Americans call them the dog days of summer. Koreans call them boknal — and answer the heat with a bowl of soup so hot it fogs your glasses.
There is a stretch of the year, roughly mid-July through mid-August, when the air in Seoul stops moving. The humidity sits on the city like a wet towel. It is the same stretch you know at home: the dog days, named for Sirius, the Dog Star, which rises with the sun in high summer.
Korea named those days too. There are three of them, and they have been on the calendar for centuries. Chobok, the first. Jungbok, the middle. Malbok, the last. Together they are sambok — the three bok days. This year they fall on Chobok (July 15), Jungbok (July 25), and Malbok (August 14).
Here is where the two cultures part ways.
On a 100°F day, an American reaches for something cold. Iced tea. A popsicle. The freezer aisle. A Korean reaches for a clay pot that has been simmering for an hour, sits down in front of it, and sweats through the entire meal on purpose.
Fighting fire with fire
The idea has a name: 이열치열 (iyeol-chiyeol) — use heat to control heat.
The traditional reasoning goes something like this. In deep summer your body is already spending everything it has on staying cool. Heat leaves through the skin all day long. Cold food and cold drinks, the thinking goes, ask an already-strained system to do more work. So instead of fighting the season, you meet it. You eat something warm and gentle and rebuilding, and you let yourself sweat — because sweating is the body doing its job, not failing at it.
Whether or not you buy the physiology, the cultural fact is not in dispute. On Chobok, restaurants across Korea have lines out the door. Families that agree on nothing else agree on this. It is less a health regimen than a national appointment.
(This is a centuries-old culinary tradition, not medical advice. We’re telling you what Koreans do and why they say they do it.)
But Korea keeps the opposite prescription too
This is where most explanations stop. They shouldn’t.
In the same August, in the same city, the other half of the country goes in precisely the opposite direction: naengmyeon, buckwheat noodles in a broth so cold it carries a slick of ice. It arrives in a stainless steel bowl, and the bowl itself is cold enough to numb your fingers.
So Korea’s answer to summer isn’t one thing. It’s two, and they point opposite ways. What they share is the refusal to go halfway. Push the body hard in one direction or the other — but do not sit in the middle. There is no lukewarm option.
The scene you’re thinking of
In the opening minutes of KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix, 2025), the three members of HUNTR/X load up on carbs on a private jet before a show. One of the bowls is naengmyeon, served in stainless steel.
American viewers saw noodles. Korean viewers saw the bowl first. Stainless isn’t a style choice — it holds cold far longer than ceramic. In Korean summer cooking, temperature is part of the flavour, and a bowl that can’t hold the temperature ruins the dish. The animators knew that. It’s the kind of detail that tells you someone in the room grew up eating it.
What’s actually in the pot
The dish at the centre of boknal is samgyetang (삼계탕). The name is the entire recipe: sam (ginseng), gye (chicken), tang (soup).
A young chicken, small enough to serve one person, is stuffed with sticky rice, a whole ginseng root, jujubes, garlic, and sometimes a chestnut. Then it is simmered in water — just water — until the broth turns milky and the meat gives up at the touch of a spoon. It arrives in a stone pot, still boiling.
Baeksuk (백숙) is its plainer older sibling: the same whole bird, the same slow simmer, but without the ginseng, usually larger, and meant to be shared from a communal pot. If samgyetang is the restaurant version, baeksuk is what your grandmother makes when someone in the family has been working too hard.
How to actually eat it
This is the part nobody tells first-timers, and it is the reason samgyetang occasionally disappoints people who order it expecting a Thai or Vietnamese soup.
It is not underseasoned. It is unseasoned — deliberately.
- Season it yourself. Your bowl comes with a small dish of salt and black pepper. That dish is not a garnish. Stir a pinch into the broth, then dip each bite of meat into the rest. Korean cooks leave the seasoning to you on purpose, because the broth is meant to taste like the bird, not like a sauce.
- Do not add soy sauce. It will flatten everything underneath it. Salt, pepper, nothing else.
- Use your hands. Chopsticks get you started, but the bird is whole and bone-in, and pulling it apart with your fingers is completely normal at any table in Korea.
- Save the rice for last. The sticky rice inside the cavity has been absorbing the broth the entire time. Break it out at the end, stir it into whatever is left in the pot, and eat it like porridge. This is the best bite of the meal, and it is the one most first-timers miss.
- Kimchi on the side, not in the bowl. The pairing works by contrast — clean broth, sharp kimchi, alternating. Kkakdugi, cubed radish kimchi, is the classic partner.
- Chew the ginseng if you’re curious. It’s bitter and earthy and not for everyone. Nobody will judge you for leaving it.
Don’t be scared
Yes, it arrives as a whole bird, bones and all, in cloudy broth. Yes, it looks pale. That paleness is the point — it is what an hour of simmering does to good chicken and clean water, and it is exactly why the salt dish matters. This is a dish built to be finished by the person eating it.
If you go the other way and choose naengmyeon, there are only two rules. Use the scissors if they bring them — the noodles are long and chewy, and cutting them is not rude. And add the vinegar and mustard a little at a time rather than all at once, so you don’t muddy the temperature you came for.
An experiment for August
Here is the part we’re actually curious about.
Korea is not the only place with brutal summers. Phoenix in August is hotter than Seoul ever gets. So is Austin, so is the Central Valley, so is most of the Gulf Coast. But the American answer to that heat has been almost entirely cold — iced coffee, cold brew, frozen everything.
Nobody has really tried the other thing.
So: pick a genuinely miserable afternoon this month. Make the soup, or heat one up. Sit down in front of it, salt it yourself, and sweat through the whole bowl. Then tell us — in the comments, or by replying to our newsletter — whether you felt worse afterward, or strangely, notably better.
We’d like to collect enough answers to write the follow-up.
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- Cconma Red Ginseng Concentrated Extract 240g — The soul of samgyetang in a jar. Premium 6-year Korean red ginseng, slow-extracted and concentrated. Stir into hot broth, take it straight, or use it as the base for your own boknal bowl at home.
- Flower Red Ginseng Extract 80ml × 30 packets — 6-year Korean red ginseng in single-serve pouches — the root that gave samgyetang its name, in its most concentrated form. One pouch a day through the boknal stretch.
- MISUN Premium Gorosae Soybean Paste (Doenjang) 500g — For the days you want to go further. Doenjang jjigae is the other great Korean summer restorative — fermented, deep, and warming in the same iyeol-chiyeol tradition.
