냠 냠 Korean Cooking

Hi! You've got Katy this week. On the requests of a number of people, I'm going to spend this post talking about cooking in Korea, some of the recipes I make regularly, and the hurdles to learning how to feed yourself in a different culture. But first, the title. "냠 냠" is pronounced "nyam nyam" or "nyom nyom" and is onomatopoeia for eating tastey food (essentialy korean for "yum yum" in english). I know this, not because people sit around saying "냠 냠" when they eat, (actually they say "맛있어!" which traslates as "it's flavorful!") but because I have been reading a lot of baby books lately. You know, the kind with one word or phrase per page describing a super simple primary colored illustration? Like a "baby's first words" kind of book. Yeah, I check out ten of those per week in order to practice reading and learn new words. Ten is the max limit on books you can check out at the childrens library here. So many of the books I read have to do with food, because it's one of the most important vocabulary sets to my functionality here, and, most of them have 냠 냠 in the title or as part of the story.

Anyway, back to the point. So this week's post is about Korean cooking as an foriegner, and I'm super excited about it. As I've mentioned before, cooking at home requires me to do a great deal of grocery shopping at a variety of shops and markets, an endeavor that takes hours sometimes. The ingredients though, the longer I'm here, seem less and less foriegn. And usually, I'm only shopping for fresh food and perishables, as I now have a stocked pantry of korean staples to draw from. Speaking of which, I put a little effort into the pictures below to show you what a stocked pantry looks like in our home. See the description below the pictures for explanations.

 

First, the feel good cabinet (except the onions, don't mind the onions). Here we have tea and junk food. Yuja, as you see labelled is a tea made of citron, the fruit that I have mentioned is one of Goheung's proud products. This jar is the typical way of drinking citron tea which I also included a picture of in a previous post. It is essentially the fruit, all chopped up, and preserved in honey. You put a spoonful or two in hot water and drink, pulp and all. Next to that is the tower of tea.On top is rice tea. That's it. Tea bags of ground rice. Because we don't get enough rice in our diets here... Below that is green tea... with rice. Because we don't get enough rice in our diets here. It's actually 70% rice, and 30% green tea, and is the preferred manner of drinking green tea by most people I've talked to. The third tea down is buckwheat tartary, which is good for digestion, delightfully nutty, and anti-inflamitory (I hear). Finally, on the bottom of the pile, is good ol' plain green tea. Most people here think it is bitter, and many grocery stores don't even carry it. Then of course, to the far right are the sweets. Granola bars for getting Jamie between meals, sweet bread like pan dulce for me, and chocolate cakes that are a lot like little debbies for dessert. Oh, and my 70% Theo dark chocolate, because I brought over a year's supply for fear I wouldn't be able to find my favorite chocolate here.

Above we have the staples cabinet. The red arrow points to a mostly empty, dog-food sized bag of rice. The red X is a bulk bag of sesame seeds. The yellow labelled 1, 2, and 3 are dried kelp, seaweed, and large dried anchovies respectively. Then of course, underlined in red is a bag of good ol' wheat flour. The stack indicated by the yellow bracket are individual sized cups of instant ramen (J likes the red kind, I like the yellow). Then there is the bag marked by a red circle which is sesame powder. Beside that is a jar of skippy peanut butter marked by a yellow X. Now skippy isn't our favorite brand, but it is all that is sold here, and toast with peanut butter for breakfast goes a lot further than toast with jam. Below that is the rectangular jar of spam I thought I'd never buy. Spam is ridiculously common in Korea. It is used in rice bowls, kimbap, soup, and more. Meat can be pretty expensive here, so I get the impression it's the only affordable way many rural Koreans can have meat at home. Then marked in green with a 1, 2, 3, 4 is vinegar, sesame oil, and gochujang, or red pepper paste, and finally salt. Just above the sesame oil is a tall jar of buckwheat noodles indicated by the yellow arrow. Buckwheat noodles are as common if not more-so than the flour noodles we eat back home here. Lastly is a big box of cereal marked by a red asterix. With these staple ingredients I can make about 7-9 basic Korean recipes and keep us easily fed for weeks, only having to pop out for veggies and specialty ingredients. Of course there is always a bulk jar of kimchi and assorted banchan (korean side dishes that are made in bulk and served with every meal) in the fridge.

Now for a few basic Korean recipes. I've already shown pictures of kimbap, and gotten excited on this blog about that success, so I'll show something new here. But keep in mind that I'd be pretty excited to email anyone with more detailed recipes for anything you are curious about.

First, soup! I've made two soups here that I am especially thrilled with. The first was Korean chicken noodle soup, with homemade noodles and broth and topped with zuccini machsticks and green onion. In most of Asia, a long noodle indicates a long life, so there is special importance (and pressure) on noodle making ability. The second is a chicken mushroom soup that looks creamy but is actually a sesame powder based broth. There are two kinds of mushrooms involved, and of course green onion.

 

p.s. The drink in the first picture (the one of chicken noodle soup) is so-mek. A mash up of soju, and mekju. Soju being a Korean liquor and mekju being lite beer. Koreans love this combo, and we don't mind it so much ourselves.

 

Then there's always the rice dishes, whether it's creative kimbap combos or fried rice, we can usally expect for rice to feature heavily in at least 1 or 2 meals a day.

 

Now, for ttokpoki. Ttokpoki is made with a korean staple called ttok (or dok) that is a gummy rice dough. For chuseok many traditional dishes involved ttok, and there is a ttok "education center" near our house where you can take lessons in making this traditional food. Ttokpoki is ttok in spicy sauce and can be ordered at any traditional restaurant. I am going to walk through this recipe in steps because it is or particular importance to a Korean cooking repertoire, and uses some of the more unique-to-korea ingredients (and I remembered to take pictures as I made it).

 

First, you make the broth with water, kelp, and anchovies which are boiled together for some time before the broth is strained.

 

Then, you add the ttok, as many hard boiled eggs as people you are feeding so that everyone gets one, and a gochujang (red pepper paste) & brown sugar mixture and boil them together until the liquid reduces to the consistency of thick spaghetti sauce.

 

 

Then you chow down while it's hot. It's super delicious and the secret to good ttokpoki is definitely in the base broth. Anchovies give it a distinct flavor that is more complex than a cheap store bought ttokpoki and the hard bolied eggs are the kind of treat you only get at home. Yum!

 

The last food I'll describe is often considered pub food here, and is called the Korean pancake or onion pancake. I like it because it is super easy to make, and surprisingly satisfying. It's usually a quick meal for nights when I didn't make a dinner plan. It is simply fried green onions with a batter of 1part water to 1part flour poured over them and cooked until just browning and holding together. Then it is served with soy sauce. That simple. For a slightly more interesting batter, sometimes a little salt and sugar can be added. Yummers. Usually it is served with banchan (korean side dishes) to suppliment. In the picture below I served it with preserved (mildly-pickled) chopped yellow onion banchan.

 

So that's a glimpse at my adventures in Korean cooking thus far. I have to say my favorite aspects include the sheer amount of sesame everything, whether it's via oil, seeds, or powder. It's never a main ingredient, but it's almost always involved and delicious. Jamie's favorite Korean food that I can make here at home is the chicken noodle soup, while his favorite Korean meal is BBQ. I'll continue experimenting and hopefully expand to using meat and fish. Frontiers I have yet to brave include eel and octopus (commonly sold on the street in town) and making my own ttok. These will be essential to my coming around as a good Korean housewife, but I've got time. Cooking in a new culture is challenging, not simply because of the language barrier, but in getting used to new flavors and learning how different ingredients behave. For example, noodles here are made very starchy, and so forming them can be challenging as the dough likes to shrink down as you try desperately to roll it out. Anchovies must be de-headed and have their intestines removed before use (I don't know why), and kelp is different from edible seaweed (who knew?!). These are just a few examples of the unexpected hurdles of cooking in any foriegn context. But I'm getting the hang of it. In the meantime, I've subscribed to my first magazine in korean, and it is, of course, a cooking magazine. This helps me with both my reading ability and cooking, and gives me a fresh project daily.

 

As always, thanks everyone for reading along. Please do email me with any specific questions or recipe requests. I'd love to share in more detail but don't want to bore anyone here on the blog. Happy half-way through October!

-Katy