Cooking Korean

I recently decided that after nine months of living in Korea, I had better start learning how to cook some of the local food.  There's only so many times you can have pork with ginger and soy sauce before it starts to get old, and since Koreans seem able to cook a wide variety of dishes with what's available at the market, I thought I'd give some of those dishes a shot.

I found a helpful website (which I urge those of you playing at home to try out as well - www.mykoreankitchen.com) with a ton of Korean recipes written for the foreigner in mind (they're all in English).

For my first forays into the wide world of Korean food, I tried to recreate some of our favorite dishes from school (where Devon and I are lucky enough to be served lunch every day).  I figured this was a smart bet for two reasons: one, we could be fairly confident we'd like whatever it was I was making (no surprises like squid or silkworm pupae) and (I think more importantly), we'd have an benchmark to see how close my attempts came to "authentic" (aka. ECC cafeteria) Korean cooking.

I selected two meals: a spicy chicken and potato stew and bulgogi perhaps Korea's most famous dish.

Last night, I made the chicken stew, and for the most part it was good.  I added an extra cup of water to the recipe because the stew looked too thick while it was cooking, which wasn't such a good idea--turns out I don't know more than a Korean when it comes to Korean cooking.  It came out thin, and though it was flavorful, the flavors weren't as strong as they should be.

At school it comes in a thick, heavy sauce that's amazing on rice.  The blistering red-pepper paste contrasts beautifully with the caramelized sugars to create a dish that is both runny-nose spicy and dessert sweet.  This is perhaps the least "Korean" of the food we eat at school, though it may be because it's a chicken dish (most Korean food seems to have pork, beef, or the oceanic bounty in it).

For dinner tonight, I tried my hand at the bulgogi, sort of a stir-fried marinated beef dish.  The marinade took longer than I had anticipated to prepare, because of all the chopping and grating, though maybe it was just because I was unprepared.  Hopefully next time it'll go smoother as I work the kinks out.

Both dishes were easy enough to prepare though the chopping took long enough.  Once everything was ready though, they were incredibly easy to cook 5-minutes in a wok for one, an hour over a low flame for the other.

If any of you at home want to try either of these out, I'd recommend the bulgogi.  It isn't as spicy as the chicken dish and most of the ingredients should be readily available.  If not at the supermarket than at the local Asian market.

If you decide to make it, just follow the recipe for the marinade and dipping sauce.  To eat, just wrap it in lettuce and enjoy (the recipe calls for rice paper and perilla leaves, which are good, but unnecessary for enjoyment).  Serve hot and enjoy!

  Just don't forget the rice...