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I love food. During my time in Korea, I have been collecting recipes and anecdotes about Korean food. I also have been working on survival techniques for westerners living in Korea.

In this journal are recipes for cooking Korean food in Korea or abroad and recipes for recreating western food with Korean ingredients.

But mostly, it's about enjoying life.

SUBJECT KEY
Christmas Chronicles - Trying to celebrate Christmas in Korea
Drink - Imbibe me
Event - Special events involving special Korean foods
FFF (Food for Foreigners) - Recipes for foreigners living in Korea
FP (Food Porn) - Pictures for stimulation
Fusion - A mixture -- or clash -- of cultures
Junk - Junk food
KFC (Korean Food Concept) - A blog entry explaining a type of Korean food
Kimchi - Something about kimchi
KR (Korean Recipe) - A recipe for Korean food, duh!
Miscellaneous - Stuff, stuff, and stuff
News - Korean food in the news
Out There - What others are saying
Rest (Restaurant) - An entry about a restaurant in Korea
Street Food - An entry about a street food concept or adventure
Tip - A survival tip for living or visiting Korea
Video - A summary of a video on the site
WTF - A feature on anything unusual that has to be investigated further

Sunday, August 27, 2006

(Drink #2) Pu-erh Tea -- Fermented Tea?

Eun Jeong works as a tour guide. Usually she is showing Japanese tourists around Seoul. She's been getting tired of that and has been trying to get her foot in the door for outbound tours, where she takes Koreans to different countries.

She took her first outbound job to China a few months ago. Missed her a lot. I also wondered what she would bring me back. Other than a tiny terra cotta teapot and pervers naked cartoon character (it's Jjangu!) used to test the heat of tea water, she brought back lots of teas.

Her prized find was what she called "Boy Cha."

In our dialect, we call it "Pu-erh Tea." It's a special fermented Chinese tea from Pu'er county in Yunnan, China. This stuff is really cool. It's created unlike any other tea. It uses older leaves from tall and old trees. It's matured outside in moist air and is then stored underground for one to four years to ferment and mellow. Some teas can be fifty years old!

These teas are sold in bricks and were once used as a form of currency.

We've been living off iced Pu-erh tea all summer. We've been using it so much, that we just call it "water," as in, "Hey, do you want some water?"

I'm also very suspicious of herbal medical claims. I want to see studies using the scientific methos before I believe anything. Some studies have substantiated claims that this stuff reduces cholesterol and saturated fats in humans. It may also assist in weight loss.

Yeah, I was very skeptical when Eun Jeong was saying that. "Drink this. Help you lose weight."

So far this summer, my tummy has gone down a little. I'm not sure how responsible the Pu-erh tea was for that. I've also been working out and cutting back on my beer intake.

But the tea is very good. It's nutty and a little earthy. Eun Jeong makes it very light, Asian style. Pu-erh is very expensive, but thankfully, only a dab'll do ya.

To prepare a gallon pot of tea, Eun Jeong just uses a half teaspoonful -- yes, half a teaspoonful -- of caked black tea leaves. The leaves should smell burned. She just boils a big ass teapot of water, steeps the tea, and refrigerates the tea in pitchers.

To make a cup of Pu-erh tea, use only a pinch per cup.

Since it is fermented, Pu-erh tea has a long, long shelf life. So a $50 cake of Pu-erh will last you maybe a few years. It's worth the investment.

Now here's the shameless marketing part. I've been working on ways to finally make some money for doing the Journal. And because of our legal problems with my ex-employer, we've been needing some money to help us during our court battles.

Nonetheless, I've been very picky about what affiliate programs to join and what new advertisers to add. Then I stumbled across Generation Tea. They have a great affiliate program, and their Chinese tea selection is remarkable. These guys are passionate tea! And they know what they're talking about.

They're also one of the few places where you can buy Pu-erh tea on the internet. They also have a lot of other fine Chinese teas and teaware.

So if you have the time and want to invest in some good teas, investigate this tea company. If you buy anything from them, it helps keep ZenKimchi financed -- and fed. Clicking on any Google ads also helps, even though you don't have to buy anything. And remember, there's always the Korean Fun Store, which is expanding all the time (I plan to sell Korean food from there soon).

Labels: Drink

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(KFC #15) Acorn Jelly Salad (Tastes Better Than It Sounds)

At the mountain restaurants, including my favorite dong-dong-ju place, one of the plates you can order with your food and alcohol is DotoriMuk 도토리묵. It's Acorn Jelly Salad.

According to Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared M. Diamond, acorns were not practically domesticable nuts. There was too little meat for the trouble one had to go through, and the tannins in acorns made them too bitter to be bearable.

Somehow, Koreans have figured out how to remove the bitterness and convert them into an earthy jelly. In DotoriMuk, they almost have no flavor because of the other ingredients.

DotoriMuk itself is spicy and garlicky. It's one of the few salads that goes well with alcohol, especially rice liquors like makkoli. It contains leafy lettuce, slivers of onions, cucumbers, carrots, and a dressing made of sesame oil, red pepper powder, sesame seeds, and loads of garlic.

Good salad. Gives you killer breath for the rest of the day.

Update: My Korean Kitchen has posted a recipe for this.

Labels: Korean Food Concept

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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

(FFF #18) Missin' da Waffle House

I couldn't resist it much longer. I needed a grease fix. Korean food is great and healthy. Sometimes it's too healthy.

There are times when I really miss Waffle House, or the "Awful Waffle," as we used to call it. It's one of those places that intimidates those who've never ventured inside but is comforting to those who have made the journey.

Waffle House serves breakfast twenty-four hours a day, but I'm not interested in breakfast beyond a pecan waffle. I've always ordered a Chicken Melt Plate with Hashbrowns scattered, smothered, covered, topped, and peppered.

A waffle maker I still have yet to acquire. So I made do with the chicken melt. I had done this in the past, but my hashbrowns had always turned out bad -- limp, soggy, sometimes a little green.

I've since learned that after you grate them, you have to leech the starch out of them, like my Perfect French Fries technique. In this case, I drown the grated potatoes in ice cold water with a little salt in a bowl in the refrigerator for two hours or so. While I was waiting, I fried some diced onions.

After draining the potatoes, I put them in a frying pan with butter over medium heat.

After shaping them, I just left them there. Yes, leave them for around ten minutes or so. They won't crisp up if you move them around like a potato stir-fry.

I didn't like just standing there doing nothing, so I added a pat of butter and some black pepper.

I flipped them over, and they were nice and brown (hence "hashbrowns").

Smothered them in sauteed onions and covered them with cheese.

I covered the pan to let the cheese melt. In the meantime, I seasoned a chicken breast with salt and lots of pepper. While my hashbrowns were sitting on the plate, I sauteed the chicken in butter.

Setting the chicken aside, I toasted the bread according to a technique I learned as a short order cook. One slice, one side first.

Flip it and add slice #2.

Put the cheese on the toasted side.

Then the onions and chicken.

And that's it!

Labels: Food for Foreigners

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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Improved Korean Fun Store

NOTE: MS Internet Explorer users click here if you can't see the Flash movie above

I have been putting a lot into work into consolidating and improving the ZenKimchi Korean Fun Store. So far, I'm including merchandise through Cafe Press and modifiable merchandise through Zazzle.

This includes T-shirts of any style, golf shirts, caps, BBQ aprons, beer coasters, beer steins, coffee mugs, magnets, stickers, and even teddy bears.

One of the most popular items is the "Dog Meat" dog T-shirt.

Other popular items include the Kimchi Chick hat

And the "Maekju hana juseyo" ("Give me a beer") shirts.

In fact, I've discounted the basic value T-shirt from $12.99 to $10.99.

The ZenKimchi sites are my passion, and they're fun to work on. Yet they also cost a lot of time and money. It would be nice to see a little extra pocket change come from all this work.

And besides, look at the stuff. It looks cool!

Labels: Miscellaneous

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(FFF #17) How to Make Cheese!

Yes, I may be starting an ominous trend in bathtub cheesemaking by foreigners -- that is, if foreigners actually had apartments with bathtubs.

I saw on Epicurious a little recipe for homemade ricotta cheese. Now, I know that cheese is quickly becoming more popular in South Korea. I'm finding more and more varieties, and some of it is not too expensive. Yet ricotta is still hard to find unless you cheat and go to Costco. And even if you do find it, it's too expensive compared to what I'm about to show you.

And you know what, this is un-freakin-believably easy!

Here are the ingredients.

Two quarts of Milk
One pint of Fresh Cream
Juice from one Lemon
Pinch o' Salt

That's it.

The hardest part of making this is finding a vessel and filter to strain it through. But I'll touch on that later.

HOW TO MAKE IT

Slowly heat the milk and cream to close to boiling. When it starts becoming agitated, add the lemon juice and turn off the heat.

NOTE: In the picture, I'm doing something I found out I was not supposed to do. DO NOT use an aluminum pot. In the next picture, I'm using stainless steel, which although not wholly endorsed by home cheesemakers, is better than aluminum.

So, as if by magic, the acid in the lemon juice curdles the proteins in the milk/cream mixture. Now comes the most difficult part -- straining.

I have since found cheesecloth in the baking supplies section of E-Mart, but at the time, finding a fine mesh filter was difficult. I tried coffee filters.

But it was tedious getting all that into those little filters. I also tried lining a collander with the filters.

That actually worked pretty well, but it quickly saturated the paper filters, and it used a LOT of them.

I also tried a surgical mask, which you see all over Korea on high air pollution days. They're cheap and plentiful, and they're great filters. And they do work. I don't have a picture, though.

Other than cheesecloth, the most effective filter I experimented with was a very, very clean hand towel. I laid it over a collander, which was placed over a large bowl.

That's how I ended up with the nice thick cheese that's pictured at the top.

Now, technically, this is not real ricotta. Real ricotta is made from whey after making other cheeses. But it's a great mock up. It's smooth, creamy, and has a slight lemony zing. I and anyone else who has tried it also has not gotten sick. If you're a clean person, and you just keep everything clean and sanitized within the bounds of common sense, the cheese is safe.

What to do with the cheese? Spread it on bagels. Make a cheesecake. Or, as I will show you later, make cheese blintzes.

Labels: Food for Foreigners

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(Out There #3) Mary Eats

Mary started popping up at eGullet, talking about Korean restaurants. I was curious about her blog that she was plugging oh so subtly.

Let me tell you this. She has a cool blog. Mary herself is a freelance restaurant reviewer, and she has pictures and stories about her travels through Seoul and other parts of the world.

The section I find most interesting is the "Articles" page, where she posts the restaurant reviews she has written for the Korea Times and the Korea Herald.

Labels: Out There

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(KFC #14) "Popping Sue" - The Summertime Treat

I haven't seen any treat like this anywhere else. Patbingsu 팥빙수 (or "Popping Sue" to foreigners) is a Korean summertime treat, that, in my mind, divides ice cream into all its separate elements and throws it back together minus the eggs.

It's a simple concept, really. It's shaved ice topped with sweetened red beans (the "pat"), fruit (usually canned, jellied, or dried), syrup, ddeok (chewy rice cakes), and milk (fresh or condensed). Now, that's not how each patbingsu is made. Giving a concrete official ingredient list of patbingsu is like giving an official ingredient list to an ice cream sundae. It depends on who's serving it and the taste of the customer. Some varieties get pretty far out there. I've heard of creamed corn being thrown on there.

Like Bibimbap, you take this concoction and stir it until the individual components are unrecognizable. EyeLove Seoul has a good explanation on how to eat Popping Sue with much better pics than I have.

This is another one of those dishes that creates emphatic divided opinions amongst people. Eun Jeong absolutely loves it. Others hate it. I personally -- well, I'd take an ice cream over Popping Sue, but if it's put in front of me, I'd enjoy it. I'm one of those foreigners who actually likes the sweetened red beans. It's the shaved ice with milk that turns me off.

I think it reminds me of a bad experiment I made with the Snoopy Sno-Cone Makertm when I was a kid.

Labels: Korean Food Concept

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(KFC #13) SundaeGuk - I'm in the Mood for Some Nasty

I've tried lots of different soups in Korea. And I know sundae, Korea's odd-textured noodle and blood sausage. I always passed by places that offered SundaeGuk 순대국, a stew using that ingredient. Yet I frequently found an excuse to eat something else. I had no idea what was in it -- other than sundae.

Then one day, soon after our move, I ordered it. This was mainly because Eun Jeong and I were tired from moving, and we wanted delivery, and we hadn't accumulated many magnetic restaurant menus on our door yet. Doors in Korea tend to get covered in restaurant delivery fliers after a while. Ours was still fresh and empty.

So one of the only places we had a number for was a HaeJangGuk place. I was not in the mood for Fred Flinstone Hangover Soup, so I opted to finally try a bowl of SundaeGuk.

A few minutes later, it arrived at the door in a heavy black bowl with a divided container full of side dishes and hot peppers and a stainless steel covered bowl of rice. I gingerly removed the plastic wrap from the hot bowl.

The steam smelled of heaven. It was the smell of bacon frying in the morning. I unwrapped the spoon and dug in. The broth itself contained a lot of pork fat, as was evident when I refrigerated the leftovers, and the entire soup hardened. Yet it was the little nasty treasures that made this soup special. There was, of course, the sundae. And this was the best way I have ever had this dark savory gelatinous sausage. Its little friends included slabs of fatty pork belly, some liver, crunchy yet tasty bits of cartilege, and the forbidden but irresistable gobchang, intestines.

It was a heavy stew, and I couldn't finish it all in one sitting. Only once have I finished an entire bowl. It fills my grease quota for the week when I'm missing my good ole American greasy food. It's not for the culinary wimps out there. It is another great example of Korean Man Food.

Labels: Korean Food Concept

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Saturday, August 12, 2006

Durian!

After dinner in Ilsan last Saturday, we had the dessert with the infamous fruit that had been thawing all day in Brant's window. He had found it at Carrefour and had excitedly been telling me about it for a while.

We had to eat it outside because Brant didn't want the smell in his apartment. We found a table outside a convenient store. Brant and I got the biggest knife he had and some spoons. I didn't know how to open it, so I just carved – carved – into it and pried it open.

The insides were creamy and custardy with pits that looked like avocado pits.

I had my first bite of durian.

I had been wanting to try this for years. I had heard horror stories of how the smell and taste were pungent, strong, sickening – it's banned in public spaces in Singapore.

Image from Wikipedia, taken by Steve Bennett

The way Tony Bourdain described it was sort of like stinky cheese, like kissing your dead grandmother. Others have described it as cream cheese, onion sauce, sherry wine. More graphic descriptions compare it to "eating vanilla custard in a latrine" or "pig shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock," sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray, and used surgical swabs (Wikipedia). The variety of descriptions comes from the fruit itself having different odors based on where it's from and its level of ripeness.

I personally was prepared for anything – except the sweetness of it. That's what was unsettling for me. Stinky is good. It's good for cheese. It's good for dwinjang. Add sweet to the mix, and it's freaking disturbing.

Everyone had a different idea of what it tasted like. I wish I could remember everyone's description. My best comparison was how a banana daiquiri tastes after you vomit it.

The cool thing for me was that Eun Jeong was gung ho about trying it. She was actually excited. I didn't know she was the adventuresome type for food. But she said it was fruit. Fruit's not scary. She had to see what the big deal was about. "Besides," she said, "My friends say it has a lot of protein."

So she enjoyed big gloppy spoonfuls of fruit protein.

We wanted more, so I cut it into quarters, which reveals more pockets of custardy nastiness.

This made Brant very happy.

He was in a state of ecstasy or revulsion.

Even his fiancee Terra had a good time with it.

I had to stop after a while because if its richness and, yeah, it was starting to make me sick. Eun Jeong said she was glad to try it but didn't want to try it again.

That was last week.

Today, she said, "I forgot what it tasted like now.

"Do you want to try it again?"

"Yeah, sure."

WARNING: Brant has promised to bring a durian to the next ZenKimchi 식 Ruffians outing.

Labels: Miscellaneous

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Dog Day Postponed Due to Injury

Yeong-jun, the party master known to ZenKimchi fans especially in the Sh-wing video, has gotten himself into some trouble. He was out this weekend and was crossing the street when he got hit by a motorbike.

The current prognosis is that he'll be in the hospital for a while with a messed up foot, broken leg, and small (we hope) head injury.

Be it so, Yeong-jun is the master of ceremonies for our dog meat excursion. I think it would be best to postpone it until he recovers.

Labels: Miscellaneous

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ZenKimchi Exclusive!

The ZenKimchi 식 Ruffians is a group dedicated to finding the sublime meal in Korea. "식" (Sik) is the Korean word for "cuisine." "Ruffians" is the term used for fans and followers of Anthony Bourdain's philosophy of experiencing the most a culture has to offer through its food.
Sign up now to join us on the next outing.
Note: Most all events right now will be in the Seoul area.

UPCOMING EVENTS
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2/24 Joe's Birthday at Hooters
--PAST EVENTS--
Hockey and Dong Dong Ju
Foreigner Chuseok
Sh-wing in July