Traditional Korean Food Ingredients

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.

The Koreans Favorite Part: Nooroongji

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!