This page is outdated. You are being sent to the CURRENT ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal. Please be patient.

Firefox works best here.

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, January 28, 2007

(Fusion #4) Korean Sloppy Joes

Growing up with the name Joe can have its pitfalls while growing up.

"Yo, Joe!"
"Joe Piscopo!"
"Joe-mamma!"
"Where're you goin' with that gun in your hand?"

It doesn't help that a lot of words rhyme with Joe, so it almost seems like people are calling your name when they are not. Jo 조 is also an informal way in Korean to say, "Give me!"

I always knew when it was Sloppy Joe night at my house growing up when I came home and my parents were snickering.

"What's so funny?"

"We're having Sloppy You for dinner tonight."

My dad never got tired of that joke, even though he himself was named Joe. He was immune because he chose to go by his middle name, Dan.

Two weeks ago, I made Sloppy Joes for the first time in Korea. Yeah, yeah, it was a jarred sauce that I found at Costco. I also used pork instead of beef because of Korea's astronomically high beef prices. Nonetheless, they turned out pretty well. Eun Jeong loved her first taste of (what may be) Iowa's greatest contribution to the culinary world. (<-- That is one of the most fascinating links I have found recently.)

Eun Jeong loved the Sloppy Joes so much that she ate the leftovers for breakfast on top of rice.

The other night, we both came home from our jobs exhausted. Eun Jeong had already eaten at her place, but I was starving. I stopped by E-Mart to pick up some ingredients for myself. I told Eun Jeong, whom had offered, to not cook me anything.

Luckily, she chose to ignore me.

She created this dish off the top of her head. She knew I was going to cook dinner for myself, but she felt I needed another side dish.

She made a concoction made from ground pork, onions, carrots, peppers, and a spicy sauce. It tasted almost exactly like a Sloppy Joe! Yet the ingredients in the sauce were 100% Korean.

We made this again yesterday morning for breakfast. Basically, you need julienned onions and carrots. Also you need some garlic. Bell Peppers really add to the flavor, but you can exclude them. Really, any hearty veggies you have lying around in the fridge will work. Yesterday, we used up the leftover zucchini squash.

So basically, here are the steps:

1. Brown the pork in a pan with a heap of black pepper, along with onions, carrots, garlic, and whatever vegetables you have.

2. Add two tablespoons of gochujang 고추장(the red pepper paste).

3. Add a dash of salt, some soy sauce, some corn syrup, and some mirim 미림(also known as mirin, a cooking wine made of rice). Taste often to balance the flavors to your liking.

4. Serve on rice or toasted bread.

Labels: Fusion

...................................................

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

(FFF #25, Fusion #3) Cheese Ravioli in Soju Sauce

This is the ideal entry for the ZenKimchi Food Journal. In fact, part of this dish was the inspiration for the journal itself. It's about creating Western food using ingredients found in Korea (the ravioli). It's about easily making from scratch something you used to just buy at home (the cheese). It's about combining, dare a say, fusing, Korean and Western foods.

This started out from my first months in Korea where I was craving my brother's (an up-and-coming Italian and Spanish chef in Atlanta) vodka sauce. I didn't have vodka on hand at the time, but I did have lots of soju -- 1,000 ($1) a bottle, may I add. I said, "Why not," and made a dish that actually rivaled any vodka sauce I've ever had in the past.

This brings me to another tangent. It is traditional in so many cultures to cook with alcohol. I have yet to find this application used much in Korea. The only place I've seen soju used in cooking was at the chitlin' restaurant in Ansan. I personally sneak a shot or two of soju in my kimchi jjigae when Eun Jeong's not looking. If so many cultures successfully use alcohol in their cuisine, there have to be applications in Korean cuisine. Yet that's another road I have hardly traveled.

If you live in Korea, I think this is the ultimate dish to impress your significant other--or someone whom you'd like to be your significant other. Maybe I should have waited until Valentine's to post, but I've been waiting long enough. This gives you enough time to plan.

The Filling

Remember the easy mock ricotta you can make at home? Get a good bit of that in a bowl and blend it with an egg, some finely chopped parsley, and a little bit of salt and pepper.

The Wrappers

The wrappers are basic mandu wrappers. In this case, I used some dyed with green tea.

See? These little things are in the freezer section of any little mini ajossi mart.

Flour a surface. These buggers are sticky. Place a small--a small--dollop of cheese filling in the center of the wrapper.

Wet your index finger in a bowl of water and rub it around the edges of the wrapper.

Put another wrapper on top. Now it's time to make it look more like ravioli.

What I did was cut off the rounded bits so that it looked more square like.

I then pressed down the sides with a fork to give them that ravioli cutter look. This also helped seal them.

It takes a while, but it's worth the work. Remember--only a dollop of cheese filling. You can see a few of mine had spewed out.

A quick one minute bath in some lightly boiling salted water, and they're ready. These guys get sticky, so rinse them in cold water immediately, put them in a sauce immediately, or place them separate from each other.

In the meantime, I had put together the sauce.

The Sauce

Vodka sauces are creamy, tomatoey and garlicky. I sweated a lot of garlic in some olive oil with some chopped onions.

Now, you can make your own homemade tomato sauce if you want to. Me? There are some times I just cut corners. I'm just that lazy. Besides, I'd already made homemade cheese and ravioli. If I can get any of those premade, I would do it quickly. But, hey, I can get spaghetti sauce at the store, so let's save ourselves the trouble of having to make something else from scratch. I love food, but I'm not a monk.

To the onions and garlic, I added a jar of spaghetti sauce along with half a bottle of soju. I let this simmer for a while--until the soju had a bit of the bite cooked out of it and had time to mingle with the sauce.

I then stirred in some heavy cream until it had a bit of an orange color. I let it cook through on medium low heat for another five minutes.

After garnishing with some fresh Romano cheese, I had a classic dish. Of course, you can use the soju sauce on other pastas. Really, this one is worth it.

Labels: FFF, Fusion

...................................................

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

(Fusion #2) Kimchi Quesadillas

I know, I know. This is another one of those "What were you thinking" moments.

I still stand by my hypothesis that kimchi can be used in any dish where you would use anything pickled. In quesadillas, I used it instead of pickled jalapenos. Just tryin' it.

You know what? It worked.

Also, cheese and kimchi are good matches. I see more and more kimchi items with cheese on them at Korean restaurants.

Okay, here's where my former days at Yucatan Sam's kick in. I used to make quesadillas all the time. They're really grilled cheese sandwiches with tortillas. I thought I'd use the tortillas and cheese I had bought at Costco recently, which is why this isn't labeled under "Food for Foreigners" (Costco is cheating).

Meet the ingredients. Ingredients... reader. Reader... ingredients.

Okay, now that you're acquai--what?

Alright. Tortillas, diced onions, sliced cheese, and kimchi (the batch I made this past weekend). You happy now?

Of course you are.

There are two ways to build tortillas. You can do it like a traditional sandwich and use two tortillas. Or, like above, you can pile the ingredients into a big tortilla and fold it in half. I think it's less messy that way. At Yucatan's I was notorious for spilling the contents of sandwich style quesadillas. I was also known for over salting the ground beef, but that's another story.

Grill on a lightly oiled pan. Careful not to burn.

After toasting on both sides, slide it onto a cutting board and cut it into wedges.

Omigod, that was easy. Even so, I've screwed up quesos many times. This time, though, the kimchi really gave them some extra kick and fire. I don't get it. It actually tasted good.

Labels: Fusion

...................................................

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

(Fusion #1) Krispy Kreme -- How Sweet It Is

This is when I get the nastiest and most un-PC about Koreans' approach to food. It's when they mimic Western food for the Korean palate. Everything -- everything -- is sweetened.

At any bakery in Korea, the only non-sweet bread is the stale baguette in the corner. Even the garlic bread is sweetened. Almost all pizzas are served with sweet corn or sweet potatoes along with a side of sweet pickles. The sweet pickles come with almost every sit down Western meal, whether it be Outback, TGI Friday's, or a local fancy steakhouse. Sandwiches have to have some sweet fruit sauce, honey mustard, and sometimes -- gasp -- strawberries. All mustard is honey mustard. Sweet ketchup is considered an elegant exotic sauce, which is thrown on the oddest things. Steaks come smothered in a sweet brown sauce, as do hot dogs. Even the scant Mexican food I find tastes like a cup of sugar was thrown in the sauce.

Dunkin' Donuts is one of the most successful foreign fast food chains in Korea. On casual glance, it looks far more successful than McDonald's. Yet when I first came to Korea, I saw there were no Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

If you didn't know already, Krispy Kremes are light airy and extremely sweet doughnuts. The company was born in the South 1937 and pretty much stayed there until the late 1990s. It started expanding and went public. It was the darling of Wall Street for a while.

When I lived in Rochester, New York, a Krispy Kreme opened near my house, and cars were wrapped two-fold around the drive-thru for two weeks and was the talk of the office.

Actually, Krispy Kremes are a bit too sweet for my taste. I didn't like them as a kid. When I discovered that I could order a fresh hot doughnut whenever the "Hot Doughnuts Now" sign was turned on, I gained a new appreciation for them. Krispy Kremes don't age gracefully. They are best hot and fresh off the conveyor belt. After half a day, they start getting gooey and sticky. By two days, they're practically inedible.

Realizing Koreans' penchant for sweetened Western food, I consistently said, "The first ajossi to open a Krispy Kreme in Korea is going to be a very rich man."

My prophecy is coming true.

Not only one but six stores have opened thus far. Eun Jeong and I were in the vicinity of the Sinchon store in Lotte Department store. I think it's the flagship outlet. I thought I'd go grab some doughnuts for nostalgia's sake.

Eun Jeong laughed when I said I could smell them from the other side of the department store. When we got there, we saw this.

Eun Jeong, who works as a tour guide in Seoul, said that it has been like this every day she has seen it. This line was pretty far outside the store. I changed my mind about getting a doughnut. Yet Eun Jeong wanted a coffee and stood in line. Yeah, we could have gone for coffee somewhere else, but we had made the journey this far, she didn't want to give up.

So we waited.

And waited.

And we got a guy to take our picture while in line.

The line, despite being long, went through quickly. It passes in front of the doughnut making machinery, giving some entertainment. Near the front of the line, a girl was handing out free samples of hot doughnuts.

We got a dozen doughnuts and some coffees. Eun Jeong could eat only one. I only two. I packed the rest in a zip top bag and took them to work. The Canadians I work with had never tried them before and were hooked, as were the Koreans.

It was one of the few times I was right about something. Krispy Kreme in Korea is making someone very rich.

Labels: Fusion

...................................................

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
Sign up to get invites to new events
2/24 Joe's Birthday at Hooters
--PAST EVENTS--
Hockey and Dong Dong Ju
Foreigner Chuseok
Sh-wing in July