Category: Food

Day 56-58: Moving South

It was a lazy morning, packing up just before checkout time, getting brunch at the Flying Pan, and heading directly to the bus terminal in Gangnam to go to Gwanju. I tried to study on the luxury bus, but kept dozing off.

Arriving in Gwanju, I immediately tried to find a seat to get on the internet to find the specific address of my airbnb, but apparently the bus terminal is a popular place on a Sunday afternoon. It’s weird that this Airbnb is only two blocks from where I stayed the last time I was in Gwanju. I’ve barely done anything the town, but there is a familiarity to it. Remembering how bad the sidewalks were, I wanted to catch a bus over to the Airbnb, and after waiting 15 minutes, the bus just blew by the bus stop. So, I walked the 2km. It’s a nice apartment and an even nicer neighborhood with a good selection of supermarkets and restaurants.

I was briefly tempted to buy a bunch of junk food, breakfast, or stuff to cook in, but I went for an “Imperial” set meal at the Chinese restaurant, including noodles, dumplings, pork, and a coke. I’m still full from that meal.

Jajjyangmyeon for one

I didn’t even have time to watch a movie or anything in the evening before I just passed out from exhaustion.

Brunch for 263000
Bus ticket (premium)28100
Coca Cola2000
Airbnb59.93 (USD)
Chinese food18,000
Total:1075 RMB
(USD 159.85)

Despite going to bed early, I still slept in. And following the standard morning routine, didn’t get around to lacing up my running shoes until 10am. After a long run, of which the last 15 minutes weren’t logged because an incoming text message stopped the tracker, I quickly showered and went downstairs to eat some baekban. I had a new contender for best meal in Korea. Not only was it relatively cheap, the servers were aggressive to give me more food, not only refilling the side dishes, but giving me an entire new plate of bulgogi. It was also the first restaurant I went to where you had to take your shoes off.

The lotus root was the best

I was so stuffed I had to take a nap after that, but I dragged myself out of bed to hit a neighborhood coffee shop before 2pm where I could save a dollar on the coffee (morning special). I’m amazed by how dog-friendly Korea is, I’m constantly finding people bringing dogs with them into restaurants and cafes. This cafe had a dog locked up in the employee room, but it escaped once. A nearly perfect sphere of fur ran up to me, yipping and demanding I pet it. I couldn’t stick around the coffee shop too long because I needed to find an ATM. It appears I was down to my last 50,000 Won note, and that might not be enough to even get me to Jeju Island.

The quest for cash was onerous but ultimately successful. I must have tried quite a few ATMs, but there were 3 main problems. One, UnionPay isn’t widely available in the insular Korean banking system. Two, my Chinese bank card is chip only (no magnetic strip). Three, I don’t know if China has made any new regulations barring foreigners from withdrawing cash outside of China. After a number of failures, I got some cash. The ATM happened to be in a supermarket, so I picked up some snacks and a salad because I wasn’t sure I could eat another full meal that day.

Back in the apartment, I ended up devouring all of the food that night (despite hoping to save some of it for the next day), and going to bed early again.

Baekban6000
Coffee2900
Groceries6070
Total:14970
(90.6 RMB)
(USD 13.47)

I overslept again and needed to get out the door pretty early because there were a lot of unknown elements in the route to Jeju. I originally wanted to go via Mokpo, which is only an hour from Gwanju, but upon further review, I realized the ferries leave at 9am and 0030. Wando, two hours south of Gwanju, became my second choice with two ferries in the morning and one at 4pm. While I was half certain, I could just roll up to the ferry terminal, buy a ticket, and embark, I also remembered my troubles in Weihai where they cutoff ticket sales when they started embarkation, hours before the scheduled departure.

I walked the mile to Gwanju’s bus terminal, got a 10:00am ticket to Wando. Considering, how my weight had ticked up several days in a row, and I had been overeating a lot, I considered fasting the day. However, in the 20 minute wait before my bus, I decided to get a bagel from Dunkin Donuts.

I spent the whole two hours of the bus ride studying vocabulary. After two brief stops to change passengers along the way, we pulled into Wando’s bus terminal and I hoofed it the mile to the ferry terminal. It doesn’t matter where I go in Korea, but I always see a foreigner within about five minutes. While stopped outside a corner store, double checking the map, there was some white dude on a bicycle. Wando is a tiny little town, but okay.

When I finally got to the ferry terminal, the irony of the day arrived. I was an hour too early to buy a ticket, with sales only starting at 1:30. I drank some water and crashed on a seat with the free available WiFi. Then I remembered, I left my plug adapter in the Airbnb. I specifically reminded myself that morning to NOT forget it. I think I might be almost done with Korea. My SIM card done. My 8 dollar plug adapter lost.

I need to start getting used to seafood

After buying my ticket at 1:30 and confirming that boarding didn’t begin until 3:30, I had time to think about lunch. I headed across the street and had some bibimbap with seafood. I kept up the study, and with plenty of time to kill, also had an affogato from the chain cafe in the ferry station.

After the long wait, we got on the ferry. I was the only person dragging luggage, but that makes sense if most of the passengers had cars, the Silver Cloud being a car ferry first and foremost. My 3rd class ticket entitled me to a windowless room with a shoe locker and a 46 person capacity. Fortunately, there were only a handful of people, but it was annoying to have to take my shoes on and off. I didn’t mind laying on the ground though. The 2nd class cabins were roughly the same size with smaller capacity and windows. I wonder what 1st was like. Bored, I bought a snack from the onboard convenience store and explored the ship. I spent two hours in the aft of the ship, enjoying the sun and doing a bit of studying until I got too cold, then headed back to the room to nap. The 2.5 hour journey felt much longer than that.

Trying to escape the pollution

We arrived at dusk, the terminal was deserted with no schedules on display for me to plan my escape from Jeju. With a Wifi connection, I was able to check directions to my hostel, another 2 hours away. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait more than 2 minutes before a bus came barreling along, and some 16 stops later I disembarked in roughly central Jeju City. I walked to the next bus stop to wait for the cross island bus that would take me to the southside of the island where I had foolishly booked my accommodation. That hour long bus ride seemed to be 80% twisting mountain roads, but at least I had a seat for myself and my luggage.

Back in civilization, I got off at my stop and followed the navigation to my hotel/hostel. It’s a hotel, but there is a hostel attached to the first floor. Just one dorm room with barely anyone staying there. There is a huge lounge with pool table and foosball, free real coffee, and free bike rental. I’m surprised there aren’t any backpackers, but I guess there is a lot of competition.

Tired, but still vaguely aware that I should eat, I went out to wonder the streets, which were all marked as “something something famous food street”, and a huge market, which was closed/closing. I settled for a sundae gukbap (blood sausage soup with rice), which was again much more food than I really wanted, but it was good.

And sleep.

Bus to Wando18600
Blueberry bagel w/ cream cheese1600
Ferry Ticket29900
Lunch10000
Affogato5500
Onion ring chips1500
Sundae gukbap7000
Hostel (@ 5 nights)356 RMB
Total:804 RMB
(USD 119.5)

Running Total: 16324.9 RMB (USD 2426.7)
Daily Average: 281.5 RMB (USD 41.8)

Cold Noodles

Pyongyang Cold Noodles

There are plenty of noodles in Korea, but your udon and ramen are clearly Japanese and your jjamppong and jajangmyeon are (ostensibly) Chinese. For a taste of true, home-grown Korean noodles, look no further than cold noodles, a.k.a. naengmyeon (냉면). The noodles themselves are typically buckwheat based, like soba (which is also often served cold in Japan), and come either in soup (물냉면 “mul naengmyeon”, water cold noodles) or dry (비빔냉면”bibim naengmyeon” mixed cold noodles). I believe the soupy version is more traditional.

There is a huge difference between the cold noodles from North Korea, called Pyongyang Cold Noodles, to distinguish them from the South Korean version. The South Korean style is loaded with vinegar (or kimchi juice), chili sauce, slices of pickled radishes, apples, and half of a hardboiled egg to create a cacophony of flavors that can take a little getting used to. The North Korean style is simpler, where one is supposed to appreciate the purity of the broth. The difference is a little too on the nose as a metaphor for the two Koreans.

찜닭: “Steamed” Chicken

Pure comfort food

찜닭 (jjim-dalk, literally: steamed chicken) is a marvel of Korean ingenuity. Chunks of chicken (with or without bones) are braised in a spicy (or not) soy-based sauce along with onions, potatoes, carrots, dumplings, rice cakes, and glass noodles. The cheese topping is optional, but worth it.

The whole dish is reminiscent of 大盘鸡 (da4pan2ji1, literally: big plate chicken), a Uighur dish from northwestern China where hunks of chicken are braised together with peppers, Chinese scallion, and potatoes in a flavorful spicy red sauce and served on a plate of broad wheat noodles. The jjim-dalk sauce, ignoring the baseline spiciness common in Korea, reminds me of 三杯鸡 (san1bei1ji1, literally: three cup chicken), a Taiwanese* dish so named for its use of a cup of soy sauce, a cup of rice wine, and a cup of sesame oil in its preparation**.

*: Sanbeiji originated in Jiangxi province, but it is currently most strongly associated with Taiwanese cuisine.
**: There is some debate as to the exact ingredients referenced by the three cups. As there is also a lot of sugar in the sanbeiji, many reasonable people assume that one of the cups refers to a cup of sugar. Baidu’s Wikipedia-clone says the original recipe used a cup of lard (instead of sesame oil).

WOTD: 수육 (Suyuk)

Choose your own adventure dining

One of the unfortunate things about Korean food once you get over the first flush of how delicious everything is is that you notice that meal after meal is visually similar. It makes it very hard to be aggressively sharing through social media (as if the little dopamine bursts of a half dozen likes directly stimulated the taste buds). Meal after meal, or at least the meals I’ve been going for, are composed of a cauldron of soup, a metal bowl of rice, and a handful of kimchi/banchan. Beyond that, its not hard to notice how meat is pretty much always served with a basket of lettuce leaves and a few chili peppers. No one will ever convince that Korean food is unhealthy because each bite of meat is taken with a mouthful of lettuce. You certain get your fill of salad.

수육 (suyuk, 水肉，”boiled pork”) is eaten with the lettuce wraps much like your array of barbecued meats, but the key difference is that it is boiled rather than barbecued. As should be clear from the parenthetical above, suyuk is based on the hanja literally representing “water meat,” though there is no close equivalent in Chinese cuisine. If I wasn’t dining alone and ordered a medium or large portion of suyuk, the restaurant would have brought it out in a chafing dish and the broth to heat it up at the table.

Suyuk appears to usually be served in restaurants that also offer an array of 국밥 (gukbap, “soup rice”). As pictured above, this set meal came with a bowl of pork soup to which I added a small portion of noodles and the bowl of rice. There were three dishes of seasonings (salty, spicy, and fishy) and the bowl of chives to doctor up the soup to one’s taste.

The whole set was listed as a 수백한상 (su baek han sang), which I think literally means “water, white/hundred, one, table” or rendered more naturally a table of suyuk set meal. baek (백) is an interesting word which either means white or hundred via the Chinese loan words 白 (bai2) or 百 (bai3) respectively. Baek appears in baekban which refers to a set meal consisting mostly of banchan side dishes (notice how ban shows up in both words). The dictionary says baekban is 白饭 (bai2fan4, “white rice”) in the Chinese hanja, which strikes me as less poetic than an etymology suggesting a hundred dishes.

Hangover Soup

Could be any soup…

해장국 (Haejang-guk), aka “Hangover Soup,” is a hearty stew served across Korea. I ordered it by random, assuming that the hae referred to “seafood,” but my error was a pleasant mistake. Honestly, it seems a lot like any other soup in Korea, although the addition of a chunk of bone and the coagulated blood are nice touches that should provide valuable nutrients.

국 (guk) is a word meaning soup, and 해장 (haejang) does literally mean “to get sober,” so the nickname is a proper translation.

I can attest to having it in the middle of a drinking session and not having a hangover the next day, though I wasn’t drinking that much to begin with. Worth a try, but I wouldn’t want it if I actually had a hangover.

…Surprise!

Sweet and Sour Pork

It should be a given that what passes for Chinese food in America is light years away from “authentic” Chinese food, but there is one dish that bridges the gap. I remember the first time I had sweet and sour pork in China and thinking it tasted exactly like Panda Express (in a good way). The same can be said for Korea, as despite their versions of Chinese food being bizarre to my sinified palate, one invariant served at pretty much all Chinese restaurants in Korea is a dish called tang-su-yuk (탕수육).

I can’t imagine a less appetizing looking dish

It doesn’t take a linguist to realize that tang-su-yuk sounds an awful lot like tang-cu-rou (糖醋肉 “sugar vinegar meat”) or more properly 糖醋里脊 (tang2cu4li3ji3 “sugar vinegar pork loin”), although the Korean dictionary says that the hanja (Chinese characters) behind tang-su-yuk are actually 糖水肉 (tang2shui3 rou4, “sugar water meat”). Though, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

To the best of my knowledge, China has at least three distinct schools of sweet and sour pork. There is the Cantonese style centered around Guangdong and available at every Hong Kong cafe (港式茶餐厅); there is the southern (江南 jiang1nan2, a.k.a. south of the Yangtze) style centered around Hangzhou; and there is the northern style, which I associate most strongly with Dongbei (东北 “Northeast” a.k.a. Manchuria), though technically speaking Dongbei food is based on Shandong cuisine.

In Hong Kong, one orders 咕咾肉 (gu1lao3rou4 in Mandarin), which I assume has some meaning in Cantonese. The meat is chopped pork ribs (排骨 pai2gu3) that are lightly coated in flour or corn starch to create a very crispy, but thin outside texture. Bell peppers, onions, and pineapple are briefly stir-fried in, though the vegetables usually retain a bit of their raw edge. Needless to say, the dish is heavy on the sweet.

In the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, one orders 糖醋里脊 (tang2cu4 li3ji3), where the name is a literally description of the ingredients: sugar and vinegar. 里脊 means tenderloin, so there are no bones in the dish. Relatively lean, elongated pieces of pork are thickly battered and served in a brownish sauce. Much like McDonald’s failed launch of mozzarella sticks, there is often a moment of disappointment when you bite into what looks to be a big chunk only to find there is barely any meat inside.

In northeastern China, you order 锅包肉 (guo1bao1rou1, literally “pot wrapped meat”) whose name probably has an interesting origin story associated with it. This dish batters large, thin slices of lean pork and better restaurants add a bit of shredded ginger to the sauce. Unlike the other two forms of sweet and sour pork, the pieces are not bite sized. Though there is still a lot of breading hanging off the pork it is usually fried very crispy on the outside and chewy inside.

All in all, I probably prefer Guobaorou, but they are all good in their own rights. Just hope that the kitchen is able to walk that fine line between sweet and sour to achieve the perfect balance.

Kimchi Stew

When people ask me what I’m doing in Korea, I like to joke that I am here to learn Korean and eat my body weight in kimchi. There are many kinds of kimchi (a taxonomy for which has just been added to the top of my to-do list), but when I say kimchi, I mean the prototypical version made from Napa cabbage. Any meal that comes with a little on the side is a good meal. Any restaurant that has a jar on the table is a good restaurant. If you believe the propaganda, kimchi burns fat, builds muscle, improves concentration (for learning), regulates moods (to cure depression), and promotes household harmony.

Unfortunately, there are limits to how much kimchi I can eat in a sitting. Unless I’ve a bottle (or two) of soju and possibly some potato chips or roasted peanuts as well, the sour, pungent, spicy, cold nature of kimchi means it is best in small doses. Unless you cook it.

Hot kimchi is an entirely different beast. Throw it on the grill when you are barbecuing thinly sliced pork belly, throw some in your fried rice, or make a pancake out of it and the flavors of the kimchi blend with the other foods into a rich and savory tapestry. However, the absolute best way to eat kimchi is in its stewed form, aka kimchi jjigae (김치찌개).

If it wasn’t enough food for one person in the first place, the auntie came by halfway through to give me a fried egg.

I like to go to the cheap little Korean restaurants where there is a small range of classics–such as bimbimbap, fried rice, dumplings, noodles, etc–but I invariably order the kimchi stew. Even among the holy trinity of stews–kimchi, soybean paste (된장), and tofu–there is no god but kimchi and I am its prophet. Soybean paste stew is a classic, but best served along with BBQ (where it reportedly serves some health benefit). Tofu is nice, but you usually get some nice chewy tofu in your kimchi stew, whereas the tofu soup is usually a silken tofu.

A bowl of kimchi stew is an indescribable experience from start to finish. It’s served boiling in a stone pot, so you whet the appetite from the array of banchan before you can start picking out pieces of softened, steaming kimchi leaves with your chopsticks. The broth is hot, salty, savoury, spicy, sour, and pungent, checking off every flavor except sweet. You take a spoonful of rice every so often to clear the palate and enjoy the heady rush of flavors once more. Halfway through the bowl you give up on all pretense of restraint and dump the rest of your rice into the pot so that every grain can become infused with scarlet goodness. On the bottom of the bowl, you discover a secret trove of pork you weren’t expecting like an unannounced prize in the cereal box.

Kimchi stew is also super easy to make since the kimchi pretty much provides all the seasoning you need. Oh sure, a teaspoon of salt, a dash of pepper, and maybe even a spoonful of chili or soy sauce will help if you dilute it by adding too many vegetables to the pot–I recommend sticking to just Chinese onion (大葱) and some kind of large, mild green pepper on top of the tofu, pork, and kimchi base.

Tteokbokki

Best snack food?

I’ve definitely been neglecting my duties as a culinary ambassador (aka clueless whitesplainer), so I’m reaching into the photo album archives to bring up this classic snack food: tteokbokki (떡볶이). I’ve only had it the one time so far, but I have found myself craving it more and more over the past week. Chewy “rice cakes” in a spicy sweet sauce, how can you do any better? Maybe by adding some oden (오뎅, borrowed from Japanese, but meaning “fishcakes” here). The square guys in the picture have a chewy tofu texture with a mild fishy flavor. They are usually served on skewers and you can ask for a bowl of the “soup” to drink on the side.

I briefly introduced 떡 (tteok) on the travel blog when I had a “traditional” tteok soup for the lunar new years. While you can buy bags of sliced tteok from supermarkets, its the tteokbokki format that is sold in every night market and street corner. 볶이 (bokki) means “stir-fried,” which feels like a misnomer, as they are usually just hanging around simmering in the oh-so spicy, oh-so delicious sauce. You’ll also see 볶 on the menu of small snack shops for fried rice (볶음밥, bokkeumbap).

WOTD：Ramen

That’s not Korean

Much like the commonalities of dumplings across east Asia, ramen presents an interesting case for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Let’s begin with the word and then talk about the actual food item. As pictured above on the lantern, “ramen” is written with the Japanese kitakana script, which suggests–despite its entry into English from the Japanese–that it is in itself a loan word. The beauty of blogging is that I can posit wild speculations without actually doing any research to verify this.

So, Korean uses a similar word as fitted to its phonetic system: 라면 (ra myeon). We should remember from the post on zhajiang mian that “myeon” is a functional morpheme in Korean for noodles and related to the Chinese character 面.

In China, ramen is rendered 拉面 (la1mian4), but this word is better translated as hand-pulled noodles and is most associated with the northwestern (read: Muslim) parts of China. Most notably, 拉面 pretty much also refers to freshly made noodles, while the instant packs are called either 方便面 (fang1bian4 mian4, “convenient noodles”) or 泡面 (pao4 mian4, “soaked noodles”).

So this is the key difference. We tend to associate “ramen noodles” as cheap stuff college students live on, while there is really a major difference between that kind of ramen (inspired by pulled noodles) and the real pulled noodles. To the best of my knowledge, in Japan ramen refers exclusively to fresh noodles (though the real star is the soup stock with every region of Japan claiming to make the best kind), while China uses different words, and in Korea, ramyeon either refers to the instant noodles or the kind served at a Japanese restaurant.

WOTD: Dumplings

Whether called jiaozi, baozi, wontons, mandu, or gyoza, dumplings are delicious

Of course they are stuffed with kimchi

Dumplings are universal. To the best of my knowledge, every culture has some food item which consists of a starchy outside stuffed with filling. If we adopt a broad enough definition, everything from samosas and empanadas to ravioli and pierogi are types of dumplings. Needless to say, China has a ton of menu items that defy translation more specific than “dumpling.”

饺子 (jiao3zi) and 包子 (bao1zi) make up the core concept, though I consider jiaozi to closer to the Platonic ideal of a dumpling. 包, as we covered before, is a general term referring to the wrapping, while 饺 is a specific character for the food item. Jiaozi tend to be sorted by their method of cooking and filling (a.k.a 馅儿, “xian4r” covered here). Boiled (水饺 shui3jiao3, literally “water dumpling”), pan-fried (煎饺 jian1jiao3), or steamed (蒸饺 zheng1jiao3). Pork is the most common stuffing, especially paired with a single vegetable, though one can also get pure beef or lamb stuffed dumplings.

Jiaozi have thin skins while baozi are bread-y, but that distinction gets confused by regional specialties like 小笼包 (xiao3 long2 bao1 “small basket dumpling) from the lower reaches of the Yangtze (Nanjing through Shanghai) and 薄皮包子 (bao2pi2 bao1zi “thin skin dumpling”) from Xinjiang. Of course, we cannot forget wontons (rendered 馄饨 hun2tun), which are always served in soup and have extra skin hanging off them.

I suppose I could have complained that they were a little burned…

Dumplings in Korea and Japan are very similar to the prototypical 饺子, though Japan tends to fry their dumplings more often than China. Linguistically, Japan uses the kanji-equivalent of 饺子 (pronounced gyoza in Japanese). The relation is quite obvious. Korean, on the other hand, uses 만두 (mandu) as its general word for dumplings. This is also related to Chinese, except it derives from 馒头 (man2tou, a steamed bun). This is ironic because mantou are best described as baozi without any filling, which would exclude them from the dumpling family. Finally, I don’t know how widespread it is, but the fried dumplings I ordered (pictured above) had “야끼 교자” provided as explanatory text. Sounding that out, “Yakki Gyoja” sounds just like a transliteration from the Japanese (yaki being that super common element of Japanese grilling cuisine names: yakitori, teriyaki, teppanyaki, okonomiyaki, etc.).