Oxtail soup is the broth of the gods! It’s deeply robustly beefy delicious.
Shopping so often in the little Korean grocery store means that I see many foods which are unfamiliar. Though it leads me to a neighboring cuisine, I can’t help but be curious. I rarely see the tails of cattle for sale anywhere else! Imagine my surprise when I saw some lovely fresh oxtails in my regular grocery store. I grabbed a couple of packages and hurried home to find my Korean cookbook.
As you can surmise from the huge ugly snowbank in the parking lot, hot soup is very appealing!The weather warms, the snowbanks melt and concentrate the dirt, more snow comes, and the snowbank rises. By spring there will be oily black muck where the snowbanks were.
So why did my store have oxtails? There are a number of immigrants from Mexico and Central America in this area and my store is beginning to stock items which appeal to them. Remember the oxtail soup (caldo de cola de res) in the book Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (1992)?
Apparently oxtail soup is enjoyed all over the world. In Andalucia, Spain, ‘rabo de toro’ is traditionally made from the tail of bulls killed in bullfights and is seen as a delicacy. In Germany, there are two kinds of Ochsenschwanzsuppe: the country kind is eaten with the bones and veggies, the city soup is strained and thickened, served with thinly sliced leeks and fresh parsley. In the United Kingdom, it’s a thick, slightly glutinous gravy-like soup popular since the 18th century; it’s available canned by Heinz, or as a powder-mix from Knorr.
In Japanese it is called te-ru su-pu (tail soup). It is a regular item at all the Okinawan/Japanese American Restaurants on every Hawaiian Island. Whenever it’s on the menu, in all it’s variations, it may be Hawaii’s most popular lunch entrée.
In Korea, it’s called gori gomtang or kori komtang (곰탕) or gom gook (곰국). Some recipes included an onion, daikon radish or turnip, or Korean sweet potato starch noodle (glass, cellophane, or clear noodle).
“jung, It never occurred to me that it was kom as in “bear”. that’s really cool and also makes me wonder what the original connection was, maybe linked somehow to the birth of korea myth?“
—from a comment on this Easy Oxtail Soup post
Tip: names of Korean soup dishes generally have a -guk or -t’ang suffix; names of thicker stew have a -jjigae or -jim suffix.
| Oxtail Soup Komtang Korean Cooking page 14
Wash the oxtail and place the joints in a large pot. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Discard the water and scum. Rinse the meat. |
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new earth second series, episode 1
Tess's Japanese Kitchen 
Delicious! In italy we have a traditional dish from Rome, it’s called Coda alla Vaccinara. That’s an half way of roasted and braised oxtail with mixed vegetables like carrots, celery and onions. Great really :)
Ooo! Sorry to have neglected Italy. Sounds really delicious!
I have Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book (Knopf 1980), and there is a recipe for Coda alla Vaccinara. She recommends that visitors to Rome should make an effort to eat this dish. She notes that accinara now means tanner but it is the old local name for butcher.
The notes introducing such recipes always make me want to travel, to see and taste…
Thank you for the mention of my post about oxtail soup in Like Water for Chocolate.
In our local carniceria, early in the morning, I sometimes see the whole tail, freshly skinned, hanging from a hook with the entire hind quarter, head and rib cage on other hooks. To sheltered shoppers, used to seeing only packaged meats, sights like this can take some getting used to. In Mexico, it is a normal sight, and everyone knows this is what a butchered animal looks like before being cut into tidy pieces. I appreciate that all parts of the animal are used.
Kathleen
Hi Kathleen,
There is a description of how to use a whole tail in my small Korean soft cover book. I almost wish I could buy a whole tail and cut it myself. This dish would have the whole assortment of bones and meat from big to small—not just the biggest and best. A different eating experience, revealing the relationships of the diners: quick vs. slow, or generous vs. selfish.
And the collection of bones would make an interesting collection. Perhaps just a photo of the collection would suffice?
I know a woman who is making some ingenious sculptures with bones she gets from venders at our local farmers’ market: pig, cow, buffalo, and lamb.
I sometimes get a ‘creepy’ feeling looking at the neatly packaged, plastic wrapped, styrofoam dishes, cuts of meat at the grocery. I once saw a toddler, not watched by his mother, poke a finger into a container of ground hamburger and snag a large bite of raw meat. (I did tell mom.) The sanitary packages sometimes seem so artificially sterile.
On the other hand, it is convenient…