Two dishes invented in Seoul that defined moments in the 20th century for Korea start this week of battles.

HaejangGuk – This “hangover soup” was invented when Seoullites were under strict curfews from the pre-democracy days. HaejangGuk, a pork bone soup with dried cabbage and big Fred Flinstone chunks of meaty pork bones, satisfied late night revelers when they came out from closed-in nightclubs early in the morning.

Budae Jjigae – One of Asia’s first 20th century fusion dishes, Budae Jjigae comes from the early post-war period, where desperation and poverty turned U.S. Army rations of Spam and hot dogs into a surprisingly tasty soup. “Fourth of July in a pot.”

This is part of ZenKimchi’s March Madness 2010. The poll will end at 12 a.m. Seoul Time March 22nd. The winner will go to the regional quarter finals.

From Gangwon-do we start of with a dish from the mountains and one from the sea.

Makguksu – Chilled buckwheat noodles with a rich beef broth, almost like a consomme. Garnished with radishes, Korean pear, cucumbers, crumbled dried seaweed a hard-boiled egg.

Ojingeo Sundae – Squid stuffed like sausage and steamed. A streetside favorite.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

This is part of ZenKimchi’s March Madness 2010. The poll will end at 12 a.m. Seoul Time March 22nd. The winner will go to the regional quarter finals.

The South kicks off with two dishes with passionate followers.

Jeonju Bibimbap is the height of the mixed rice dish, combining delicate tastes into a complete whole.

Samhap carries smaller but highly devoted following. This is the famous fermented skate served with steamed pork belly, raw garlic, hot peppers and sweet fresh kimchi.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

This is part of ZenKimchi’s March Madness 2010. The poll will end at 12 a.m. Seoul Time March 22nd. The winner will go to the regional quarter finals.

We start our battle in the North with two iconic dishes from Pyongyang and Hamheung. These chilly noodle dishes started as humble winter fare and now bring refreshing relief to summer heat.

From Flickr Bibim Naengmyeon – Chilled buckwheat noodles mixed with pepper paste, cucumbers, radishes and other vegetables

Mul Naengmyeon – Chilled buckwheat noodles floating in a beef broth with cucumbers, hard boiled egg, radishes and other fruit and vegetable garnishes

This is part of ZenKimchi’s March Madness 2010. The poll will end at 12 a.m. Seoul Time March 22nd. The winner will go to the regional quarter finals.

It’s time for ZenKimchi’s March Madness, sponsored by hi EXPAT!

Korean foods from different regions compete for fame and glory on the international stage. Which cuisine will reign supreme?

Here’s how it works.

It all starts at midnight Seoul Time on March 14th. Every day pairs of foods from the regions of Seoul-Gyeonggi, Northern, Southern and Central will vie for your votes. Each region has sixteen foods. The winners of each region will square off in the semi-finals and finals. By the end of March, we will award a lucky Korean food the title of 2010 World Champion.

Disclaimers and technical stuff

We have tried hard to place foods in the regions where they originated or have a popular version. Some things did need to get fudged and wedged in certain regions to balance it out. The regions themselves are a bit blurry. Northern includes any land from Kaesong north. Seoul-Gyeonggi is the capital plus the surrounding doughnut province, including Incheon. Central includes Gangwon-do to the north and cities such as Andong, Chuncheon and Daegu. Southern is mainly Busan and Jeolla-do. I also don’t always follow the government’s standard for romanization because it doesn’t always make phonetic sense (how does hoe sound like “hway?”).

We also have a few wildcard spots. In the comments, lobby for your favorite Korean dish, and if the demand is strong for a food not already in the brackets or one that lost early but is popular, we’ll place it in the wildcard position. Note that we won’t feature beverages in these playoffs. That may call for another round.

Now, stomachs get ready to RUMBLE!!

Posted by Tammy

Many Korean apartments and condos do not have ovens (as many expats discover after moving to South Korea). Having to adjust to cooking without a major appliance can make it life in the “Land of the Morning Calm” difficult if you enjoy baking.

This is a cake recipe you can make in your microwave in a coffee mug. It’s very easy, since it makes only two servings. The touch of Korean pepper powder invokes chocolate’s ancient past as an elixir of Aztec royalty.

You can find the original version of this recipe here. Cut it in half if you’re making a solo treat.

Ingredients:

- 4 tbsp flour
- 5 tbsp sugar
- 2 tbsp cocoa (I used some powdered hot chocolate mix this time)
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp Korean pepper powder (or more), cinnamon or Chinese 5 spice powder
- A pinch of salt
- 1 egg
- 3 tbsp milk
- 3 tbsp oil (I used grapeseed oil)
- 3 tbsp chocolate chips or flakes plus 2 tablespoon extra
- A small splash of vanilla extract
- 2 microwave safe coffee mugs

Preparation:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients in a big bowl.

2. Next, add in the milk, oil, vanilla extract, egg and mix well.

3. Pour mixture into mugs (at the halfway mark).

4. Sprinkle the top with the extra tablespoonful of chocolate chips or flakes .

5. Microwave one mug at a time. Cook for 1 minute on medium heat. It will bubble and rise as it cooks, so make sure you provide ample room for that. Leave it for a few seconds, then microwave for another 30 seconds on medium again. The mixture will solidify, but still look a little molten. That is fine because it will continue cooking on residual heat. Overcook it and you get a chocolate rubber ball.

6. Allow to cool a little before serving. The chocolate chips will sink to the bottom for a chocolate syrup treat. Think of it as the icing on the bottom instead of the top.

As you can see from the photos, the end product looks a little messy (after all, you’re serving it in the same dish you made it) but a generous scoop of your favorite ice-cream will hide that perfectly.

Tammy Quackenbush lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her love of Korean food started when she taught ESL in Chuncheon, Gangwon-do, back in 1996-1997. However, she didn’t become “famous” for her Korean cooking style until she started making cooking videos on YouTube as Koreanfornian Cooking in 2007 (had to put her college degree to use somehow). Her recipes and articles have been featured on Slice/Seriouseats.com, Foodbuzz, Korea.net and iFoodTV.com.

The highly knowledgeable and entertaining Jennifer “Fatman Seoul” Flinn will lead a tasting tour of 20 Korean dishes. It’s all in English, and lots of mysteries will be revealed along with what I’m sure will be colorful anecdotes.

Here’s the official rap:

On March 20th, O’ngo Food Communications and Seoul Eats will be organizing a Korean Food Taste Tour. Participants on the tour will first enjoy a specially tailored lunch tasting menu consisting of over 20 different dishes and it will be explained by a Korean cuisine expert, Jennifer Flinn, in English. After lunch we will walk over to the historic Bukcheon district to visit 2 museums: A Korean Folk Art Museum (Gahoe Museum) and the Seoul Museum of Chicken Art. At the Folk Museum, we will enjoy Korean Traditional Tea.

After the museum tour, we will head over to a kitschy Korean Rice Wine Restaurant (Makgeolli) to have an Korean alcohol tasting. We will sample and learn about 9 different Korean makgeollis, wines, and alcohols. At this restaurant we will enjoy our drinks with Korean Seafood Pancake (Haemul Pajeon) and Red Spicy Chicken (Dak Bokkeum).

The tour is designed to give travelers to Korea an insider’s view on the culture and the food.

The tour group will meet at 11am on March 20th outside of Anguk Subway Station Exit 6 (Orange Line Seoul Subway Line 3). The tour will last from 11am and finish at 3pm.

The tour will be lead by Jennifer Flinn who has been in Korea for 9 years. She has studied and written countless articles on the food. She is fluent in English and Korean and she is a member of RAS (The Royal Asiatic Society)

The complete cost of the tour will be 80,000 won ($72.00 Dollars) per person. A booklet explaining the dishes and a map will be provided.

Payment can be sent to O’ngo Food Communication’s Bank Account by Bank Transfer at:
Woori Bank 1005-480-990616    ( 최지아 온고푸드커뮤니케이션 우리은행 1005-480-990616)
or sent to Daniel Gray by Paypal at dnlgray (at) gmail (dot) com.

If you are a tourist and need to pay on the day, arrangements can be made.

There are only 20 spots available and preference will be given to non-Korean citizens. Korean tour operators are not invited to attend.

Pumpkin Jeon and Fresh Cabbage Jeon
Spring Green Salad with Pear
A Variety of Side Dishes (Banchan)

The Miele Guide, Asia’s premier restaurant guide, has opened its voting to the public.

VOTE NOW

Full Disclosure

I’m again one of the judges for the Korean side–I think still the only non-Korean judge–and tried to really nominate some well-deserving restaurants.

Gamja fries topped with chopped galbi. (from SF Weekly)

I’ve hinted it many times, and we just keep getting confirmation after confirmation. The Korean government and corporations dream of conquering the world with their prissy pretentious overpriced “well-being” concept of Korean food–you know the postulations like “Americans pay $300 for Japanese food, why not Korean” and “Americans only eat hamburgers, so they’ll like Korean food because it’s well-being.”

But reality blows their sanitized fabrications out of the gukmul.

SF Weekly reports that Korean food is entering the American consciousness, or at least the San Fanciscan consciousness, as stoner junk eats. It started with the Kogi tacos in L.A. Now street vendors and strip malls sell bulgogi topped hot dogs (you can actually get those at New York Hot Dog & Coffee in Korea), marinated beef and kimchi-stuffed sandwiches with creamy gochujang mayo, and fries topped with chopped galbi.

Accomplished Seattle food writer Matthew Amster-Burto (Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater) ponders why Korean food hasn’t taken off in Seattle even though the stars are aligned that way. He blames the insular tendencies of Korean restaurateurs, as in their neglect to advertise in English papers, and the baffled cluelessness Americans feel in Korean restaurants, to which I can relate. Talking to Joule’s Rachel Yang, he works on some ideas for establishing Korean food in Seattle, which could be a blueprint for the rest of the States.

1. Inexpensive restaurants with streamlined menus catering to Americans’ favorites (bulgogi, japchae, galbi), similar to Seattle’s teriyaki restaurants, should populate the area.

2. Promote gochujang. The culinary oracles are already predicting that gochujang is about to become the next sriracha sauce.

3. Korean tacos are already getting Americans used to Korean flavors, like kimchi.

Face it, folks. Royal court cuisine isn’t going to lead the charge. Neither is topoki. Americans aren’t going to latch onto yangnyeom dolsot bap because it’s boring but healthy. Rule #1 is taste. And even though my cholesterol count rises just reading those descriptions, the Korean junk food invasion looks mighty tasty.

Korea Attacks! Korean junk food has established a tasty foothold

Enjoying Korean food without knowing it

[HT to a very special reader]

Posted by shinshine

My father is coming.  After moving back to Korea last year, my father’s visiting for a few days.  My mind is going in all directions and the first thing I think of is – I gotta clean out my fridge.

Sometimes I end up with random stuff, other times I buy things to poke around and figure out what to do with them on top of my usual grocery items and leftovers after various cooking trials.  With a bit of exaggeration, my small kitchen is stocked to feed everyone in my apartment building for a week at any given point.

Just to minimize the moment of sheer shock when he opens my refrigerator, I started the process of cleaning it out.  The first one was pickling pearl onions, then baking potatoes and eggs that didn’t work out (but still made a good lunch).  This time is turkey tacos, an idea I got from the Beer-Braised Turkey Tacos Recipe from the magazine Food & Wine.  The innocent looking turkey tacos above have hodgepodge of ingredients from my refrigerator, including bekseju (백세주), gochujang (고추장) and doenjang (된장) – which, combined together, help bring out an earthy, warm flavor of the familiar winter meat dish, yet something that makes you wonder what else is in this…?

To make turkey tacos for 2) After sauteing 1 chopped onion and 3 cloves of sliced garlic, add a defrosted turkey leg and a thigh along with 1/2 bottle of bekseju (백세주), a Korean rice wine.*  Reduce until the liquid is just covering the bottom of the pot.  Take out the turkey meat and pull off the meat from the bones.  Reserve the meat and discard the bones.  Add about 3 cups of stock or water and a tablespoon of doenjang (된장; fermented bean paste or miso) and 2 tablespoons of gochujang (고추장; Korean hot pepper paste).  Bring up to a boil.  Add back the turkey meat, a tablespoon of grated ginger and a seeded, sliced jalapeno.  Simmer over low heat for about an hour until the meat is tender and the liquid is reduced and thickened to your desired consistency.  Mix in enoki mushrooms (팽이버섯; paeng e beo seot) and chopped scallions right before removing from heat.  Salt is not necessary because there is enough in gochujang and doenjang.

Warm up wonton wrappers over low heat just until soft and turning translucent on a pan coated lightly with oil.  Make sure to shape them like shells as the wrappers tend to get crispy soon after taking off from heat.

The recipe is purely based on the available items in my refrigerator.  As with recipes in general, it is up for revision based on what you have in your own refrigerator.

* I wanted to test it for myself what I heard about leftover soju and bekseju.  Usually, these can’t be saved for later because they go flat once opened.  One way to resolve this is to freeze the leftover then defrost it in the refrigerator before drinking it again.  And now I know that at least for bekseju, it works.

Shinshine grew up in Seoul and has been living in the U.S. roughly the latter half+ of her life.  She’s been living in New York since 2005.  Having switched careers from finance to food, she is now a full-time restaurant cook in New York City after culinary school in 2008.  Recently she started her food diary, www.shinshine.com, which is about three things in life she enjoys the most – food, Korea and New York