It’s hard to wrangle the recipe for authentic Korean kalbi marinade—crucial to the sweet, savoury, garlicky goodness that is short-rib barbecue heaven—from Vancouver’s Korean restaurants.

“It’s a secret,” says Yi-Jun Lee at the head office for Jang Mo Jib, a Korean restaurant that graces Metro Vancouver with several locations. At Sura Korean Restaurant (1518 Robson Street), the head cook murmurs in polite Korean that the owner would likely not want him to share their recipe. The latter restaurant’s wang kalbi ribs are butterflied with the meat hanging off a three-inch bone.

You can enjoy Korean barbecued meats at many restaurants around town. But summer’s a great time to try making them yourself on your own grill, so we went searching for tips from the experts.

Thankfully, Jay Cho, who offers a variety of both authentic Korean and fusion cuisine from his Coma Food Truck, is used to the western practice of sharing recipes. The 26-year-old is a Cordon Bleu–trained chef, but like many Korean children, he grew up on his mother and grandmother’s cooking and returned to his roots for his culinary venture. His top tip?

“You want to marinate the meat for 24 hours,” says Cho in a phone interview. “If you want the meat to be very soft, add some puréed kiwi, apple, or Asian pear.”

Though the Coma Food Truck doesn’t offer kalbi—a kalbi burger is in the making—Cho uses this marinade for the sirloin bulgogi that’s part of his Korean-Mexican burrito. It’s a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame seeds (toasted and lightly ground), honey or brown sugar, black pepper, minced garlic, sliced green onion, and a purée of the above-mentioned three fruits.

Cho gets his meat from a local butcher that supplies restaurants, but for do-it-yourself Korean-barbecue hopefuls, H-Mart (various locations) might be your best bet. The grocery store is one of a handful that sell beef and pork cuts specific to Korean barbecue. For kalbi, look for L.A. short ribs, so named because the cut was popularized in Los Angeles, which has a large Korean population.

Some stores sell the meat already marinated, but the recipe—surprise, surprise!—is a secret, says butcher Taegyu Kim at the H-Mart on Robson Street. As he brings out fresh cuts of beef and pork, he offers a preparation tip: before marinating the short ribs, soak them in water for an hour to rinse off all the ground bone and blood.

In addition to kalbi, three styles of pork also grace the Korean barbecue. There are the daeji kalbi (baby back ribs) cut into single ribs, and samgyupsal (thinly sliced belly), both marinated in a mixture of gochujang (red-pepper paste), soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and sugar.

Less common at family barbecues in Vancouver, but ubiquitous at the outdoor barbecue restaurants in Seoul, is pork butt. It’s called daegi gogi, and it looks like thickly sliced bacon. It’s grilled unmarinated, then cut with kitchen shears into bite-sized pieces at the table, and eaten in ssam (lettuce wrap). Diners take a leaf of green lettuce, layer on a perilla leaf for added flavour and complexity, add shredded green onion, a spoonful of rice, and a piece of sizzling pork, and top it all off with a dollop of ssamjang (a mixture of gochujang pepper paste and daengjang fermented bean paste).

If you’re serving kalbi, pork ribs, or pork belly, C3 Korean Canadian Society board director Angela MacKenzie advises adding a plate of rice and kimchi. “It’s just not complete if you don’t have the rice and kimchi,” says MacKenzie in a phone interview. She too grew up on her mother and grandmother’s Korean cooking, with picnic barbecues a big part of family get-togethers.

As with kimchi, every Korean family has its own kalbi marinade. “Some will throw something extra in there but they won’t tell anyone else about it,” says MacKenzie. There’s—wait for it—“a secret ingredient”. But she does share that her mother’s marinade, which was passed on from her grandmother, includes grated ginger.

These days, you can buy ready-made barbecue marinades at any of the Korean grocery stores, but you’ve got all the basic ingredients now. As Cho says, “If you want to learn how to make Korean barbecue—if you want something authentic—you want to do it from scratch.”