What is korean food like? Well, white sticky rice, and a variety of pickled and/or fermented vegtables come standard with every meal. Some fermented side dishes have a mild flavor while some will knock your socks off; pickled turnip and fermented fish guts are about on opposite ends of the scale. Korean cabbage, bean sprouts, various greens, tofu, garlic, and bean paste are amoung some of the standard fermented fare. Hot pepper paste - sweet and mildly spicy - is put into almost everything. If a dish has a red colour to it, it has red pepper paste.
Lots of the most popular restaurant food is some variety or animal + vegtables and gets freshly grilled on coockers built into each table in this style of restaurant. Garlic, onions, and often mushrooms will be presented with whatever animal is being griled. Fresh lettuce can then be used to make something of a Korean burritto: animal bits + fermented side dishes + choice sauce.
Korean Bakeries: Is that a delicious chocolate or vanilla cream in the middle of that pastry...nope, its bean paste! mmmmmm, beany goodness! try another....its filled with green stuff... peas? beans? I have no idea what it is.
You can also find phallic day old looking 'sausage bread' and many variety of soft breads with some combination of fake tomato sauce, fake sausage (like bad hotdogs), mayo, and a variety of other colourful sauces.
White or slightly off white bread are the only options. There is not hearty whole wheat bread. No heavy winter grains. All bread is soft and light.
'Paris Bagguette' often does not have any bagguettes in stock.
Fun New Foods! Lets start with a good one - BBQ pig organs! Seriously, they are quite delectible! Animals in Korea are given something of a healther, or at least sanitary, diet so that ALL the bits are fine to eat. I would serously think twice about touching a pig intestine from the U.S. and can vouch that the taste of pig liver between the U.S. and Korea is quite different. One tastes bad, the other tastes like a rich pot roast.
Grilled pig skin is, although not bad, certainly the leaste tasty bit of the pig. If you eat pig or cow intestine from a soup, expect a little bit of a poopy flavour; a bit grassy as well with the cow. But grilled bits are fantastic!
Bondegi - silk worm pupua - is terrible. And I don't care if it "Has lots of protein", so does beef or chicken, and those dont often taste like old dirty cardboard!
I had a strange seafood which was small, grey, looked a bit like a crecent shapped tumour, and exploded a slatly briney intense liquid into my mouth upon the first chew. After that initial shock the suspicious blob was very chewey and, once the gross liquid was gone, mostly flavourless. I am told the food has no name in English - anyone know what it is?
The cheese is a lie! Yes, it may look like a delicous pizza, but tasting it will reveal that the sauce is not made from tomatos, the cheese is fake, and finding corn, sweet potato, and unshelled shrimp are not uncommon. then you cry from the torment of shattered false cheesy hopes - much like the shells of the misplaced shrimp! Rice flour may be used in the place of wheat flour - the taste and texture just isnt quite right!
Street Food: odeng, of reshaped boiled fish bits, are not tasty! Why does everyone love this food so much!? Imagine a stick scuring a long wavy unbreaded fish stick which is dripping with the liquid it was cooked in. At least you can dip it in hot pepper paste to cover up the bland fishy flavour.
Street food = fried everything. Fried sweet potato, shrimp, 'sausage', chicken, pepper, octopus, dumpling, vegtable, rice wrapped in seaweed,
-will write more later
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