Korean Cuisine
Korean cooking, at first glance, is easy. Like making hotdogs, you do it from memory. It isn't French cooking.
But it turns out that there might be good Korean cooking and bad Korean cooking.
My wife, like her mother, doesn't use recipes. I thought at first that there were no recipes in Korea. But it turns out not all of Korea runs like my wife's family.
Everything they cook, they just throw all of the ingredients in a pot and boil it. You don't need a recipe for that- just a list of ingredients. Oh, and portions. They don't have those. Surprisingly, this approach often works. It is often good. But it is also not so unusual that it is not.
But if you make it spicy enough, nothing matters.
Turns out, if you look for them, there are recipes. And the are not all "Throw all this shit in a pot and boil it."
I make the Chap-chae now. Because it is complicated enough that a recipe helps it.
When my wife gets the children to ask me to, I make the morning bean-curd soup, or the seaweed soup.
When I first made it, I had to ask my wife what goes in it. She would laugh at my ignorance, "Who would put Mu (daikon) in Seaweed soup?" When I asked how much of anything, she would just yell at me to "Figure it out."
So I looked at some recipes. And here is the game-changer– I think about why certain ingredient are in the meals.
We don't always put beef in the seaweed soup, it can be good without it. but a bit of beef adds a lot of savour to it. Often it is added, and we will put it in when we have some about.
When my wife puts it in, she just boils a lump of it it with the anchovies and the seaweed and the rest of the shit.
I boil the water with anchovies, to make a base, and while it is boiling, sear the cubed beef with garlic and sesame oil.
I then mix the seaweed in the with the beef and sear it.
Then I remove the anchovies from the base before I put the beef and seaweed into the base to boil the soup.
My wife laughs at this. "It doesn't matter what goes in when, its all the same shit!"
She's Korean, so she knows Korean cooking. But there is no way that garlic and meat boiled from raw is going to taste as good as beef cooked with garlic, and then boiled.
The seaweed soup I made on Monday is gone, but when I came home tonight, there was new pot of it, full of beef, sitting cold on the stove.
Disappointed, as usual, that it falls on me, after working on papers all day, to make dinner for a family who have spend their day watching YouTube, I look around the kitchen and ask "Soup and rice for dinner then? Looks like there is a new pot of seaweed soup!"
"They don't like it." My wife admits, simply. "They want you to make the soup from now on."
I guess the seaweed soup is for the garbage then.
I warm up the rice, and I cook up the rest of the beef with a side of fried mushrooms, and we eat it with kimchi.