![\"Korean](\"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/20240227_172430.jpg\")
<\/a>\nLook at all this neat stuff!\u00a0 You can tell it’s Korean by the Chinese characters on the bean curd sheets, and the Japanese ones on the mustard paste. The buckwheat noodles are at least DEFINITELY Korean, although on closer inspection they turned out to be sweet potato, and not buckwheat. Look, we’re trying, OK?<\/p>\n
For our “modern make the best of it” dish, we’re making Injo Gogi Bop.\u00a0 This literally means “artificial meat rice.”\u00a0 This sounds worse than it is – the dish is actually just sushi rice inside a bean curd wrapper, with a flavorful sauce. Done right, the texture is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike meat.<\/p>\n
Lots of sources talk about this dish, (here’s the Wikipedia article<\/a>) but very few provide an actual recipe.\u00a0 We consulted our friend Ji Hyun for advice and she came through with a recipe.\u00a0 Thanks Ji Hyun!\u00a0 Weirdly, the only recipe on the English language internet that she found for us was from… a German meal kit site.\u00a0 She also found a video of some nice German people attempting to make it.<\/a><\/p>\n OK, so how do you do this?\u00a0 Rather than making bean curd wrappers from scratch, which is part of the origin of this dish, we opted to follow the meal kit route by buying ours premade and soaking them.<\/p>\n And this is the first place we went wrong – the meal kit site doesn’t say how LONG you need to soak these for.\u00a0 Opinions vary on the internet, but several hours is the low end, and we hadn’t allowed that.\u00a0 So they never really unfurled the way they were supposed to.<\/p>\n Next up, you make sushi rice.\u00a0 Rice cooker. Bam.<\/p>\n Finally, you make a sauce by frying some onions, green onion, and garlic together, then mixing that with soy sauce and Korean chili flakes.<\/p>\n The final assembly, in theory, consists of rolling out the beautifully flat soybean sheets, putting a dollop of sushi rice in each one, and then rolling them up to make a nice “meaty” little package.<\/p>\n In practice, our sheets never really unrolled, so we ended up having to make bean curd – rice – bean curd sandwiches instead.<\/p>\n For our second, more old-school dish, we decided to make a cold buckwheat noodle recipe called\u00a0Mul Naengmyeon.<\/em> I mentioned that the noodles we purchased did not seem to contain much buckwheat, but it turns out that’s not disqualifying – there’s a whole family of noodles that works for this dish, and the ones we bought seem to fall comfortably within it.<\/p>\n Being a cold dish, there wasn’t a LOT of complex prep here.\u00a0 Cook noodles in boiling water, shock in ice bath. They had a fascinating translucent color.<\/p>\n Finally, we made a\u00a0banchan<\/em>.\u00a0 If you’ve eaten in a Korean restaurant, you know that meals tend to be served with a bunch of tasty little side dishes called\u00a0banchan.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>We were already making two mains, so we went with just one side, a cucumber and sesame salad.<\/p>\n And here’s the final spread, with the sauce on the Injo Gogi Bap.<\/p>\n Sure looks a mess, doesn’t it? Still, the important thing is taste, right?\u00a0 And this poverty food, born out of necessity and desperation was… actually pretty tasty!\u00a0 It’s hard to go wrong with garlic, soy, and chili as a seasoning mix.\u00a0 The noodles had a fun chewy texture, although I would say they definitely needed the mustard and vinegar to perk them up a bit.\u00a0 And our banchan, while basic, was also quite good.<\/p>\n And that was Korea, North!\u00a0 Next up, we’re staying in the “Ks” with, surprise, surprise, Korea, South.<\/p>\n Recipes: Let’s get something out of the way right up front – alphabetical order is a social construct.\u00a0 Sure, we could put North Korea under “N”.\u00a0 That would make more sense, probably.\u00a0 Or we could put it under “D” for DPRK, … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThis is actually where 95% of the flavor in this dish comes from, and it wasn’t half bad at all.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nTop with broth (yes, out of a bag – we went lazy), slices of cucumber and Korean pear, and serve with mustard paste and vinegar on the side.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nInjo Gogi Bap<\/a>
\nMul Naengmyeon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"