ree, the BTS of food writers.”

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