And that is food!

I have long been fascinated with the discovery of foods that today we find as everyday items on the supermarket shelf.  For example, consider the day that the first potato chip was served up. Someone (George Crum apparently) peeled a potato, sliced it, fried it and added a bit of salt at the end to create the crisp. Well done George. A relatively simple, yet transformational, achievement for the potato. Not all food metamorphoses are as straightforward however. Take chocolate. Imagine being a Mayan warrior and waking up one day to deduce that the bitter, bitter, fruit of the cacao tree could be turned into some yummy kind of deliciousness if you simply: fermented the seeds of the cacao fruit; dried seeds; cleaned seeds; roasted seeds; removed seed shell; grounded the insides of the seed; liquified the grounded bits; turned the liquid into a solid;  added sugar; and (finally) added milk? The Mayan warrior might not have completed all of these steps in one go (the last two steps were European additions) but you get the point. From this:

The humble cacao bean

To this:

           Chocolate chips from Costco (best I could do here but if I could
           have found Lindt dark chocolate the picture would have been      
           very different (imagine a face covered in chocolate smears but not
           the chocolate itself!!)

Where am I going with this while in Korea here you ask? Well, it turns out that Korea has quite a lot of food to add to a list that I will title "What were they thinking when they decided to do that to that and then eat it?" (WTF for short). My present list comprises of some complicated and some more simpler food substances.

Kimchi

Of course, I have to begin with kimchi. Kimchi is Korea's national dish which is eaten at practically every meal, either as a side dish or as a main dish (kimchi stew, kimchi chicken, kimchi tofu, etc). It has been to space (and I assume all was eaten there with the Korean astronaut so none came back). Who woke up, sometime in the 7th Century, and worked out that salting cabbage and adding red pepper, garlic, ginger, spring onions and radishes (the most usual combination but there are variations depending on region and season) and burying it outside in a stoneware pot  for months at a time could result in  a spicy, smelly dish of extreme goodness for your body (not necessarily your senses although you do start to get used to it). We recently moved house and were presented with a Kimchi fridge (that has special controls to ensure kimchi is kept at optimal temperatures during its various stages of fermentation) in addition to our usual fridge  Apparently November is the prime kimchi preparation time, so I shall have to stop blogging and commence kimchiing then. Let's just hope the rain stops soon or we might be faced with a kimchi crisis reminiscent of 2010 when there was a national shortage of cabbage across Korea leading to a hefty increase in the price of cabbage and a fear that the kimchi pickling season would have to be abandoned.

Traditional kimchi storage pots

Kimchi at the supermarket

Acorn jelly

In the front yard of my family home, right next to the red brick letter box, we had a huge acorn tree that provided endless hours of entertainment for three rambunctious kids. We could climb, swing, hide, run round and round, jump in the tree leaves and, of course, collect the thousands of acorns that would fall from the tree in autumn. We would save the acorn hats for the fairies in the garden (useful as umbrellas for the poor little darlings) and use the bodies for various craft projects (creating acorn people was a favourite). Yet with all of our acorn related adventures we had never considered cracking the acorns open, grounding up the inside into a paste like susbstance, stirring that paste into water, collecting the starch that then forms, purging the starch of noxious tannins (over the course of several days), settle and dry the starch, mix it again with water, and perhaps some corm starch, to make a jelly where, added with sliced garlic, soy sauce, sesame oil and red chilli, we would eat it all up. What were we thinking? This is dotorimuk (and it is actually rather delicious).

Acorn jelly pre-made (you can also buy it as a power and
make it up yourself)

What it looks like out of the packet 

Bamboo salt

Bamboo salt is a perfect example of WTF. It is described as a "warehouse of vital minerals" (for around $55 a vial I would expect nothing less) yet how this warehouse came to be is completely bizarre. First of all you need to locate natural sea salt from the West Coast of Korea. Next, find bamboo trunks that are at least 3 years old, fill them with the west coast sea salt and plug up both ends with specially located yellow soil. Stack the salt filled bamboo trunks inside a steel furnace but only burn the furnace with pine tree firewood and the pine resin. Repeat this process 8 times and on the ninth and final time the temperature must reach 1500 degrees to ensure that the now liquified salt fuses with the minerals from the broken down bamboo and the yellow soil. Amazing.

Bamboo salt for sale 

Live octopus

Here, I would argue that covering in bread crumbs and deep frying with a sprinkling of salt, pepper and  chilli, is a great idea. Eating live, raw octopus straight from the sea (or in our case the fish tank at the front of the restaurant) with no additives is actually not that pleasant (and rather chewy). I kept expecting (not that I ate that much) the tentacles to keep crawling and sucking in my mouth. The trick seems to be to watch the tentacles slowly stop moving (that would be die!) in front of you while you engage in meaningless banter with your dinner companions over a glass or two of soju. I'm not rushing back people. 

Mountain herbs 

This is a dish we discovered on the outskirts of Odaesan National Park, just beyond the gates of the Woljeongsa Temple. We watched the men come back to the restaurant from a morning of picking what really did look like weeds from the side of the mountain. They then spent some time de-soiling and skinning followed by pickling, dipping, covering in kimchi, sesame oil, chilli etc and presented us with plates of mountain herb delicacies. It was delicious. Seriously. 

Lunch for five (three of which are under six)

Crust of burnt rice tea

Crust of burnt rice tea is literally just that - the crust of burnt rice from the bottom of your rice cooker (and I thought it was only me that managed to burn rice in a rice cooker). Luckily, Korea does sell this tea in bag form so you don't need to wait until you burn your rice for dinner (or breakfast or lunch) to partake in this deceptively simple concoction. I do feel that it tastes a bit like cornflakes which I am not sure I like so much in a cup of tea but when in Rome...

Soul to Seoul: it's not just chicken soup for the soul here but an array of herbs, a lot of chilli, some marinated bamboo stems, dried lotus flowers, pickled persimmons and a lot of special preparatory processes thrown in for good measure! And I have only just begun...