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Archive for the 'Traditional Food' Category
If you’ve ever gone to a Korean restaurant and tried a dish or two, chances are you fell in love with this fantastic cuisine. Korean food is some of the most varied and wonderful food in the world. But many of those that try it (and would love to be able to make it at home) feel a little intimidated by some strange-sounding ingredients and unusual recipes. However, it really is simple. All you need to make great Korean dishes at home is the right Korean food ingredients
Three Important Korean Seasonings
Gan jang: Gan jang is the term for one of the most important (and easy to find) Korean food ingredients: Korean soy sauce. Soy sauce is widely used for salt and flavor throughout Korean cuisine.
Gochujang: If you like your Korean food spicy, that means you love Gochujang. A kind of heavy hot sauce, gochujang is generally made from red chili powder, glutinous rice powder, powdered fermented soybeans, and salt. It’s used as an ingredient in many dishes, as well as a condiment. One of this Korean food ingredient’s most famous uses is as a condiment for bibimbap.
Doenjang (or Dwen jang): This is a fermented soybean paste, and is considered essential to Korean cuisine. It is used in a huge variety of dishes, including on its own as a condiment, mixed to create another condiment (called ssamjang) or to flavor stews, broths, and other dishes.
The Main Korean Food Ingredients
Ssal: Ssal is simply rice… but there’s really nothing simple about it. Unlike in many cultures, Koreans don’t prefer soft and fluffy rice. In Korean cooking, a short-grained, sticky rice is used, instead.
Baechu: Baechu, or Napa cabbage, is one of the most important Korean food ingredients you can find. It is often used in soups, or eaten raw as a wrap. Most importantly, though, baechu is used in baechu kimchi, the most popular type of Korean kimchi (see below).
Kimchi (or Gimchi): Kimchi is a vegetable dish eaten in Korea with just about every meal. Though it can be made differently each time, it is generally made with various vegetables and is fermented and highly spiced. It is both used as a side dish (called a banchan), as well as an ingredient in other Korean dishes.
Biji (or Kongbiji): When soybeans are blended in order to create soy milk, a fibouous pulp is left behind. This is biji, and is used throughout Korea and the rest of Asia as an ingredient in stews and soups, as well as bread products.
Other Korean Seasonings and Sauces
Ggaet nip: Ggaet nip, called sesame leaf, is a member of the mint family, and is used both as a spice for stews and other dishes, and a wrap for meats and seafood.
Ssamjang: When the Korean food ingredients gochujang and doenjang are combined with sesame oil, onion, garlic, and scallions as a condiment, the result is ssamjang. Ssamjang is a spicy sauce used as an addition to grilled dishes such as samgyeopsal.
Red bean paste: Red bean paste is used throughout Asian cooking. In Korea, it is used in snacks and desserts, such as bungeoppang and hotteok. It’s also traditional in Korea to eat red bean paste at the winter solstice in order to warm the body and keep you healthy through the winter.
Fermented foods exist universally in ethnic cuisines. Korean foods rely heavily on fermented foods. Korean recipes for kimchee, gochujang (hot bean paste) and fish sauce exist as basis for the building of many other Korean dishes including dolsot bibimbap.
Dolsotbibimbap is a traditional Korean dish that includes kimchee, gochujang and fish sauce (used to make kimchee) along with rice, namul (sautéed or seasoned vegetables), beef and egg.
Dolsot bibimbap is coming into its own lately, as lovers of fine cuisine herald their praises of this Korean dish. Recipes for dolsotbibimbap are springing up all over the internet as shows like Iron Chef and others from the Food Network provide Korean recipes.
Truly traditional foods from every culture have a food or drink that is fermented. This practice stems from the necessary need to preserve vegetables over the winter months so that peoples could benefit from those properties essential to human health and continuation.
It’s an ancient practice that hasn’t evolved by chance or because of an appreciation of flavor. The survival of a culture necessarily precludes the fact that their diet has kept them here to pass it on. Recipes of extinguished cultures do not exist.
Food knowledge used to be a regular part of cultural wisdom that was taught to youth. Today we are unable to determine what is healthy and what is not. The food that is touted as the nutrition-miracle today is consequently proven to cause cancer tomorrow.
Korean food has an advantage in the fact that it consists of Korean recipes and Korean dishes that have not been readily available to Western consumers and that the making of Korean food has, up until recent times, been home-made and hand-down-through-the-generations cuisine.
Korean people have had to make their native foods themselves in order to eat the foods that they love and need. Dishes like dolsot bibimbap have only recently become more well-known in the West.
Globalization, the spread of information, healthy practices and consumer demand for information are actually detrimental to knowledge of healthy eating. No one wants to wait for a long-term study. These involve following a group of people partaking of a substance or eating practice over the course of their lifetime.
Kimchee bap is a lesser known Korean dish than dolsot bibimbap but it has much in common with the dish that is now considered representative of Korean food.
I had never heard of dolsotbibimbap from my Korean mother. I learned of its existence when I ordered the dish in a Korean restaurant in my 20’s. When I dined out with my family in Korean restaurants, no one ever ordered dolsot bibimbap. I suspect it was because dolsotbibimbap was considered by my family as a home-made dish, and while we were out we might as well order Korean food that couldn’t be easily had at home. Dolsotbibimbap originated as a way to make use of leftovers and kimchee bap serves the same type of purpose.
Dolsotbibimbap is an artful layering of sesame oil, rice, assorted marinated, cooked and raw vegetables, egg and beef. Kimchee bap includes many of these ingredients but they are stir-fried together, kind of a kimchee fried rice.
Kimchee bap was always referred to as “hot rice” by my mother and she made it with sour kimchee. When kimchee becomes sour, it hasn’t gone bad but it has become a bit soft and a bit too sour to serve on its own. There are other delicious Korean recipes for sour kimchee that are worth checking out if, like me, you can’t keep up with the gifts of your mother’s constant kimchee production. At times, my mother would rinse this kimchee and others she didn’t. Both versions are delicious and the very different flavors are worth experimenting with.
Many Korean recipes for kimchee bap call for egg and beef. We mostly had a vegetarian version but at times my mother would add leftover beef, pork or tofu. The additions that I most enjoyed were those that included many different vegetable dishes such as bean sprouts, fern, shredded and seasoned fresh sea weed and sautéed spinach. As is common in many Korean dishes, texture is very important and the different vegetable combinations my mother tossed in provided just that.
Online recipes for kimchee bap differ than what I grew up with. In many of these recipes, the rice is sautéed in sesame oil on its own. Shredded beef is marinated in soy sauce, garlic, scallions, sesame seeds, and sesame oil, and then added to the dish. The kimchee is steamed in a rice cooker and the whole shebang is topped with shredded egg.
My mother’s version was easier and I think, tastier: she sautéed the rice in sesame oil. As the rice got crispy she would add soy sauce, garlic, scallion, kimchee, veggies, and most importantly, gochujang, the hot red pepper paste found in many Korean dishes. That’s what made it “hot rice.” And if she did add beef or pork it was shredded bulgoki or pork ribs that had already been marinated and cooked, making use of leftovers in the true tradition of this Korean dish.
It is without a doubt that the dolsot bibimbap is a popular Korean food both on the domestic and international level. Surprisingly though, it seems that what the Koreans enjoy about the dolsot bibimbap slightly differs from what everyone else enjoys about it.
As if the saying “the best for the last” is really true. The part that the Koreans enjoy the most is at the very bottom of the sizzling hot dish. It is pronounced as “nooroongji” in Korean.
A nooroongji is basically rice that has become hard due a long exposure to the extremely hot surfaces of the dolsot. Therefore, only the rice that is in direct contact with hot dish can “turn in” to what is known by Koreans as nooroongji. Some people might think, “Okay, what’s so good about a hardened rice?” There are a few reasons why the Koreans like it so much.
The first is, as it should be with dishes, the taste. The nooroongji has quite a different taste than the rest of the rice in the dolsot bibimbap. Because it has been hardened, the rice is quite crunchy, making the chewing more enjoyable along with the taste. Also, as nooroongjis are first steamed between the rest of the rice above it and the hot dish beneath it, a lot of the “juice” of dolsot bibimbap soaks inside the rice. Consequently, when the rice becomes dry and hard again (now called a nooroongji), it now has the taste of dolsot bibimbap inside the rice. So, when you chew on the nooroongji you can taste the scent of the whole bibimbap in a unique way.
Part of scraping the nooroongjis is fun too. As nooroongjis are first steamed and then hardened, they tend to stick onto the dolsot. Therefore, it is quite hard to scrap the nooroongjis. Koreans use spoons to scrap the nooroongjis, which often the children enjoy doing (although they’re not that good at it!).
The dolsot bibimbap is certainly a delicious dish. While many people are aware of its overall taste and look, it has a lot of unique parts to it which unfortunately many outsiders are not aware of. Nooroongji is one of them: popular among Koreans, but unfortunately not that widely known. Next time you get yourself a dolsot bibimbap, don’t forget to try the nooroongji’s before the waitress takes the dish away! You certainly will enjoy it!
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