Food for Serious

The last post was to annoy the person I promised a food post about. I thought it was funny, but apparently I’m going to get slapped when I return to Pitt. Totally worth it.

*******WARNING********: This is a long fucking post. Lots o’ pics though

So food here. Let me start off by saying it’s really cheap here, usually $4 or less will get you a substantial meal anywhere that is delicious and $8 will get you a meal that is high end and really delicious. You can also any food imaginable and have it delivered to your front door.

Food is a very large part of the culture and where I get most of my intimate interactions with my lab members or other Koreans on the weekends. Almost all meals consist of a main dish and a shit ton of small side dishes. I think that they are supposed to be an odd number of total plates, but I don’t care to ever count while I am eating. Every utensil is steel, from the chopsticks (which are super thin, I brought some back if you want to check them out), spoons, and bowls. They say that it is easier to clean and less waste then having so many wooden chopsticks, which I agree with I guess. There is ALWAYS kimchi. For those who don’t know, kimchi is an absolute requirement for every meal. There is nothing comparable in the USA that I can think of. It just HAS to be served as a side dish. It’s a mixture of vegetables that are pickled and has a lot red-pepper-like spice (gochu) on it. I actually don’t like it, but eat it so not to offend anyone. It’s a texture and taste thing. Just imagine eating a cabbage that’s pickled and sprinkled with red peppers, and that’s what I think it tastes like.

There are SO many different foods here, it’s going to be hard to talk about them. In general though, you can expect to have a lot of gochu and vegetables in most of your food. A lot of meals have a stove in the center of the table, and the vegetables and meat are put into a cauldron on top of the stove, usually with a soup base. The food is then cooked in front of you, and everyone enjoys it by ladling some out of the middle:

This is in the middle of the table (Source)

There are many forms of this style of meal, but in general, they are all spicy and they are all boiling hot. I had 3 different styles in 3 days, and was seriously done with that shit for awhile. It’s good, just not that often.

Outside of the spicy big-cauldron stew is one of my favorites, sam gep tang, or three-layer pork. They bring out the pork raw and then you cook it with a grill in the center of the table:

Also in the middle of the table(Source)

After the pork is cooked, you take a piece, dip it in sauce, and then place it into a lettuce leaf. You can then add anything you want from the side dishes, such as garlic, pickled radish, kimchi, onions, etc. Once you have everything you have, you stuff that shit in one bite. The lettuce wrap process is called “sam,” and this also comes in a variety of forms, such as chicken with rice cake, veggies, and a spicy sauce, also another dish I liked a lot whose name eludes me right now:

Sam gep tang from my B-Day. Lettuce, some side dishes and things to put in the wrap, grill on the right.

Individual dishes include a lot of soups, noodles and rice dishes. Soup dishes are roughly the same as above, except in individual sized portions and already cooked so you can eat right away. Most soups come out in a steel or iron bowl, and are still boiling when they serve it to you. Not sure why it served this hot, but I tended to avoid the soups while I have been here since you have to wait about 5 minutes before you can even attempt to eat. Out of the soup category, I think my favorite is sam gye tang, literally ginseng chicken soup. It has a whole young chicken in the soup, and the inner cavity is filled with rice, dates, and a few ginseng roots. It is a little of a hassle to eat, but I really like this dish:

Usually doesn't look this picture perfect (Source)

There are also a whole lot of noodle dishes, which is awesome since I’m a noodle man, if you know what I mean. I love me some ramen, which is pronounced rah-mee-yen here, and it is available everywhere for purchase at restaurants or in Cup-of-Noodle style containers at any convenient store. All convenient stores have hot water dispensers, so late at night, we would often head to a convenient store, buy ramen, add hot water (as well as spam if we were feeling ritzy), and eat at the store. This is something I will dearly miss when I leave. The ramen here is also pretty spicy, but I like it like that. The other noodle dish I like is naengmyeon, a buckwheat noodle in a spicy seasame seed oil sauce that is served with ice cubes in the bowl to keep it frosty. It’s refreshing to eat:

There is a ring of ice cubes that might be a little hard to see. (Source)

As far as rice (bap in Korean) dishes go, there is the world famous bibimbap, a dish with rice, veggies, and sometimes meat all severed in a metal bowl. I infinitely prefer the hot bowl to a cold bowl, since the hot bowl is served with a raw egg and just tastes so much better in every way. When the hot style bibimbap is served, you mix everything up, the egg gets cooked kinda and everything sizzles together into a wonderful orgy of food. Add some chili sauce and it’s even better. A less well-know dish is bokumbap, a kinda like fried rice, but instead of soy sauce, they use a chili paste (of course) and serve it with a fried egg on top:

(Source)

Another dish I enjoy was kongnamul, a bean sprout soup with rice. Whenever it is served at restaurants that have an English description, it always says “hangover soup,” since apparently it’s good for that. Served spicy and not spicy, it’s filling and different than the usual really spicy soups served here:

(Source)

For dessert, ice cream is that way to go since all convenient stores sell some bomb-ass ice cream. It’s hard describe, but the ice cream here is just so much better in every way that the USA. Most of the ice cream served is not ice pops but actual ice cream and usually cost less than ₩800, or about 60 cents. The other dessert I love here is pat bing soo. It’s crushed ice topped with fruit, gummy candy, sweet red bean and ice cream, though there are variations to the toppings. You can mix it all together and eat it or kinda work your way through each ingredient, trying out different combos. I’m definitely of the mixing party. This is delicious and I wish we had something like this back home:

Missing the ice cream, but the best looking one I could find (Source)

NOW, FOR THE BEST EATING EXPERIENCE!!!!!! The second weekend I was here, everyone came down to Jeonju to visit me and they brought a Korean guy from lab who grew up here. He gave us a tour, but more importantly showed us this sweet little place where they had a shit load of food and the most epic thing I have eaten in my life; live fucking octopus. I shit you not, that’s what we had. They brought out the octopus, still alive, to our table and began to cut its tentacles off with scissors onto a plate in the middle of the table. If you didn’t know, tentacles have their own neural network and don’t stop moving when they leave the body. What was left was a writhing plate of goddamn tentacles for us to eat. I was looking for a video of this, when I came across this other blog entry that was written in a way that I felt, so I’ll let him describe how it was (From Deep End Dining):

A couple of soju shooters later, the waiter returned and unceremoniously set a plate in the center of the table catching me and Diane off guard. Some time was needed to register what we were viewing. The sight was uncanny. It was ridiculous and sublime. Both comic and tragic like Greek theatre masks. "What fresh hell is this?" Extremely fresh hell, evidently.

The raging plate of squirming, writhing and willful baby octopus tentacles awed us. If I was the Greek hero Perseus, then this plate before me was the severed head of Medusa the Gorgon with her locks of seething, slithering serpents. Hyperbole? How about understatement. Much like Medusa’s disembodied head, these tentacles still believed they were alive — the limbs attached to a phantom body. Diane’s head spun in a figurative way but bordered on literal. Her brain signals and emotions were cross firing so dramatically that she was laughing, gagging, hyperventilating and sobbing all in the same breath. I offered her the first taste but she replied, “When hell freezes over.” This I interpreted as a “no”.

You have to understand Diane had the wrong perspective on this whole thing. She saw the tentacles as half-dead and I saw them as half-alive. It's all how you see things.

So with a firm grip on my chopsticks I grabbed the first…hmmph, okay…let me start again. So with a firm grip on my chopsticks I grabbed the…alright, just a second…I grabbed my chopsticks and nabbed the first tenta…damnit!!

I was experiencing some technical tentacle difficulties.

You see, one doesn’t grab live tentacles. They grab you. And they grab the plate and the sauce dish and the slices of garlic. In fact, the suckers suction on to anything they contact. If you are able to dip the tentacle into any of the three escorting sauces (a chili paste with raw thinly sliced garlic and jalapeno peppers or the pink, sweet and spicy sauce or a salt and pepper vinegar), then, congratulations, you cleared the first hurdle. Now try getting the thing to come off your chopsticks and into your mouth. This is not a passive piece of toro sashimi we’re talking about. This is an entity that does not want to be eaten alive, dead or otherwise. This is, perhaps, even a thing that would happily take you down with it if it were big enough.

This food hates you and what you did to it!

In every scenario I played out in my imagination as far as eating this dish was concerned, I predicted nothing more than a brief slimy struggle then stillness — the last words of an insignificant creature low on the food chain. Silly me. I could not have underestimated my dinner more because once in my mouth, the tentacle went into attack mode and suctioned on to my teeth, tongue and bottom lip making it nearly impossible for me to manipulate my mouth in order to eat it. My dinner was instinctively trying to preserve its own life while attempting to take mine by asphyxiating me.

(More description of his battle, but I’m skipping to the last paragraph)

The dust finally settled. After all that, how does live octopus tentacle taste? A little like fury fused with fear. …. There is no aftertaste but there are aftereffects. (Just don’t think about what the tentacle might be doing in your stomach.) Almost devoid of any flavor, it doesn’t taste a thing like cooked squid and nowhere near fried calamari. The tentacles are highly viscous, more resembling mucous. As far as attitude, it’s the meanest and rudest piece of food I have ever brawled with. And this was only the first piece.

And now a video, since you just have to see it to know exactly what it’s like. Just watch the first 20 seconds!!!!

Fantastic