Korean food
In Korea eating food is a social act. They get together and have meals watered with huge amounts of alcohol. They don’t meet together in their small houses, working 9 to 10 hours a day they don’t have time to cook their complicated cuisine and they don’t have the space to meet a buch of people comfortably. Instead, Korean cities has lots and lots of small and familiar cheap restaurants. The Korean Barbaque style of restaurant is very popular. Here you order meat or seafood and sidedishes and cook yourself the food using a common barbaque integrated in the middle of the table. Cooking and eating is a slow process and meanwhile, people discuss and speak about their life the same way we Europeans tend to do the same around cups of cofee.
Spicy
If I need to describe Korean food with an adjetive, the correct word is spicy. In Korea use red peppers and cayenne to add depth and boost the taste. This is common all around Asia and for them is completely normal and in fact European food is too plain for them. In Spain cuisine is usually sweet or neutral, and it’s never too spicy. In result, most of Korean dishes were quite spicy for me but after a couple of weeks I started adjusting and after a month I started appreciating the taste. Now I cook spicy myself and I really like the flavour boost spicy spices add to the food.
Meat
Korean food is based around meat but meat is never the main part of the dish. They use small portions to add texture and flavour, but they don’t eat meat in huge quantities like we do in Europe. Meat is pretty expensive in Korea because is imported from New Zealand or Australia. Pork and chicken is what Koreans usually eat. Beef is freaking expensive and is only eaten in really small quantities or in special ocassions.
Rice
In Korea the diet is rice based, which means that all the dished have huge amounts of rice or at least they are served with rice as a sidedish. For example, the bibimbap, one of the most famous dishes is a tasty mix of vegetables and egg over a big amount of rice.
This is Bibimbam, one of the most popular Korean dishes between foreigners and Koreans alike
Korean Fast Food: Kimbap
Koreans are obsessed with Well-being, being well being food all the food they market as healthly. They are really serious about this. There are basically no fat Koreans and most of them are pretty fit. Of course there are American Fast Food stores, but the products they sell in there look better in comparaison to American or Canadian ones. There are also Korean style fast food. In Korea there are restaurants in every street and in all of them you can order a Kimbap as fast food. Kimbap is a roll of rice with vegetables wrapped on seaweed. More complex versions have also tuna, egg or ham. It’s the Korean version of a California Roll, but here is extremely cheap (In regular restaurants, small ones cost 0,60 eur and huge ones 2 eur). You can buy Kimbaps as snacks or complete meals easily all around Korea and they are fast, tasty, easy to buy and eat on the go and way healthier than hamburguers and hot dogs.
Soups
They eat lots of rice but not everything has rice. The other main kind of dishes are soups. They have lots of them, Kimchi soup, Pork soup, Fish soup, Rice cake soup, Chicken Soup, Ginseng Soup… each one of them diferent of the other, but all of them tasty. They used lots of spices. In Korea I basically discovered soups and I realized I like them. In Spain we don’t appreciate soups, we don’t have variety and most of them are considered as a cheap dish or a way to use left overs.
Fish and seafood
Taking into consideration they are a nation almost completely sorrounded by seas as Spain, they as much fish as we do. What is different is the way is processed and transported. The animal is always alive the moment you buy it in the market or you order it in the restaurant. In the markets and in the restaurants they have huge tanks with the fishes swimming freely instead of clean and dead animals on the counter. They probably can do that because the sea is never more than 150km away while in Spain there are areas far away from the ports. But there is no reason we can’t do the same in martkets close to the ports. Maybe is a health inspection issue but I feel it’s better the Korean way because I think the fish is always going to be fresher than if you buy it already dead. In some markets you can even eat the fish raw seconds later buying it. The clerk will prepare the fish for you at the moment and it will be served almost over the counter.
That's how you buy fish in Markets in Korea
Fish is quite expensive thought, so they eat huge quantities of seafish, specially calamary and octopus. When I say huge is not a joke, most of the dishes have some kind of seafood and they are so used to it that they even have seafood taste snaks. Actually, calamary is a snack, you can buy dry calamary in any convenience store and eat it the same way we eat pumpkin seeds in Europe. It taste horrible, but they like it.
In the video you can see how I ate octopus in Busan in the company of several CouchSurfers. The octopus was alive, because we were eating it seconds after it was cutted. It tasted very good.
Sidedishes
One peculiarity of the Korean food is that is always served with several sidedishes. These are designed to give the correct proportion of diferent flavours and tastes. One of the sidedishes is always kimchi, the most famous Korean food.
We cook kimchi thanks to Ginny, a korean friend that invited us to her home to cook korean food with his parents. (Thanks Ginny!)
Kimchi is prepared with fish stock,lots and lots of red pepper and several other spices. Then you spread the spicy red paste over vegetables, usually cabbage. After that, they are refrigerated for several days. In the old days, Kimchi was the way to preserve vegetables during the winter. They prepared it in the fall and then buried it in holes in the earth. This is a pretty interesting similarity with our spanish embutidos like chorizo and jamon but what Korean people are preserving is vegetables instead of meat.
Pastry
Apart of the normal food, Koreans enjoy amazingly good cakes. The traditional desserts are rice cakes which are more or less the same thing than the japanese ones. They also have amazing birthday cakes which taste really good and are very healthy (You can tell they are not fat and they are made for example with green tea)
I don’t really like rice cakes but they are a good snack. One of them fill you up. Korean’s are currently influenced by European style pastry. There are tons of European Style bakeries and you can buy all kind of good cakes, bread and sandwishes cheaply and almost 24/7.
The korean food is healthy, spicy and with a very unique taste. You need to visit Korea to try it!
