Eating Korean

One of my favorite holidays in Korea is the “Day the Buddha Came ” (or Buddha’s Birthday, for short), which is celebrated with the Lotus Lantern Festival.

All of the Buddhist temples throughout the country will be celebrating on Friday May 21st with a lantern-lighting ceremony when the sun goes down.

In Seoul, there will be performances, a street festival and a lantern parade. The parade will be in Jongno on the evening of Sunday, May 16th). The Dharma service and the lantern lighting will be at Jongyesa. You can even learn how to make the paper lotus lanterns and see the beautiful lights floating on the Han River.

It’s like Xmas for the Buddha, except no trees, no presents and no fat man in a red suit.

You can see the full schedule here.

Directions: Take subway line 3 to Anguk station or line 1 to Jong-gak station to get to Insadong and Jongyesa.

I’ve been a proponent of fresh tofu and soymilk for years, so I was thrilled to get an inside look at the Hodo Soy Beanery.

Located in a non-descript building in the industrial part of Oakland, this artisan tofu-maker creates warm soymilk, fresh tofu and smooth yuba (a.k.a. tofu skin or dried bean curd) to be sold at farmer’s markets and select restaurants in the Bay Area.

After watching a brief video about soy production, we were each handed a bowl of fresh soymilk straight from the vat. Like drinking delicate silk, I felt the impurities wash from my body with each gulp of the creamy beverage.

Then, we put on hairnets and the usual accoutrements to enter the factory floor. It was a quiet Monday and the inviting scent of organic soybeans rushed into our nostrils, as the workers diligently went about their business.

Soy production is labor intensive when it’s done right.

Take for instance the making of yuba. If you’ve ever tried packaged dried bean curd from a regular store, you haven’t really tried tofu skin. The yuba, the thin skin that forms on top of heated soymilk, is considered the best form of soy, not only for its nutritional content, but for its wonderful texture. Watching the layers form over shallow pans of soymilk and seeing each sheet individually picked up and dried by hand, I came to appreciate the work involved. But tasting the fresh yuba, right off the line, transformed my idea of what tofu skin could be. I had visions of stir-frys and delicious food experiments I could make with this silky stuff. Ah, if only I lived in the Bay Area.

Hodo’s yuba and soymilk are made from just two ingredients: soybeans and filtered water. Their sweetened milk just has a bit of cane sugar added, for those who like their soymilk that way. And they get their soybeans honest and organic from small farmers in the Midwest.

Lucky San Franciscans can get their share of Hodo’s tasty soy products at certain groceries, farmer’s markets and from such restaurants, like the Slanted Door.

You, too, can experience a tour and tasting of the Beanery in Oakland on select Wednesday. You won’t be able to go onto the production floor, but you can learn about tofu making, watch the soy products being made through the see-through glass and (the best part!) sample fresh soymilk, tofus, yuba and more.

Get tickets in advance on their website. $10 pp for 1 hour.

I swear, if you’ve never had fresh soy products before, you’ll be transformed!

I’m making a rare East Coast appearance and teaching a cooking class at the Korea Society in New York on Friday, April 2nd.

I’ll be demonstrating recipes from my latest book, Quick and Easy Korean Cooking.

The recipes you’ll get to learn (and did I mention, taste?) are: Pa Jeon (savory green onion flatcakes), Ddukbokgi (a spicy snack made with rice cake sticks), and Yachae Gooksu (colorful vegetables mixed with somen noodles).

Here’s the scoop:

Friday, April 02, 2010

5:45 PM Registration and Sign-in
6:00 PM Cooking demo and tasting

The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor
(Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)

$25 for members and students; $30 for nonmembers
($35 for walk-in registration, but the class will most likely sell out, so you’ll want to reserve early)
[Note: This is an excellent deal, since I usually charge double this for a class AND I rarely teach on the east coast.]

For more info, contact Natalee Newcombe at 212-759-7525, ext. 328 or register on the Korea Society website.

Although Korea has developed into a modern society, traces of its agricultural past can be seen in so much of the culture and traditions.

Take for instance the celebration of the first full moon of the year, Daeboreum, which falls on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar year. This year, it was yesterday, Sunday, February 28th.

People would share “o-gokbap” (5-grain rice) with their neighbors. They believed that sharing it with at least 3 other households would bring good luck through the year (or maybe it just felt like good luck because your neighbors were being nice to you!).

It was a way for people to clear out their larders (of all those dried beans and grains and dried herbs to make room for the spring). That’s why we also eat “yakshik” (a kind of “dduk” made from glutinous rice, pine nuts, chest nuts, sesame oil and honey), another way to clear out the cabinets from winter storage.

After they ate the o-bokbap and vegetables/herbs, they fed it to their animals. If the animals went for the rice, it meant that it was going to be a prosperous year for the farm, but if they ate the vegetables first, it was going to be a lean year (I don’t know why they just didn’t give the animals the rice first, or maybe smart farmers did!)

Farmers also set the dried grasses and weeds on fire (to rid their fields of pests). In Jeju-do, they still have a special bonfire celebration for the Daeboreum.

It’s also considered good luck to be the first to see the full moon rise, so you may see flocks of Koreans climbing mountains at sundown to catch a glimpse of the glowing orb.

Another good luck ritual was to crack nuts with your teeth, because people thought that it would keep one’s teeth healthy for a year and prevent skin problems. (Thank goodness that superstition has gone by the wayside.) But people still give each other walnuts and other hard-shelled nuts as new year’s gifts.

My mom brought over some of that healthy rice and yachae (dried herbs and vegetables) We made bibimbap (mixed rice) with it before we went out to go look at the rabbit pounding rice on the full moon.

The last time I was in Seoul, I wanted to get Korean vegetable seeds to take back home to Los Angeles (probably a touch on the illegal side, but I’m only growing them to eat).

After asking around and doing some research I found some nice nurseries and seed shops in the Dongdaemun area. I went to a store, called “Aram,” where they cultivate the seeds directly. The owner was really nice and helped me pick out plants to bring home to my humble garden.

Here are some of the packets:

I chose a hobak (squash), some sangchu (lettuce), baechu (Korean napa cabbage), altalimu a.k.a. yulmu (ponytail radish), ggaetnip (perilla), oi (cucumber) and she even threw in a geundae (some type of chard) packet. I though some of the packets were pricey at W3,000 each (about $3), but when I opened them up, there were enough seeds to populate an entire field!

I just put them in seed trays (recycled egg cartons) on Monday and am eagerly waiting for the little sprouts to poke their heads out of the dirt.

I’ll occasionally post pix and updates as the little plants progress. Last year, I had way too many tomatoes, so I’m trying to vary things up a bit this year.

Now if the rains could just stop a bit so I can dig up the weeds in the front yard and prepare the beds for planting. But we rarely get so much rain, so I can’t really complain.

Although not worth a special trip on its own, if you happen to be visiting Anseong, stop in at the Seoilnong-won. It’s an old-fashioned farm that’s been updated for visitors to see how “dwenjang,” Korea’s fermented soybean paste is made. And they do it the old-fashioned way.

The traditional way of making dwenjang was to take dried soybeans, boil them, then grind them with a large stone mill into coarse bits. Then, the paste is formed into bricks called “meju” and left to dry (the air circulation helps with the fermentation process). A couple of months later (depending on the size of the meju), the meju and some added birne are put into large brown pots (hang-alli) and left covered in the sunlight to ferment further. The pottery allowed for a bit of circulation of air, while keeping bugs and other undesirables away.

When the fermentation process is complete, the liquid and solids are separated. The liquid becomes Korean soy sauce (ganjang) and the solids make dwenjang. Although Korean soybean paste is often compared to Japanese miso, dwenjang is chunkier and has bits of soybean in it. It’s actually more akin to the Chinese dajiang, popular in Northeastern Chinese provinces.

Dwenjang can be eaten as a dip with fresh vegetables (like carrots, cucumber and green chile peppers) or used to make a salty stew, called “dwenjang jjigae.” You might have seen a side of seasoned dwenjang to add to your meat and lettuce wrap at your favorite Korean barbecue restaurant.

At the Seoilnong-won are some old farm implements, a well and a small pear orchard. But the big draw are the rows and rows of dark-brown hang-alli filled with the dwenjang, hanging out in the sunlight.

The best time to visit is on a Saturday (April-October) when Anseong Namsadang Nori offer free performances all day at the nearby village.

As you’d figure, I have a bit of an obsession with cookbooks. I love to read them like novels, running my fingers through their crisp pages, reading the stories, salivating over the pictures and thinking about all the delicious meals in my future.

The newest addition to my collection just arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago (I do miss the days of letter-writing, when I’d eagerly await the familiar handwriting of friends and family. But I digress…).

The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook: Home Cooking from Asian American Kitchens is a beautifully photographed, nicely designed tome from first-time author, Patricia Tanumihardja.

I never had an Asian grandmother growing up (my mom’s mom was banished from the household when she was 1 and my father’s mom died before I was born). I had a couple of step-grandmas, but they lived back in Korea. And now they are both long gone.

I was always jealous of other kids, who had home-baked cookies from their grandmas in their lunch boxes. But now that I have this book, I don’t have to be jealous.

Even though I didn’t have a grandmother to teach me the secrets of their kitchen, this book makes up for it. It’s like having dozens of adopted nanas, looking over your shoulder as you prepare the family secrets, handed-down from generations.

I can’t wait to dig into the recipes — crispy fried Chinese meatballs, fish steamed with lemongrass in a clay pot, Thai, Indonesian, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese dishes. I can almost smell the sesame oil cooking in the pan. For now, I just look at the pictures and dream of other people’s grandmothers cooking for me.

I mentioned “gimjang” in my previous post without giving an explanation (sorry I just got back from Korea and I’m still thinking in Konglish). So, I wanted to give a bit of explanation here.

Gimjang is serious gimchi-making. It’s the traditional annual event when families make huge load of gimchi in preparation for “eumdong,” the coldest months of winter (and with the Siberian winds flowing down from the north, the Korean peninsula sure does get cold). It usually happens in early winter, called “ipdong” (nowadays, since fall seems to come later and later in Korea, not until November).

Here’s a picture I borrowed from wikipedia, which will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about:

Traditionally, groups of families in the village would take turns going over to each other’s houses and helping each family make their gimjang gimchi. It was a communal effort, when women could catch up on the latest gossip, share the hard labor and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Since gimjang for each family took a day or two, the hostess would provide a big lunch for all her helpers (usually boiled pork and “bossam,” gimchi stuffing material wrapped in a pickled cabbage leaf – tasty!). Everyone would take a jar of it home, so even the poor could have gimchi for the winter.

I remember our backyard full of noisy Korean ladies, all chatting away, laughing and stuffing glass jars full of spicy baechu gimchi.

The old-school way of maintaining the proper temperature was to bury the giant “hang-ali” (the dark brown, clay pots, pictured below) in the ground, then cover them with straw mats.

Gimjang, which was established as a nationwide custom during the Joseon Dynasty, is an excellent example of the Korean people’s connection to the seasons, the communal way of life, and a preservation (literally) of the food.

Although people still make gimjang gimchi, the traditions have changed. I found out the dirty secret of those living in Seoul’s apartments. They have their cabbages pre-soaked in salt by people who sell the baechu. They get their jjangaji (salted fish) delivered to them. And they just assemble all the ingredients and store them in their gimchi refrigerators!

Because I live in Los Angeles (and don’t have a gimchi fridge), I won’t be making a huge load of gimjang gimchi, but I might just make a jar or two, which definitely won’t last through the winter.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I made my way through the curvy mountain roads of Gangwondo, the most mountainous province in South Korea. Tucked in one of its hilly corners are the largest fields of napa cabbage in the country.

We rushed to get to the fields, but alas, they had farmed most of the baechu and were loading them up onto big trucks as we arrived (you can see one of the trucks, a tiny little square on the dirt road in the picture above — to give you a sense of the vast scale). And gimjang isn’t until early November!

The acres and acres of land had millions of baechu climbing the hills, waiting to be made into kimchi to liven up someone’s dinner table.

I was very sad to hear a few weeks ago that Gourmet Magazine will be closing its doors. They cancelled the Gourmet Institute and Marketplace (I was scheduled to sign my latest cookbook there, but had to cancel my trip to New York.). It was a very sudden surprise for me and many of the staff members there.

I was lucky to have had my book chosen as one of the last cookbooks of the month (June 2009) and had the opportunity to see the Gourmet test kitchens. The staff worked hard behind-the-scenes, testing each recipe. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: Their test kitchens weren’t “gourmet kitchens” with granite countertops and Viking stoves. They were IKEA-like, humble kitchens you’d find in any apartment building with formica counters and basic, laminate cabinets. They wanted their recipes to be able to be reproduced in every home kitchen, not just those equipped with fancy equipment.

I’ll miss the recipes (even the ones that looked way too elaborate!), the beautiful photos and wonderful staff. The culinary landscape will not look the same after November, when their final issue is published.