My Not-So Secret Love Affair with Korean Food, Episode 2

My love affair with Korean food continues.
Warning! NSFW! XXX! FOOD PORN! 

Gee, where do I start with my Korean food love saga? Since it is summer, I will start with a Korean summer dish, Naengmyeon (냉면). It's a cold soup, perfect for the Korean summer heat. The noodles are usually handmade and made with buckwheat, or at least the one I ate was made with buckwheat. I was a little put off by the idea of cold soup, I like my soups scorching hot, but this was surprisingly delicious and incredibly refreshing. A cold beef broth was poured over the noodles, boiled egg, seaweed, and various vegetables in the soup. It kind of reminded me of pho, because we were able to add our own vinegar, mustard sauce, and sugar to create a flavor that matched our taste buds.

Naengmyeon (냉면) on Buddha's Birthday

Next up is black chicken, also known as Ogol Chicken (오골계). My initial thought was that was was going to be normal chicken with some sort of black sauce, like a jajangmyeon sauce. Nope, it was black chicken, with black feathers and black skin and incredibly delicious! Every part of the chicken was cooked, skin and organs included. This black chicken is supposedly very healthy and my Korean friend who introduced ogol chicken to me said that it's good for your skin too. Woo! Eating tasty food AND getting a ton of health benefits. The chicken was freshly butchered as well which was pretty cool and pretty unsettling when I saw the chickens running around the yard when we left. But man, was it tasty. The chicken itself definitely tasted different and more flavorful than the usual white feather chicken, and the marinade was perfection.

 Ogol Chicken (오골계)

Apparently there is a famous fish soup restaurant in Inje County that we had the pleasure of going to for lunch at work last week. The restaurant was on a side road cutting through the mountains, just off the shore of a river, so the view was stunning. The soup is called Chueotang (추어탕), which translates to loach soup. According to my extensive Google research, a loach is a small elongated, bottom-dwelling freshwater fish. The soup's deliciousness went above and beyond my expectations. I was anticipating the fish to be in big chunks, with a fish head staring at me from pot, but the texture and consistency of the soup was surprisingly smooth and slightly flaky. It was spicy, but not too spicy, and had bits of tofu and dough flakes (which I think are called sujebi), and it tasted perfect with with a bowl of rice. FUN FACT: apparently the loach fish just sleeps and doesn't eat anything during the winter, so it is usually consumed in the fall.

Chueotang (추어탕)

On Teacher's Day we took a trip to Incheon to check out another dam owned by K Water. We went to a seafood restaurant in the area that the Korean president frequents, so that was pretty sweet. Most Korean restaurants specialize in a specific food, so the specialty of this place was a seafood soup. It had mussels, clams, crab, squid, shrimp, scallops, and probably other mysterious crustaceans that I was unaware of. I can't say the soup really wowed me, but what really got to me was the size of these bowls and the amount of seafood in each bowl. Unfortunately, I lost my camera with the pictures of the bowl, but fortunately I took some photos with my phone, so you kind of get an idea of what we had. If you look at the pictures below, you can see what sort of seafood was in the bowl, and you could kind of get an idea of how big the bowls were. The soup itself was delicious, but I can't say I would eat it again. I am a self proclaimed soup fanatic, so I enjoyed it, but the broth really had no flavor except for the very prominent seafood flavor.

Tiny crab

Charlie cutting up the octopus into smaller pieces

Another interesting eat is Sanchae Jeongsik (산채정식) also known as, Mountain Bibimbap. I discussed bibimbap in a previous post, but as a quick recap it's a big bowl of rice with vegetables, red pepper paste, and a fried egg. Sanchae Joengsik is famous in the Gangwon region (my province) so it was a treat to try our area's specialty. It's basically just bibimbap, but the vegetables were fresh vegetables, picked from the region's mountains, thus the name "mountain bibimbap". It was cool to kind of "create your own" bibimbap. The mountain vegetables were presented on the table, along with the different sauces and other various foods to add, and we were given a big bowl of rice to customize our own sanchae jeongsik. And of course, the spread included various kimchis, and my favorite, kimchijeon (kimchi pancake). I'm a mushroom enthusiast, so the fresh mountain mushrooms blew my mind. Again, I apologize for the lack of pictures, but my camera ran away.

I will conclude my NSFW food post with one of my favorites dakgalbi. I mentioned it previously, but this wasn't just your ordinary dakgalbi, this, my friends, is CHEESE DAKGALBI! At our favorite dakgalbi restuarant in Inje we usually order the cheese dakgalbi (치즈닭갈비) which is just dakgalbi with melted shredded cheese on top, but the taste is so freaking unreal I can't even describe it.

Dakgalbi with cheesy tteok and ramyeon noodles

At a restaurant in Hongdae (my favorite area in Seoul) we had dakgalbi, with ramyeon noodles and cheesy tteok! Tteok (떡) is one of my favorite Korean foods, it's a rice cake made with rice flour. This medley of deliciousness was amazing! I highly recommend trying dakgalbi with cheesy tteok. It's insanely delicious.

Welp, I hope this post left you all salivating at the mouth and itching to come to Korea to eat tasty food with me. And in case you were wondering, with one month left in Korea, I still haven't broken into my emergency box of macaroni and cheese.