When In Korea - Don't Miss The Famous Kimchi Salad

Few fall in love with Korean food at first taste, but like most acquired tastes, it's an addictive one once you get used to it. While there are obvious influences from both China and Japan, Korean food is definitely in a class of its own, mixing spicy chillies and copious amounts of garlic with delicate ingredients like raw fish. It's also very healthy, a fact attested to by the observation that very few South Koreans are overweight.

A Korean meal is centered around rice and soup, invariably served with a vast assortment of side dishes known as banchan. The humblest meal comes with three types while a royal banquet may well feature twelve. Typical banchan include bean sprouts (kongnamul), sauteed fishcake (eomuk jorim) and pickled cucumbers (oi-muchim).

The ubiquitous kimchi (gimchi), made from fermented cabbage and chili, accompanies nearly every meal and may be a bit of an acquired taste for visitors as it can be quite spicy. In addition to the common cabbage type, kimchi can be made from white radish (ggakdugi), cucumbers (oi-sobagi), chives (buchu gimchi) or pretty much any vegetable that can be pickled. Many different dishes are made using kimchi for flavoring, and kimchi is served as a side dish as well.

Two more condiments found in almost every dish are doenjang, a fermented soybean paste akin to Japanese miso, and gochujang, a hot (or not so hot) chilli paste.

A common perception amongst Koreans is that foreigners simply don't like spicy food, so you might have to spend some time convincing people otherwise if you really want to eat something hot. Also, while Korean food undoubtedly has the neighboring bland-dieted Japanese and northern Chinese breathing fire, if you're accustomed to (say) Thai or Mexican food you may wonder what the fuss is about.

Most restaurants specialize in one or two dishes - so you need to agree with your friends what you'll be having for dinner. There are beef restaurants, pork restaurants, spicy chicken restaurants, and cow knee soup restaurants.

Etiquette

Koreans use chopsticks with a twist: alone among the peoples of Asia, they prefer chopsticks of stainless steel. Unfortunately for the chopstick learner, these thin and slippery sticks are not the best implements to practice with, but if you can eat with wooden or plastic chopsticks you'll manage with some fumbling. When eating as a group, communal dishes will be placed in the center and everybody can chopstick what they want, but you'll still get individual portions of rice and soup.

Some etiquette pointers:

Don't leave your chopsticks sticking into a dish. A spoon sticking downright into the rice bowl is also not a good sign, since that's how Koreans set up the dishes for their passed ancestors. Eating rice with your spoon is polite. Actually Korea is one of the few countries where eating rice with your chopsticks is considered rather rude, mostly by the elder Koreans (nowadays, this is no longer the case). This is not the case in Japan or China, where they usually eat rice with their chopsticks. However, eating rice with chopsticks is more accepted among the younger generation.

Don't lift dishes up from the table. (This rule, too, is widely ignored by Korean youth.)
But most of all, Koreans are generally very interested in foreigners. Most of them will look at you out of interest, not because you're eating the wrong way. So don't be self-conscious of whether you're doing something right or wrong. Just use your common sense of politeness and good manners, and everything will be fine.

"Korean barbeque"

"Korean barbeque" is probably the best-known Korean dish, split in Korea itself into bulgogi which uses cuts of marinated meat, and galbi, which uses unmarinated ribs. In both, a charcoal brazier is placed in the middle of the table and patrons cook their choice of meats, adding garlic to the brazier for spice. The cooked meat from both of these is placed on a lettuce or sesame leaf along with shredded green onion salad (pa-muchim), raw (or cooked) garlic, shredded pickled radish (?? muchae) and some chili-soya paste (ssamjang) and then devoured. All are optional, so be creative.

The cost of a barbeque meal depends largely on the meat chosen. In most Korean restaurants that serve meat, it is sold in units (usually 100 grams). Beef is the most common choice but pork or chicken are also popular. You'll rarely see filet mignon, instead common cuts of meat include ribs, unsalted pork bacon (samgyeopsal) and chicken stir-fried with veggies and spicy sauce (dakgalbi). Unmarinated meats tend to be higher quality, but in cheaper joints it's best to stick with the marinated stuff.

Rice dishes

Bibimbap literally means "mixed rice", which is a pretty good description. It consists of a bowl of rice with all sorts of condiments on top (vegetables, shreds of meat, and an egg), which you mash up with your spoon, stirring in your preferred quantity of gochujang ( chili sauce), and then devour. Particularly tasty is dolsot bibimbap, served in a piping hot stone bowl (watch your fingers!) that cooks the rice to a crisp on the bottom and edges.

Another healthy and tasty option is gimbap , sometimes (rather inaccurately) dubbed "Korean sushi". Gimbap contains rice, sesame seed, a Korean variety of spinach, pickled radish, and an optional meat, such as minced beef or tuna, all neatly wrapped in dried seaweed, topped with sesame oil and sliced. A single roll makes a good snack or meal depending on one's appetite, and they travel well. Basically what differentiates Korean and Japanese gimbap is how they prepare rice: Korean style gimbap usually use salt and sesame oil to flavor the rice, while Japanese style uses sugar and vinegar.

More of a snack than a meal is tteokbokki, which resembles red slugs at first sight, but is actually rice dumplings in a sweet chili sauce.

Stews and soups

The Korean word for soup is tang, while the term jjigaecovers a wide variety of stews. Common versions include doenjang jjigae (????), made with doenjang, vegetables and shellfish, and gimchi jjigae, made with — you guessed it — kimchi.

Sundubu jjigaeis made with soft tofu as the main ingredient. The common meat version by frying ground pork with oil and dried chili powder, then pouring in broth and adding tofu and vegetables. There's also a seafood version called haemul sundubu jjigae where the meat is replaced by shrimp, squid and the like.

Budae jjigae has some contemporary history involved. It's known to have originated from the city of Uijeongbu where a US military base was located, and naturally there would be a lot of American canned food available, such as SPAM, sausages, and pork beans. Some got creative, and found out that these ingredients can be assimilated into the traditional Korean food of jjigae. Therefore, budae jjigae can be thought of as some sort of a fusion food in the past, which is now accepted and enjoyed by Koreans all over the nation. All restaurants have somewhat different recipes, but generally it's pretty spicy, and will usually have kimchi and spam-like American ingredients. Most places will bring you a big pan of stew and put it on a gas stove in the middle of the table. Many like to put ramyeon noodle  in the stew, which is optional.

Popular soups include seolleongtang , a milky white broth from ox bones and meat, gamjatang, a stew of potatoes with pork spine and chillies and doganitang, made from cow knees. One soup worth a special mention is samgyetang (, pron. saam-gae-taang), which is a whole spring chicken stuffed with ginseng and rice. Thanks to the ginseng, it's often a little expensive, but the taste is quite mild. It's commonly eaten right before the hottest part of summer in warm broth in a sort of "eat the heat to beat the heat" tradition.

Noodles

Koreans are great noodle lovers too, and the terms kuksu and myeon span a vast variety of types, sold in fast-food noodle shops for as little as W1000-2000.

Naengmyeon are a Korean speciality, being thin, chewy buckwheat noodles served in ice cold beef broth, and hence a popular summer dish — although it's traditionally winter food! They're also a classic way to end a heavy, meaty barbeque meal. The key to the dish is the broth ( yuksu) and the recipes of well known restaurants are usually closely guarded secrets.

Mandu dumplings are also very popular and are served up in steamed or fried as an accompaniment to other foods, or boiled in soup to make a whole meal.

Ramyeon is Korea's variant of ramen, often served with kimchi (what else?). Korean ramyeon is well known for its overall spicyness, at least when compared to Japanese ones. Try shin ramyeon for example. Jajangmyeon is a noodle with a black sauce that usually includes pork, onions, cucumber, and garlic. Finally, u-dong are thick wheat noodles, similar to the Japanese udon.

Japchae s made from yam noodles, which are fried along with some vegetables (commonly cabbage, carrots, onions) and sometimes beef or odeng (fishcake).

Rice noodles, common in much of Asia, are seldom found in Korea.

Seafood

Since Korea is a peninsula, you can find every type of seafood (haemul), eaten both cooked and raw. Restaurants where you pick your own fish — or bring it from the fish market next door — are popular, but can be very expensive depending on what you order.

Hoe, pronounced roughly "hweh", is raw fish Korean-style (similar to sashimi), meaning it's served with spicy gochujang (chili sauce) sauce. Chobap is raw fish with vinegared rice, similar to Japanese chirashizushi.

Another cooked specialty is haemultang (???), a spicy red hotpot stew filled crab, shrimp, fish, squid, vegetables and noodles.