Seoul in late July is the kind of hot where the air doesn’t move and the subway platform feels like a sauna, and this is exactly the week Korean restaurants sell the most samgyetang. That sounds backward. Nobody in a heatwave wants a bowl of soup that arrives at a rolling boil, in a stone pot, with steam still coming off it. But bok-nal logic isn’t about cooling down — it’s about matching heat with heat, on the idea that sweating through a hot meal on the hottest days does more for you than an iced coffee ever could. Whether that’s true is a different conversation. What I can tell you is that on the day of chobok, the first of the year’s three “dog days,” the line outside any decent samgyetang restaurant in Seoul runs out the door by noon, and it has for as long as anyone can remember.
What bok-nal actually is
Bok-nal (복날) refers to three specific days spaced across midsummer — chobok, jungbok, and malbok — determined by an old lunar calendar system, usually falling between mid-July and mid-August. Together they’re called sambok. The tradition is to eat something hot and restorative on each of the three days, and samgyetang is the most common choice by a wide margin, followed by dishes like dak-baeksuk — the plainer, ginseng-free cousin of samgyetang — and hearty soups like yukgaejang.
I want to be careful here about what this dish is and isn’t. Samgyetang is traditionally understood in Korea as a warming, restorative food for the hottest stretch of summer — that’s as far as I’ll go, and as far as any responsible food writer should. It isn’t a cure for anything, and ginseng’s specific effects are still debated in the scientific literature far more than supplement marketing would suggest. What’s uncontroversial is that it’s delicious, filling in a way that doesn’t sit heavy, and genuinely satisfying on a day when you’ve sweated through your shirt just walking to the store.
Quick facts
| Time | 40 min prep, 90 min cook, mostly unattended |
| Makes | 2 whole bowls, one bird each |
| Difficulty | Medium — nothing technical, just a long simmer |
| Spice level | 0 / 5 — this is a savory-sweet, not a chili, dish |
| Vegan? | No, and there isn’t a version of this dish that isn’t built around a whole bird |
Samgyetang Recipe
Ingredients
Method
- Soak the glutinous rice in cold water for 1 hour, then drain well.
- Rinse each chicken inside and out and pat dry. Loosely pack the cavity of each bird with the drained rice, 2 garlic cloves, and 3 jujubes — loosely, so the rice has room to swell.
- Cross the legs and tie them with kitchen string, or tuck one leg through a slit cut in the other side of the cavity, so the stuffing stays in during cooking.
- Set both stuffed chickens breast-up in a deep pot just large enough to hold them snugly. Add the ginseng, scallions, and water — it should cover the birds by about 2 cm / an inch.
- Bring to a boil uncovered, skimming off the grey foam that rises in the first 5 minutes.
- Cover, drop the heat to a gentle simmer, and cook for 60 to 75 minutes, until the leg bone wiggles loose with almost no resistance.
- Lift each chicken carefully into a wide bowl — it will be soft enough to fall apart if you’re rough with it — and ladle the broth and rice over the top.
- Serve with a small dish of salt and pepper for dipping the meat, and scallions scattered over the broth.
The four things in the pot, and why each one is there
A young whole chicken, glutinous rice, ginseng, and jujube. That’s the shape of the dish once you strip away the restaurant garnishes. The chicken is small on purpose — Korean yeonggye, young broiler chickens around 500 g, cook through in the time it takes the rice inside to turn tender rather than mushy. The rice isn’t a side; it’s stuffed into the cavity, where it slowly absorbs the fat and collagen rendering out of the bird as it cooks, which is most of why the broth ends up tasting so much richer than plain chicken soup despite having almost no seasoning in it. Garlic and jujube go in with the rice, mostly for the broth, and by the end they’ve given up most of their character to the liquid — the garlic mellows out completely, and the jujube leaves behind a faint sweetness that keeps the whole pot from tasting flat.
Ginseng is the ingredient that makes this samgyetang rather than just chicken-and-rice soup, and it deserves its own section.
Getting the ginseng right — and what to do without it
Fresh Korean ginseng (insam, 인삼) is a gnarled, pale root that looks a bit like a small forked parsnip, and it’s genuinely difficult to buy outside Korea unless you have a Korean grocer or herbal shop nearby. It has an earthy, slightly bitter, faintly medicinal taste that most people either like immediately or need a bowl or two to get used to — it isn’t sweet, and it isn’t subtle.
If fresh root is out of reach, dried ginseng slices are the next best thing and travel far better; Korean and Chinese herbal shops online sell small bags meant exactly for soup, usually labeled su-sam or simply dried ginseng. Two or three dried slices per bird gets you most of the way to the real thing, with a slightly more concentrated, woodier flavor since drying intensifies it.
If neither is available, bottled Korean red ginseng extract (hongsam-aek), the kind sold as a health drink at Korean supermarkets, can be stirred into the finished broth off the heat, a tablespoon or two per bowl. It’s a real compromise — you lose the actual root, and with it the small ceremony of fishing it out and eating a slice at the end of the meal, which some people consider the best part. But the flavor carries through, and a soup made this way is still recognizably samgyetang rather than a different dish wearing its name.
And if you genuinely can’t get any form of ginseng at all, I’d rather you know that honestly than pretend there’s a perfect stand-in. What you’ll have is a very good stuffed chicken-and-rice soup, close in spirit to dak-baeksuk, the plain version of this dish that Korean home cooks make when ginseng isn’t on hand. It’s worth making. It just isn’t quite this.
Where people get it wrong
Overcrowding the pot is the most common mistake — two birds in a pot sized for one means uneven cooking, and the one on top ends up underdone while the one submerged falls apart. Give each chicken room, or cook them in batches if your pot is small.
Overstuffing the cavity is the other one. Glutinous rice roughly doubles in volume as it cooks, and a tightly packed cavity can split at the seam, spilling rice into the broth and clouding it. Pack it loosely — about two-thirds full is right.
Don’t skip the initial skim. The grey foam that rises in the first few minutes is coagulated protein, and left in the pot it turns the broth cloudy and slightly bitter rather than the clean milky white you want.
Frequently asked questions
Can I make samgyetang without ginseng?
Yes, and it’s still a legitimate dish — see the section above. Dried ginseng slices are the best middle ground if fresh root isn’t sold near you; bottled ginseng extract stirred in at the end is a workable fallback. Without any ginseng at all, you’re making a close relative called dak-baeksuk, which is worth eating on its own terms.
What’s the difference between samgyetang and regular chicken soup?
Mainly the stuffing and the ginseng. A whole young bird is packed with glutinous rice, garlic, and jujube before it simmers, so the rice cooks inside the chicken rather than beside it, and the broth is left almost unseasoned — just salt and pepper added at the table, rather than built up with stock vegetables the way Western chicken soup usually is.
Can I make this ahead and reheat it?
You can, though the rice inside the bird keeps absorbing liquid as it sits, so the broth reduces and thickens overnight — add a splash of water when reheating on the stove. The chicken itself reheats fine; just don’t expect the broth to look quite as generous the next day.
Where to go from here
If the long, mostly hands-off simmer here appealed to you, kimchi jjigae and sundubu jjigae are both faster one-pot Korean stews worth trying next, though they lean spicy where this one doesn’t. And if you’re building toward cooking more Korean food regularly, the Korean pantry starter kit covers the handful of items — none of them ginseng, which really is its own category — worth stocking first.
Samgyetang restaurants are one of the few places in Seoul where ordering is genuinely simple: most menus have one dish, sometimes two, and a printed English menu is common near tourist areas. If pointing at a menu still makes you nervous, k-trips has a plain-language guide to ordering food in Korea that covers exactly this kind of one-dish restaurant.