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Dining
Guide / Korean Cuisine
In many aspects
Korean cuisine is a combination of Japanese and Chinese
techniques in preparing food. If compared to Japanese cuisine, it
relies less on fish and seafood; if compared to Chinese, it relies
less on oil.
The staple
food of course is rice (in Korean: bap). Rice noodles (in
Korean: chapche) and bean curd (in Korean: duboo)
are common starch substitutes or additions.
Korean foods
tend to be spicier than either Japanese or Chinese dishes. The hotness
comes chiefly from chili. Other common spices are sesame
and ginger.
Most peculiar
about Korean cuisine, however, is its way of pickling instead of
cooking vegetables. Pickled vegetables in Korean is kimchi,
a term anyone visiting Korean restaurants will learn fast. Literally
kimchi is just the word for vegetables; but pickling is so predominant
that even for the Koreans, kimchi also means pickled vegetables
and they only specify the preparation if it is other than pickled.
Koreans are
likely to eat pickled vegetables every day of the year, commonly
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In the cold Korean winter kimchi
can last for many months. However, in the tropical Thai climate
kimchi should be and is prepared only several days before consumption.
The pickling process takes about 12 to 14 hours. Almost all available
vegetables can be pickled but the most common in Korea are cabbage,
turnip, and cucumber. The seasoning is chili, garlic,
onion, ginger, oyster sauce, fish sauce, and salt.
During the
fermenting process the vegetables loose much of their natural flavor
and instead adopt the flavor of the seasoning. The difference in
texture, however, is enhanced.
Even as kimchi
is most peculiar to Korean cuisine, it's rather the Korean habit
of preparing meat as barbecue (in Korean: bulgogi) that has
appealed to a large number of gourmets around the world.
As the Koreans
use chopsticks meats are chopped into bite size before being
cooked. And like in Chinese dining, dishes (except rice) are served
family style with food placed in the middle of the table
where every diner picks a piece of this or that.
The Koreans
pay particular attention to the arrangement of the food on
the plates and the dishes on the table, a similarity to first-class
Thai cuisine. Foods are supposed to be placed neatly in concentric
circles or parallel linear columns and never in a disorderly
fashion. But that's not enough. Also the colors of the foods
should alternate in a regular manner.
Other descriptions:
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