One good thing about being on a low carb diet is that you get to get loads of greasy meat. In Korea, this low carb thing is very difficult to do but I'm slogging through it and having a lot of famous Korean BBQ. I'm sure my cholesterol is off the charts but I'll work on that later.
Recently, I'm all about this cuisine called "dduk kimchi samgyeopsal" and it's a taste I'm been craving like a madman lately. For those of you who don't know, “samgyeopsal” refers to thick cuts of pork, like bacon, with three layers of fat ("sam" is the number "three” in Korean). At first, you may be put off by the amount of fat. In fact, when I first came to Korea I used to cut off at least one layer, the fattiest, before I ate it much to the amusement of my Korean friends. The meat also sometimes contains small round bits of cartilage that I still don't enjoy eating but is supposed to be consumed.
Normally, one would grill this up and then eat together with “daengjang” (fermented bean paste) or “ssamjang” (fermented red bean paste) wrapped in sesame leaf and various types of lettuce after dipping the roasted pork in a small dish filled with sesame oil and salt. Of course, you could also include some thinly sliced garlic pieces that have nicely browned on the grill in a mixture of, you guess it, sesame oil. The stuff you wrap with is collectively referred to as "ssam" or to wrap. You may be familiar with this term as Momofuku's Korean American chef recently opened a "Ssam Bar" (basically wrap restaurant). It's not a new thing, it's a very traditional way to eat and people in any hard core Korean restaurant eat this way.
The thing about this place is that you also roast up kimchi on the grill along with the roasted garlic. While this is not novel, there are many places you can roast your kimchi with the meat, the topper is that you eat this not with sesame leaf and lettuce but rather wrapped in “dduk” which is Korean rice cake. In this case, the rice cake is very thin round piece that are sliced in half into half moons and lightly brushed with sesame oil. The combination of the dduck (rice cake), the roasted fatty pork, the kimchi, the roasted garlic, the salt and bean paste is truly delectable.
This is great, of course, with Korean soju or just beer.
-Pat in Seoul
1 comment:
Man, I miss Korea. When I first got there, I'd asked a co-worker what her hobby was. Her reply: pork belly. I didn't really get it at first because little did I know that grilling pork belly is a national pastime. It soon became my favorite hobby too - discovering different variations of it. My favorite was this place in Insadong that sells "ohgyupsal," or five layers of fat.
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