Jeonju values

Photo by Diane Choo

Korea is a country of regions, provinces, and towns.  People feel strongly about where they come from and where you come from, too.  Each region has its own reputation and its own way of doing things, but the differences aren’t always visible ones.  South Korea has had too much destroyed, by war and by overenthusiastic modernization, to show the diversity of its regions in something as obvious as architecture.

But it’s hard to destroy food and food memories.  Seoul, a city full of people who came from somewhere else, is overflowing with restaurants named Suwon Galbi, Mahsan Ahgu-jjim, and Chungmu Kimbap, each name consisting of the name of the town and the dish it made famous.  Korea is a small country, North and South together the size of Minnesota, but regional pride drives food culture as much as its drives politics and society.

Which is how we ended up, seven of us in a mini-van, like the beginning of a screwball comedy, driving around Jeolla-do, the southwest part of South Korea. In February, Diane and I had eaten our way around most of the other major regions, but we had only spent one night in Jeolla-do, the culinary center of Korea.  In our last meal there, the owner of the restaurant had said, when pressed to explain what made Jeolla-do food different, “The food here has gamchil-maht.”

But what did that mean, gamchil-maht?  Different people we talked to had different theories of what made Jeolla-do food special, but it was never anything simple and pat, like, “They have the most refined, royal palace-style food,” or “They have a way with bean sprouts,” or “They use more fish sauce than anyone else.”  I looked up gamchil-maht in a dictionary and found “savoriness, deliciousness,” which didn’t help me understand what actually made Jeolla-do food savory and delicious.

Talking to our parents, we came to understand gamchil-maht meant a particular kind of deliciousness.  Flavor that’s sharper, brighter, subtler and yet more intense at the same time.  Flavor that even if you’re full, draws you to eat one more bite and maybe another after that.  Flavor that creates hunger even where there is none.

So we had to return to Jeolla-do and to Jeolla-do alone.  And appropriately enough, on our first night in Jeonju, we ate two dinners.

Jeonju is one of the larger cities of North Jeolla Province, only a couple of hours from Seoul.  As you approach it, it looks like another Seoul suburb with high-rise apartments of no distinction.  It does have a pretty little historic district, though, of old-style houses with curving slate-tile roofs and sliding doors covered in rice paper.  The hanok village actually looks a little too good to be old.  Although the village houses a working paper factory, several craft centers, restaurants, and a guesthouse or two, it doesn’t feel very functional.  But I can imagine in 10, maybe 20 years, the paint will have faded a bit, the tiles won’t be so shiny, and the village will feel more authentic.

Since we were in Jeonju, we felt like we had to try the dish that bears its name, Jeonju bibibimap, even if Diane and I had already tried it at the most famous restaurant serving this dish, 가족회관, Gajokhoegwan, in February and met the owner.  This time, though, we decided to go elsewhere, and we ended up at 성미당, Seong Mi Dang.  We thought it might be the native favorite, the way New Haveners in the know prefer Modern Apizza to the more famous Sally’s and Pepe’s.

The restaurant seemed nice enough and cozy with warm, wooden pillars.  We started with a slightly boozy drink called 모주, moju, which smelled like cinnamon and tasted as grapey as Manischewitz.  In classic Korean fashion, we were told it was good for you.

We ordered a round of bibimbap, one with raw beef or yukhae for me and regular cooked beef for everyone else.  Our friends Randall and Carolyn, who hadn’t had Jeonju bibimbap before, dug in happily enough.  Diane, her mother, and I, though, looked at each other, a little afraid to admit what was in our minds.  Finally, someone broke the silence, “It’s not the same, is it?”  We agreed, it wasn’t.  We slowly started to drive Randall and Carolyn crazy, as we sighed, one after the other, “Oh, the other place is so much better!”  “Oh, I’m so sorry you didn’t get to try the Jeonju bibimbap there!”

The bibimbap we were eating wasn’t bad.  It was definitely too spicy, so that the red pepper paste overwhelmed the other flavors, but the ingredients were fresh and various and the colors bright.  It was more or less as good as any bibimbap I’ve had on 32nd St. in New York.  We almost started to wonder if it was all in our heads, if the Jeonju bibimbap at Gajokhoegwan was no different, if we had just imbued it with mystery and wonder because of the surreal experience we’d had there.

There was only one thing to do.  We had to go eat at Gajokhoegwan.  It didn’t matter that we were so full, that we’d had a big lunch on the road to Jeonju, or that we had days of eating ahead of us.

Luckily, Gajokhoegwan was just down the street.  We didn’t order another 6 bowls of bibimbap, but we did order two to share with a face-saving excuse about jet lag and loss of appetite.  And as soon as the bowls were brought out, we knew we had done the right thing.

Photo by Diane Choo

The ingredients gleamed.  There were one or two ingredients that had changed, perhaps being out of season, but you could see that Mrs. Kim ran her restaurant with the precision of a sergeant.  Each ingredient was in the same place it had been last time.  Here, the gochujang wasn’t overpowering.  The brass bowl was in perfect balance, each bite revealing a new flavor and texture.

Photo by Diane Choo

On our way out of town the next morning, we stopped at the café with no name, one that we had found in February.  It still didn’t have a name but it wasn’t hard to find again—it’s just a few blocks into the hanok village from the water wheel.  The building has a roof and frame that mimics the hanok houses, but the ground floor café is surrounded in glass, and from the street, you see a place with Korean antiques so beautiful they’re timeless, vivid modern art by the owner, and a very un-Korean looking chow chow guarding the door.

They serve coffee, espresso, macchiato, all those words that thrill my Western morning heart when I’m traveling, but they also serve beautiful, delicate Korean teas.  They have crowd pleasers, like green tea and yuzu-jam tea (yuja-cha), but they also have teas with names like ginger flower tea (saenggang-kkot) and April flower tea (sahli-kkot).  The ginger flowers are yellow with a flavor I can’t quite place, but the April flowers are white and smell so clearly of honey.

The teapots, the café, the bibimbap—they were all beautiful and careful at the same time.  We had three more days left to figure out what it means that Jeolla-do food has gamchil-maht, but already in Jeonju, one thing was clear.  Gamchil-maht doesn’t happen by accident.

Photo by Diane Choo

I Love Cheonggukjang

It certainly wasn’t love at first taste – I wholeheartedly agreed with Grace back in February when she wrote about the “muddy” non-deliciousness of cheonggukjang jjigae. But last week, my friend introduced me to a version so wonderful and delicious that I want to bring everybody I love back to enjoy it with me.

Unobtrusively located in a small back alley near Anguk Station, the restaurant (Byeolgoong Shikdang) has about six items on their menu. For 7,000 KRW (slightly more than $6) each, my friend and I ordered the most perfect stew.  Their cheonggukjang jjigae is the right balance of nutty, salty and creamy with some chewiness from enoki mushrooms and softness from the fermented beans.  The accompanying rice and sides similarly so pure and tasty that my friend and I ended up eating too much, waddling out of the restaurant but with no regrets.

On a different note, I don’t know if seaweed (김) counts as a side dish, but in this case, I’ll count it because it was a notable highlight among the sides.  Their roasted unadorned seaweed has a sweetness that made me stuff sheet after sheet into my mouth.  It is so good that the seaweed with some rice and some soy sauce for dipping would be a lazy, but simple, complete and happy meal on itself.

Byeolgoong Shikdang (별궁식당)

Near Anguk Station (Line 3), Seoul, Korea

Tel. (02) 736-2176

A blessed bowl of pho

I used to live in San Francisco, but by the time I left 5 years ago, I was so unhappy that I imbued the city with all my sadness and could never imagine living there again.  But now that it’s November in New York and life feels bleak here, the Bay Area feels more appealing than it has in years.

It’s the kind of place where God might bless your pho.  I had one day free after a weekend full of work out there, and I went to Outer Sunset for a solitary bowl of noodles at Pho Phu Quoc (aka PPQ) before meeting some friends at Golden Gate Park.  I don’t even believe in God, but the sun streamed right into my bowl like a benediction.

It tasted as good as I remembered it.  It’s still for me the best pho I’ve ever had, straightforward and unassuming enough to be craveable everyday, yet full of equal measures of richness and light.  The restaurant was crowded but I got a seat right away.  The whole meal felt graceful, effortless.

It cost more than I remembered though.  And MUNI — when did the fare shoot to $2 a ride?!?  Something always changes, and I probably have, too.

(FYI, the California Academy of Sciences has some amazing creatures.)

Sujaebi – Handmade Comfort Food

My friends and I could remember neither the name nor the exact location of the restaurant, but we climbed into a taxi anyway and asked the driver to take us to “that place that’s famous for their sujaebi close to the Kyongbok Palace”. He knew exactly where to take us and a short 20 minutes later, we were happily slurping on our steaming bowls of sujaebi.

Sujaebi is a lot like kalguksu except the noodles are not knife-cut. Instead, pieces of dough are flattened and torn off by hand. The version at Samcheongdong Sujaebi was hearty and refreshing – the noodles so smooth though that I wondered if they had indeed been torn by hand. Regardless, the noodles were comforting, the clams in the soup added a nice chewiness and the half-moon pieces of squash made me feel virtuous and healthy.

Samcheongdong Sujaebi

Samcheongdong 102, Jongro-gu, Seoul

Tel: (02) 735-2965

Operating Hours: 11:30AM- 9:00PM

Two very true Korean food stories

There are two good articles on Korean food out this month, very different and yet both true.

Saveur’s article on “The Art of Kimchi” is rich.  The author, Mei Chin, has definitely done her research, and you get a sense of how much is expressed in the word “kimchi” — the range of ingredients possible, the diversity of flavors, the importance of its place on the Korean table.  She describes watching her friend’s mother doing kimjang, the massive kimchi-making that happens every November for the winter supply.  When she tastes the kimchi that’s been prepared but not yet fermented, she says, “It tasted bright and cold and complicated.  In fact, it tasted a little like autumn itself, that final burst of color and vitality before hibernation.”  Buy the magazine, it’s worth it.

Barbara Demick in the New Yorker is writing less about Korean food than the lack of it, as she describes the life of Song Hee-Suk, a North Korean refugee now living in South Korea, and how she tried and failed to keep her family fed during the famines.  Only the abstract is available online, so you should buy this magazine as well, but there is a good slideshow narrated by the author online.

The story’s written sparely, which makes it all the more heartbreaking: “Once, while visiting a relative for lunch, Mrs. Song was served a porridge made of bean stalks and corncobs.  As hungry as she was, she couldn’t swallow it.  The bitter, dry stalks stuck in her throat like the twigs of a bird’s nest.”

As I work on this cookbook celebrating Korean food, I don’t ever want to forget that the story of Korean food also includes this, the country’s division and hunger.

Ack, it’s been three weeks since my last post!

I recently realized how much work I have to do to get this cookbook written and I started to spend more time panicking than blogging. So I am going to take a tip from a good friend of mine and take stock of what I’ve done this year.

Since March, I’ve cooked 21 Korean Sunday dinners and worked on 98 recipes.  Each dinner included anywhere from 6-12 people.  In total, I’ve fed about 69 different people, many of whom have come multiple times.  I’ve made new friends, people who I met simply because they were willing to come eat at a stranger’s house.  (There are a surprising number of you out there.)  I’m not as close to having well-developed versions of recipes as I’d like, but I’ve made a lot of progress.  This isn’t even counting the number of dishes Diane’s cooked, the number of people she’s fed.  I think we might actually finish this book.  Not this year, but next!

I’ve been working on writing up my notes from our incredible trip to Korea in September-October, but it’s been hard to find time between the cooking, the recipe-revising, the other job, and life.  But I hope to get something up soon, and in the meantime, here is a somewhat unattractive photo of the galbi–jim (braised short ribs with chestnuts, jujubes, and shitake mushrooms) I made last night.  I used Diane’s great-aunt’s recipe — she soaks the ribs in Coca-Cola for 3 hours to “draw out the blood” and she doesn’t use sesame oil and sesame seeds, which is almost as shocking and scandalous as the use of soda.

It was delicious.  I was proud.  Onwards.

Chuseok Feast

On Saturday, October 3, the moon shone the fullest it has all year, and Koreans celebrated 추석, Chuseok, also known as Hangawi.  The holiday isn’t quite the same as the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival or the Vietnamese Tet Trung Thu, but all three celebrations occur at the same time each year, as they’re centered on the harvest moon.  Supposedly, Chuseok in Korea has its origins in moon worship, which sounds sort of lovely and ethereal, but it’s now a holiday as frenzied as Christmas.

In the days leading up to Chuseok, the streets of Seoul were clogged with people driving to get groceries, buy gifts, and presumably go home to their hometowns to pay their respects to their ancestors.  It’s not a gift-giving holiday quite like Christmas, but it’s that perfect opportunity to ask So-and-So for a favor with a well-timed gift, like a $200 box of beef or even a $35 Spam gift set.  (I’m not sure what kind of favor that will buy you, but keep in mind this is a Spam-loving country.)  Of course, there are gifts that are given just out of kindness and generosity, like the giant box of beautiful peaches my aunt sent over, but I kind of love the thought that some shady deals might be being made over a box of raw short ribs.  If I were in a position to grant favors, I would certainly rather get meat than a Tiffany crystal vase.

In the end, though, Chuseok is much more like Thanksgiving than Christmas.  Once the three-day holiday actually begins, the roads begin to empty because people are at home spending time with their families.  There’s an acknowledgment of the past, as people honor their ancestors by tending their graves and setting a sumptuous table before them.  And there’s a thankfulness for the present, with a ritual offering of the first rice of the harvest to one’s ancestors.

Most of all, there is a lot of food.  My family gave up on driving anywhere during Chuseok years ago, but at least while my sister and I lived here, we always took the “eat a lot” tradition very seriously.  Once we left home, my mother would tell me via phone how good all the food was and how sad she was we weren’t there to eat it.  So given the opportunity, how could I not come home for Chuseok?

The foods served traditionally at Chuseok are your usual chesa foods, the ancient classics that are placed on a low table for your ancestors, with an emphasis on the harvest’s first fruits.  There’s almost always jeon, or pan-fried fritters, and a meat dish in celebration.

In our house, every big holiday is an excuse to eat kalbi-jjim, or super-fatty short ribs braised with chestnuts and dates in a sweet, soy sauce marinade.

The rest of the foods served vary from family to family.  Our Chuseok table included steamed prawns; bindaetteok or mung bean pancakes, shrimp and zucchini jeon; bean sprout kongnamul; bellflower roots and cucumbers tossed in a tangy, spicy sauce; and a light Western-influenced salad with my mom’s signature nut-pepper dressing.

We made an old favorite, seogogi chapssalgui, where you take thin slices of beef marinated like bulgogi, slightly sweet and salty, and then dredge it in sticky rice flour.  It gets pan-fried, and then you wrap each slice around slivered green onions, sprouts, and thinly sliced perilla leaves, with a dab or two of a vinegar-mustard sauce.

And of course, there were multiple kinds of kimchi: Napa cabbage, young radish, and a cold, refreshing water kimchi filled with thinly sliced radish.  My mother must have been inspired by my cookbook project, because she resurrected a Chuseok tradition from her family, 토란탕 or beef and taro soup.

We washed it all down with a couple of bottles of 경주겨동법주, Gyeongju beopju, an ancient wine with a clear, light and fragrant flavor, similar to Japanese sake.  It’s apparently been designated “Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 86-3,” and must always be made with water from the well of the Choi family in Gyeonsan Province!

We ended the meal with the one food that is truly particular to Chuseok, the way turkey is to Thanksgiving, 송편, songpyeon or pine-steamed rice cakes.  (The block on the left is a white tteok filled with beans–my favorite.)  The exact shape and recipe for songpyeon varies from region to region, but they all have a sweet filling, usually made of sesame seeds or white beans, and they’re steamed on a bed of sweet-smelling pine needles.  The outer dough can range in color as well, from pure white to dark green, even a sweet yellow or pink.  Sitting around and making them as a family was a game, and the person who made the prettiest one would soon meet a good-looking husband or wife.  Given how obsessed my parents are with marriage and grandchildren, I’m glad songpyeon is one of the few things my family has never made from scratch.

I have to confess I didn’t make all this food.  My mother rules her kitchen, and she wasn’t going to give up her realm so easily, but she did let me and my sister do quite a bit.  When we sat down to eat, it felt like we had made dinner together as a family, which, in the end, is really the best way to cook a Chuseok feast.

The power of chicken (and ginseng)

I was reading a book on Korean food history the other day and came across this gem:

“The last king of the Baekje Dynasty was so energized and nourished by samgyetang made from Baekje chicken and Geumsan ginseng that he was able to bed 3000 court ladies.”

I’d heard 삼계탕, samgyetang was revitalizing, but I had no idea it had Viagra-like powers.  (I guess that Baekje king was onto something, though—a 2002 study demonstrated that ginseng, a root long prized in Asian traditional medicine, can “enhance libido and copulatory performance.”)

Anyway, enough about sex.  Baekje was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea and lasted from 18 B.C. to 660 A.D., which means Koreans have been eating samgyetang, one of my favorite soups, for over 1300 years.

It’s essentially a whole, young chicken, small enough to fit into a single-serving stoneware bowl, stuffed with sweet, sticky rice, plenty of garlic, and ginseng. The chicken is simmered in water right in that bowl, along with jujubes, more ginseng and other “good-for-you” ingredients, if you like, until the meat becomes incredibly tender and the bowl is filled with a rich, fragrant broth.

If you have a source for delicious, quality chickens, the kind that have real flavor, it’s very easy to make at home.  It may be blasphemous for me to say so, but I think it’s delicious even when you can’t find ginseng.  You essentially stuff the chicken, pin it up with toothpicks or sew it up if you’re less lazy than I, and stick it in a pot.  A more detailed recipe will be in the cookbook, I promise.

But the best place to try it in Seoul (and possibly the world) may be Seoul Samgyetang, otherwise known as Seoul Nutrition Center.  (Nearly every restaurant in Korea that sells samgyetang calls itself a “nutrition center.”)  Located in downtown Seoul, it’s in the old-fashioned alley of restaurants behind the Plaza Hotel.

I can’t give you a street address because Seoul is only starting to name its streets—hence the little map printed on the back of all restaurant cards—but the phone number is 775-4300.  (If you have a Korean relative, this map will help you.  If not, ask your hotel concierge.)

Because chicken is the central ingredient in samgyetang, the restaurant is also a great place to try other iconic Korean chicken dishes, like 안동찜닭, a braised chicken and noodle dish made famous in the city of Andong, and 닭도리탕, spicy chicken and potato stew.  We ordered one of each, jjimdak, doritang, and samgyetang.  The waitress told us it was too much food for the five of us and not to order the samgyetang, but we ignored her.

The first dish to appear was the Andong jjimdak, a giant platter of sweet potato dakmyeon or glass noodles, tossed with pieces of bone-in chicken and vegetables, including cooked cucumbers, which tasted much better than I expected.  The sauce was a light one, yet spicy, which wasn’t surprising given the copious amounts of dried red peppers.  It was more of a dry heat that hit me a bit in the back of my throat, which sounds unpleasant but wasn’t.  The chicken was tender and flavorful, even the white meat, and the chewiness of the noodles complemented the meat very well.

The second plate they put on the table was full of dakdoritang, red and spicy in a completely different way.  The heat here came from ground red pepper and probably a touch or more of red pepper paste, so that the sauce was slightly sweet and wonderful mixed with rice.  The quality of the chicken was apparent in this dish as well.  I loved how the potatoes soaked in the flavor and gave the dish a warm, starchy, comforting quality.

Both dishes served the chicken in the Korean way, the whole chicken chopped up, not a part thrown away, which is why as we rooted around, each platter yielded that curved piece, the chicken’s neck.  The sul anju, or the snack served with the complimentary cup of ginseng wine, was sautéed chicken gizzards, chewy to the point of being almost elastic but surprisingly tasty.

But the dish that highlighted the flavor of the chicken best was, of course, the samgyetang, the chicken-ginseng soup.  While the dakdoritang and the jjimdak was the kind of food that’s fun with a crowd, the samgyetang was the kind of dish you want for yourself and yourself alone.  The broth was clear and rich, with a noticeable ginseng, rootsy flavor, but without overpowering the familiar and delicious chicken flavor.  It was one of the most balanced samgyetangs I’ve ever had, as so many places overload the ginseng, as if to prove they used that expensive ingredient.  Compared to the spice and heat of the Andong braised chicken or the potato and chicken stew, the samgyetang didn’t create any fireworks in my mouth.  But it tasted so right.

And I felt so virile.  Just kidding!  But I did feel warm and happy and fully nourished.

Here’s one last photo of samgyetang you can get in New York, at Arirang on 32nd St.  To me, the flavor is a little muddy, especially compared to the clarity of the samgyetang I had at Seoul Samgyetang, but in a pinch, it’ll do.

Coming home in autumn

I come home to Korea at least once a year, but this is the first time in 15 years that I’ve been back in the fall.

The persimmon trees are bearing fruit, even in my neighborhood in urban Seoul.

The rice fields down south, in Jeollanam-do, are a vivid yellow-green, almost fluorescent in hue.  When they turn fully gold, they’ll be ready for harvest.

This is the only time of year you can find fresh jujubes, sweet and crisp and light, like tiny oblong apples.  I’d only seen them dried before, dark red and wrinkled.  And you can still catch the last of the summer’s peaches, which are stay crisper than American peaches even as they ripen and turn honey-sweet.

I’m so happy to be home.

I’ve heard that adopted children, when they meet their biological parents, feel a shock of recognition that’s almost physical.  I wonder if they feel the way I do here, when I look at the signs with their hangul lettering or hear snatches of conversation with the intonations I know so well.  Everything feels familiar, even when I think it’s strange.  There’s the Korean love of cartoon mascots, the googly eyes and smiles they like to put on inanimate objects, donuts, coffee cups, even fermented blocks of soybean paste.  Girls walk by, giggly and made-up, and even though I’m too tall (and too crass) to ever have that Korean girl look, I feel like I know who they are.  I walk into a bakery, a branch of the Paris Baguette chain, and as I bite into a sugary donut, still warm, I know instantly the texture and flavor—sticky rice flour, or chapssal, filled with a sweet cream cheese.  It’s delicious.

Even when I sit drinking coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, it feels like such a Korean place—the way they place your coffee on a tray, the way they offer green tea lattes.  I flip through a fancy food and travel magazine, and I realize I know one of the dapper, cosmopolitan men featured for their good taste–my friend’s father.  (I won’t say whose father it is, as she’ll be mortified enough when she sees this.)  He’s heading the Cultural Ministry’s tourism marketing, which reminds me, I should try to find out what he knows about the Korean government’s fellowships for studying Korean food.

I know this country.  I don’t know who the pop stars are today, I didn’t know about the famous Chunhyang folktale of Namwon until yesterday, and I have no idea where the most famous Buddhist temples are.  But I still know this country better than I thought I did.   I’m so thankful that through this cookbook project, I’ve not only learned more about this country, but also come to see how much is already familiar to me in the most intuitive and fundamental ways.

I’m so happy to be home.

Back in Korea

Whenever I fly Asiana Airlines, I realize there really is no excuse for crappy food on planes.  Yes, they have to cook in large quantities; yes, they have to keep things warm in unnatural ways.  But just look at this simple and lovely bibimbap.  The vegetables are fresh, even perky.  The instant rice that gets cooked in a microwave is a wonder—each grain really is distinct and tender at the same time.  Even the rehydrated dried pollack soup is surprisingly soothing.  In fact, the only thing that’s mushy and unsatisfying were the soba noodles, but only in comparison to the rest of the food.  If I’d been offered this soba on Continental on my flight home from Oaxaca two years ago, I might have wept.

Asiana Airlines has to package special condiments in addition to butter, salt, and pepper.  Look at this darling tube of red pepper paste and the little envelope of sesame oil!  Whenever my mom flies Asiana to New York, she uses what she needs for her bibimbap and stows the remainder of the tube safely in her purse.  I’ve seen her pull out that tube of gochujang at restaurants all over the U.S.; I’ve even seen her squeeze some straight onto her tongue in moments of bland desperation.

It’s good to be home.

Diane and I, with a whole crew of friends and family, are packing into a van tomorrow morning to go on a five-day road trip for the best food in Korea.  I won’t be blogging as deliriously as I did in February, but I hope to be posting some choice missives in the next two weeks.

And wonder of wonders, my mother has agreed to let me cook dinner for Chusok, Korea’s harvest and thanksgiving holiday, on October 3.  I may have to lock her in a room to keep her from helping, but I can’t wait to show her I actually do know how to cook.