Aug 7th, 2007
A trip to Korea
I have never been to Korea. But I’ve had a fair amount of contact with Korean culture and food–notably through my friend Minjoo (for whose baby I recently knit two sweaters), my grad-school advisor (whose research is on social movements and social mobility in South Korea and the United States), and lots of Korean friends in grad school. So I’ve had many opportunities to eat Korean food–and I love it. Unfortunately, much Korean cuisine is not especially vegetarian friendly. Many dishes have beef or seafood, and even bibimbap, a rice-and-vegetable dish, traditionally has chunks of beef in it.
So I was thrilled when I found Flavors of Korea: Delicious Vegetarian Cuisine, by Deborah Coultrip-Davis and Young Sook Ramsay, several years ago. It’s published by the delightfully named Book Publishing Company, which is located on the Farm in Tennessee. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this cookbook, as the many stains on its pages will attest, and I very much recommend it to anyone who wants to cook meatless (yet traditional–there is no “Americanizing” of ingredients, so you may have to visit an Asian market for some things) Korean food.
A few days ago I decided to prepare an all-Korean dinner (clockwise, starting on the left): vegetable pancakes (yachae jon), marinated black beans (kong jang), ginger tofu (sangkang tubu muchim), and cucumber pickle (oi kimchi). (The dipping sauce for the pancakes is in the center.) Everything turned out great, but I was a disappointed with the texture of the beans. The recipe calls for cooking dried black beans in two parts soy sauce to one part water–even using low-sodium soy sauce or tamari, the result is mouth-shrivelingly salty. So I tried partially precooking the beans in a pressure cooker and decreasing the amount of soy sauce they cooked in later, hoping the beans wouldn’t end up as salty. They didn’t, but they did end up mushier than I’d like. Ideally, they should be very firm, almost crunchy, but most of these had lost their structural integrity. Back to the drawing board…
Wow! What a treat. I’m not sure that I’ve ever had Korean food, but that looks delish!
It’s definitely worth hunting down a Korean restaurant or grocery store and giving it a try. If you’re a fan of garlic or spicy (hot) food, then there’s a good chance you’ll like it!