I feel it closing in...

You know the bit in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta's cooking dinner, transporting coke and dealing with his family while off his nut and getting tailed by a helicopter?

Well apart from the hard drugs and felony, that's kind of how I'm feeling at the moment. This week we're pretty busy with clearing our apartment, getting our travel details in order and preparing our jobs for the next teachers to take over from us. On top of that I'm trying to switch Street Foodie to Wordpress without losing everything I hold dear, and the rainy season has just hit BIG TIME.

As such all I've got to show for myself is the above photo of a dukbokki/soondae hybrid I recently discovered in Nampodong while scouring the area for a fix. This thing is swimming in so much corn syrup it looks like the creepy plastic food you get outside some restaurants. As such I had kind of expected this to be a medley of the worst features of both dishes, but something in there surprisingly worked. The soodae was a little less gelatinous than I've had it before, feeling somewhat more substantial between the teeth than previous incarnations, and the dukbokki wasn't that bad.

Street Foodie Domesticated!: Rotiserrie Chicken Salad.

Every Wednesday evening a guy sells rotisserie chickens out the back of a van outside our apartment complex. Despite a recent jump in price from 5000 to 6000 won, these little babies are exceptionally good value and I always find it hard to resist bagging one on the way back from school (it helps that Wednesday is my worst day for classes.)

These things are as versatile as they are delicious. Fighting the temptation to tear it apart and eat just with the accompanying sachets of mustard and salt is always hard. I’ve had this with potatoes and vegetables as part of a mini-roast, wrapped in tortillas with a spicy tomato sauce, and just last week in some chicken sandwiches on the way to Seoul (the last image our fated camera shared with us.) The chicken is usually super tender, falling of the bone and possessed of just the right amount of lip smacking greasiness.

This week however I finally paid heed to elements by getting my salad on chicken-style. I started by picking and dismembering the chicken, taking care to devour all that greasy/salty/terminally unhealthy chicken skin while I was at it. I then threw the meat in a bowl with some lettuce leaves, halved cherry tomatoes and thinly sliced spring onions, before mixing it up with my new favorite dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, schezwan pepper, sliced chili and cumin.

It worked. The chicken plumped out the leaves and toms perfectly, taking on the flavours of the dressing without losing any of that rotating-on-a-stick goodness. This probably could have served as a meal in its own right but instead I opted to match it with some other salad-y stuff I somehow got possessed into making.

Turns out the boy can cook!

Seoul Food

46,300 websites may have used the above semi-pun in some shape or form before me, but given the subject matter and my own penchant for corny tricks of the English language, I really couldn’t title this post anything else.

As you may have guessed, I just spent the weekend in Seoul, where despite eating two zinger burgers in one day, I also managed to get a taste of some of the street food.

Shortly after arriving we discovered our camera was missing – either left on the KTX or nabbed at Seoul Station – so forgive the shaky details and lack of accompanying photos!

First up, a midnight stroll in Insadong yielded a bowl of steaming shell dwellers from a busy pojangmacha. The shellfish in question were large, round and cone shaped (I’ve forgotten the name) requiring the use of a toothpick to pry out the body. Once liberated, the meat was chewy and earthy, reminding me immensely of mushrooms. Dipped in gochujang and washed down with an ice-cold beer, I could think of worse things to do on a balmy night in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world.

The next day on a trip to Dongdaemun market we stumbled across some bindaeduk. Bindaeduk has been on my “to-eat” list for a while now, so it was fortuitous to come across it and an opportunity not to be missed. Similar to pajeon, bindaeduk is a pancake made out of mung beans and despite the absence of potatoes the closest thing to hash browns I’ve come to in Korea yet. The one we tackled was thick and crispy on the outside, strewn with beansprouts and green onion and incredibly garlicky. Luckily, my buddy soy sauce was there to temper the flames making bindaeduk a good, hearty post-lunch pre-dinner snack.

Finally, I rinsed away the day with a handy cocktail in a bag in Hongdae. A little stall serves these in thick plastic bags with straws sticking out. I opted for a kahlua milk, and retired to a nearby park to drink it among a few hundred other people who had the same idea. Fantastic.

If Kimch-jeon is a marriage made in heaven, I am a home wrecker.

In my last-post-but-one I felt I had purged myself of my often inappropriate love of pajeon, the Korean seafood pancake. I thought that was it for my online paj-love, and I was just coming to terms with the comedown when I happened across another Korean pancake classic, kimchi-jeon, being served on the street behind the Lotte Department Store in Seomyeon.

I documented my then burgeoning affair with Kimchi on my old TV Casualty blog, and since then the relationship has flourished. I routinely hoover the kimchi at our lunchtime diner and though I’m still too much of a lily-livered westerner to stomach anything that’s been fermenting too long, I think I’m getting a good grip on the range of tastes that’s out there.

Kimchi-jeon marries the best of both worlds. The crisp, doughy batter plays a gracious host to the kimchi, which in turn passes on all its best assets to the pancake. Although kimchi is spicy, it’s rarely a tongue-burner and it’s rounded, garlicky heat shines through in the jeon, which takes on a sort of spongy texture in response.



Kimchi has the added bonus of taking on a new dimension when it is cooked, with the fried-out fish sauce kicking things up in the flavour stakes. As usual the pancake was great on its own but elevated by quite a few notches when dipped into the accompanying dish of soy sauce.

I just hope the pajeon won’t get jealous.

Japchae

Down a side street not far from Gukje market, the bustling pace of Saturday Nampodong suddenly slows a little as you hunker down amidst a clutter of metal buckets and plastic stools and let one of the resident ajummas take care of your eating needs for ten minutes or so.

These ladies specialize in one or two dishes maximum, and it requires little more than a point and a smile to get you on your way. In this instance, I was extending my finger toward a bowl of glass noodles, sliced carrot and sliced leek, which the vendor promptly dumped into a small pan on a portable gas burner and cooked along with a ladle of dark brown bubbling stock from a nearby pot.



“Japchae,” as I found out it was called, is a deceptively simple noodle dish I’ve only ever seen for sale in this particular alley in Nampodong. The dark brown stock I saw ladled into the pan soon identified itself as having sugar, soy sauce and sesame oil components, along with a slightly fishy under taste that suggested there may have been a few bones lurking around in the bottom of that pot.

The sliced carrot and leek did more that add colour to the dish, alternately giving a little crunch and bite to mix things up a little, while the thick glass noodles retained all the flavour of the stock and had a nice slurp-happy consistency.

Not bad for an afternoon when my other purchases consisted of a pair of Obama socks, some fake Ralph Lauren shorts that were too big for me and a KFC Zinger Burger!

Tempura alert!

A while back I wrote about Korean Tempura, the lightly battered and deep fried bits and pieces that seems to be one of the most popular street foods here in Busan. At the time, I was in the middle of open class hell (just finished!) and found my stall of choice to be fresh, satisfying and cheap.

A few days ago I visited another tempura stall and realized I could probably start a blog solely about the different food that manages to make its way into the deep fat fryer. Having just spent the best part of six years of my life living in the land that gave the world the deep fried mars bar, I thought I was unflappable. It turns out I was wrong.

What attracted me to the stall in the first place was the onion bhaji looking construction at the top of the page. With a little help from an onlooker, I ordered and found it to be mixture of thinly shredded potato, carrot and chili. Good in principle, but by the time it reached my plate it was cold and dry, though the soy sauce it was served with did manage to lift it up a little.



Next I moved onto a suspicious looking ball of batter I’d been eyeing up for a while. When I bit in, I found it to be none other that a whole boiled egg. Again, the batter and the egg were cold by the time I bit into it, leading to the incredibly rare situation wherein I was unable to finish what was on my plate!

I also saw battered sesame leaves and a few other unidentifiables sharing the same stall - feel welcome to pitch in with any strange tempura discoveries of your own!

Pajeon and on.

I have wanted to write about pajeon, the Korean seafood pancake, ever since I started this blog. It was one of the first street foods I ever tried in Korea and since then I’ve eaten it in a countless number of bars, restaurants and tents throughout the city. It’s hands down my favorite Korean food and when someone doesn’t like it, I can’t help but take it a little personally, such is my relationship with the stuff.

Although the best pajeon (the ones walking the crispy tightrope and loaded with prawns and octopus) are usually found in places with four walls and a roof, I can’t help but retain an affection for the street variety. It’s quick, cheap and delicious, and in my mind the best place to get it is in Nampodong, an old port area home to several markets (including Jagalchi Fish Market) and what’s soon to be one of the tallest buildings in the world (if it’s ever completed that is.)



On a recent visit to Nampo I went to one of my regular pajeon haunts and ordered myself one of the usuals. Some places stack’em high and wait for the orders to roll in but these ones were being cooked to order, and a slightly worryingly short time my paejon was ready and good to go.

My doubts about the cooking time proved to be unfounded, as I found the paejon to have a very agreeable consistency; golden on the outside yet soft and doughy in the middle. It was also riddled with super-thin spring onions punctured by an occasional flash of carrot and red chili, giving it a good onion-y taste with a bit of occasionally spiciness. The most surprising thing about pajeon however was the lack of any octopus. Pajeon usually abounds in the chewy tender stuff but this one was completely without, though I have to say managed nevertheless to hold its own in its absence.



Complimenting the pajeon was a bowl of deep, dark, delish soy sauce spiked with chilis onions and sesame seeds. I literally couldn’t get enough of it and found myself drowning my pajeon in it. The friendly lady next to me also took the liberty of dribbling a little dukbokki sauce on my plate from a nearby vat, which though agreeable enough, reminded me too much of dukbokki to ever really be a contender.

Dakbal: Chicken Feet

“Put enough spicy sauce on anything and it will taste good” I repeat to myself as I prepare for my first Dakbal moment. Slowly, I pick up one of the spindly chicken feet in front of me and, checking for toenails, prepare to put yet another alien object into my mouth (no jokes please, I’m aware of how that sounds.)

To be honest, Dakbal was an easier jump to make than the above paragraph lets on. First off, the feet were suffocated with a red hot sticky spicy sauce (I had a bit of a Lady Macbeth moment in the bathroom afterwards) so I knew hot would be the dominant sensation. Secondly, they looked like they had more meat on them than some of the odds and ends you find in a box of mediocre fried chicken, and last but not least, the toenails had been removed, something I usually insist on in a pre-dinner snack.

As for the eating of the things, that was a different story. I first attempted using chopsticks, but despite my ever-improving skills was unable to angle it sufficiently enough to get a bite in edgeways. Next I downed tools and plunged in fingers first, making a pass at the chicken feet head on. This time however my teeth barely scraped the skin and I ended up with a face full of hot sauce that reminded me of when I dressed up as the Joker at Halloween. Thankfully my next attempt proved more successful, and I was soon dismembering, biting and slurping my way through the whole batch.

Once in, most of what was going on had to do with the hot sauce they were covered in. It was like that crimson, sticky, slightly sweet lava you sometimes get at fried chicken places, with a fair number of chilli seeds and slices thrown in for good measure -REALLY hot! The meat meanwhile clung together in little pockets of goodness and was by in large, tender and easy on the way down, with some slightly crispy skin giving it a bit of extra character to boot.

At 1000 won for ten, you really can’t ask for much more.

Jokbal: Pigs Feet

Recently I’ve been worried my posts are getting a little pedestrian. Who wants to read about pork skewers, I thought to myself, Internet users vote with their feet and if you’re not careful Danny boy, they’ll surely leg it somewhere else instead. You’ll never get a foothold in the blogging game if you carry on like this, do something different you idiot!

Ok, before I get carried away and really put my foot in it, I’ll dispense with the puns and get on to the post’s real topic. Jokbal is a dish made by simmering pig’s feet (hair removed) in leeks, garlic, ginger, rice wine and water until tender, before being slicing it up and serving with a variety of condiments. I bought mine at our local market where whole joints of Jokbal wrapped up in cellophane compete for space at several different stalls. In addition to a generous tray of Jokbal, my 5,000 won also bought me a tray of sliced onion, sliced chili, a smudge of wasabi and two little bags of soy sauce and bean paste, as well as a tub of spicy sauce and another of saeujoet (fermented shrimp sauce.)



The slices of Jokbal were thick and cold, reminded me of the cold cuts of ham and roast beef left over after Christmas dinner, with clear seams of fat swirling through them at seemingly random intervals. The overall result was an even distribution of fat through a meaty, fibrous slice of pork. Had there been a little pastry involved the whole thing could easily have passed for a Heston Blumenthal deconstruction of a pork pie, such was the easy familiarity of it. The only place where it differed to what I’m used to at home was with the skin. Here it was thick, undisguised and a little chewy, though didn’t put up enough of a fight to be a problem.

Among the condiments, the saeujeot really made me sit up and take notice. Tiny tiny shrimp with big black eyes floated around in a salty, briny liquid concoction that is apparently one of the key ingredients of Kimchi. When introduced to the Jokbal, the saeujeot provided a good counterweight to the greasiness of the pork. The same could be said for the vinegary soy sauce and wasabi, which is fast becoming my favorite dipping sauce ever.



Although Jokbal may initially sound a little alien to the western palate, there’s really nothing strange about it. In my opinion Jokbal would find a great home underneath a lid of pastry or between two slices of bread and compared to some of the other pig bits I’ve tried recently, it’s a real walk in the pork.

Wow for Now (Hot dogs)

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve talked shit about Korean sausages in the past. In my experience, they either amounted to little more than rolled up spam, or they were dripping with so much of that scary looking see-through fat, just looking at them set one arm a-tingling. Why, I often wondered, couldn’t they be more like those little Thai firecrackers I saw on Eating Asia that time?

As usual however, it appears that I was being a little unfair. I came to this realization recently when on a scour of PNU I decided to give a street hot dog chain called Mr. Wow another shot. I’d had one of their hot dogs in Kyungsung soon after I first arrived in Korea, and although at the time I hadn’t been overly impressed, a healthy queue and the smell of sizzling pork was enough to convince me to give it a second chance.



The sausage was good; coarsely ground sausage meat peppered with just enough onion to impart a decent flavour but so much as to feel like you’re getting screwed. Overall, the sausage had a slight frankfurter twang to it and (this being Korea after all) managed to get a good spiciness going. Meanwhile, ketchup, mustard and peanut sauce represented the condiments, with varying results. The ketchup and peanut sauce were good additions to the sausage (the latter staying comfortably low key) but with regards to the mustard, three was most definitely a crowd. Synthetic and watery, it was like getting an earful of background noise while trying to watch TV – quiet enough to still get most of what’s happening, but loud enough to threaten ruining your enjoyment altogether.



Mustard aside Mr. Wow knows how to hot a good dog. While they may not be on a par with the chili dogs I ate at Harry’s Café de Wheels in Sydney or New York’s eponymous hot dogs, while I’m in Korea at least, Wow for Now will do.

Do the oki-dukkboki

Ok, I realize the above is not going to win pun of the week or anything, but you can only do so much with what you’ve got, something which kind of applies to this post’s subject matter as it happens.

Dukkboki and I have never got on. Frankly, I find something artificial and creepy about the most of the rice cakes I encounter. The way they slide about the plate like little congealed logs of lung butter never fails to send shivers down my spine, and I am no fan either of the spicy sauce or compressed fish jelly that usually accompanies them.

Recently however, two factors have led me to reconsider my position. The first was a mouth watering post about dukbokki on fat man seoul. These rice cakes looked nothing like the ones I’d had before and led me to believe dukbokki offered more than I was giving it credit for. The second factor was the discovery in PNU of a dukbokki tent that always seemed to be packed. What’s more, the people within always seemed smiling and what they were eating, despite my prejudices, always looked incredibly appetizing.

Armed with these two mindsets I recently rode into PNU ready and willing to come down off my high horse and give dukkboki another shot. When I arrived however, the tent had, in fact, vanished! I cantered around the block a few times trying to figure what to do and considered getting some takoyaki instead, but with the title pun of this post already rooted in my mind, I decided to go to another dukbokki stand instead.



I don’t wish I hadn’t, I just don’t see any reason to do so again. The rice cake was, as-per-my experience, squeaky on the teeth and possessing little qualities to recommend itself. The sauce meanwhile was syrupy and spicy, due no doubt to the masses of corn syrup and msg that are probably key materials in the manufacturing process. Not necessarily bad but nothing to write home about (which I should probably do soon instead of wasting all my time blogging.)

Alongside the dukbokki, the stall also sold little fried balls I don’t know the name of as well as fried mandu. Much to the bemusement of the vendor and obviously against protocol, I ordered one of each. The ball was unexpectedly sweet and hollow, caving in as soon as I put my fork to it, while the mandu was crispy, hot, and packed with steaming pork and onions, reminding me I should eat mandu more often.



Overall I'm not convinced. I’m not saying I won’t eat dukbokki ever again, but I’m still waiting to see what all the fuss is about.

My Hoe: Raw fish at Jagalchi Fish Market.

I realize that this post kind of stretches the parameters of what might be considered street food, but in my defence when I started this thing I always thought I’d include markets and hawker centres in my range. Also, after eating the stuff I just couldn’t help myself!

Jagalchi Fish Market is probably my favourite place in Busan. The place is literally teeming with every kind of sea creature you can imagine, and a fair amount you can’t. How most of it manages to end up on someone’s plate is beyond me, as its variety is matched by the sheer abundance of the stuff.

The raw fish operation at Jagalchi largely centres around one of the older market buildings just off the right of the outdoor section. It consists of a vast warehouse of sorts containing dozens of small traders and their catch, all packed in tight so that produce, prep area and eating counters all seem to spill onto and over each other. The floor is constantly awash with water and the low hung lights and lack of windows make you feel like it could be anytime of the day or night. On Saturday I decided to take a trip down there with my friend Roy for some hoe (pronounced whay, get the crap pun now?)



We quickly decided on a snapper for 30,000 won and before it could contemplate its fate it was quickly stunned and eviscerated, then carried off for further prep. While we waited, the vendor brought us a few bits and pieces to chew over.



I’d never tried gaebul before and considering this is known to Koreans as “dog’s penis” I wasn’t really that bothered. Lucky for me however what was on the plate had been sliced up into a more appetizing shape and I quickly got stuck in. To improve the texture of you are supposed to lift it off the plate with your chopsticks and then fling it down again several times. This causes it to curl up a little (I’m getting used to my food trying to get away from me) making a little more al dente. Anyway, when I finally ate it I found it to be pleasingly chewy and, as with a lot of this sort of thing, tasting more of the dipping sauce than anything else. This, along with some salty, fresh tasting mongae (sea squirt) served as a great appetizer before the main event.



Spectacular. As per photo the snapper had been gutted, de-scaled and sliced up into half inch thick slices scored at regular intervals around their outer edge and arranged to resemble a large scallop shell. Later inquiry also told us the fish had been ever so slightly cooked at its outer edge to firm it up a little (cooking method unknown but possibly some sort of blow torch) before giving way to the translucent flesh.

And what flesh! If silk was remotely ingestible it would probably still fall short of this. Again, not so much taste as feeling; alternate passes at a spicy vinegary dip called chojang and a bowl of the ubiquitous soy sauce and wasabi tooled up for the flavour but the real money maker was the way the hoe glided around my mouth and down my throat like a piece of Teflon. At the same time it was literally bellowing FRESH at me, and not even the cuttlefish eying be reproachfully from a nearby bucket could infringe on my wellbeing at that moment.



About three quarters of the way into the plate, our server brought us what remained of our fish bobbing around in a broth with dropwort stalks, red chili and green onions. The heat had been kind to the fish, it now taking on a flaky fleshy quality in a broth so deep I might as well have been at the bottom of the sea.

Good times.

A month of soondaes: Kimchi

I recently posted about Soondae, the Korean blood sausage that is a staple of street food stalls right across the country. Then I found it to be a good addition to the genre and definitely worth trying, but a little too jelly-like in consistency to have me running back for more.

I thought that was it for soondae, until that is I discovered these boys selling out the back of a van by our apartment.




I’d never actually heard of Kimchi Soondae, and half hoped that this was a meatier sausage more like the ones we’re used to in the old country (despite being a nation of pork lovers, Korea is notoriously bad in the sausage stakes.)



When I knuckled down to eat some the stuff however I found it to be a different story altogether. Kimchi Soondae has a firmer texture than the black stuff, due no doubt to having a lot less glass noodles packing it out than the original. They also seem to have thrown some onions in, mixing it up a little consistency-wise and making it resemble uncooked chorizo. This for me, made it a little more palatable.

As for the kimchi component, I found it gave a good spiciness to the sausage without being too in your face, though I did expect a better showing from the garlic (I guess it was busy stinking out the subway somewhere else instead.) I also found the small intestine casing to be a little bit too true to its original form for my tastes, but I’m going to fry it up next time to see how it goes.

As before the soondae came with a bunch of tripe and other bits, of which the steamed liver particularly stood out and to my mind was worth the 3000 won on its own. I’ve never seen it anywhere else and would love to investigate it further.

All in all it was a pretty good tray of body parts, and coming on the same day as a particularly bad pork experience, managed to almost erase the trauma from my mind.

And I reckon I’ll go back for more.

Kraze Burger Review on A Hamburger Today!

I recently wrote a review of Kraze Burger that the folks at A Hamburger Today were good enough to put on their site. Many thanks to Robyn (the girl who ate everything) for lowering her editorial standards and being so helpful!

Check it out, it's a great site and should be the first stop for every burger lover on the net.

Pork Skewers: Today wasn't a good day.

To paraphrase Ice Cube, today wasn’t a good day.

My troubles started when I when I went to see the Doctor to inquire about vaccinations for my upcoming trip to South East Asia as I’m short a Hepatitis B and Japanese Encephalitis jab. Despite assuring him I’d never had any sort of Hep B vaccination, the good Dr nevertheless insisted I have a Hep B blood test, to the tune of 10,000 won.

I’ve had my doubts about this guy for a while – he never seems to close the office door no matter what state of undress is required, and he once removed a fish bone from my throat without any gloves on. Despite my qualms however, before I could object this happened (I know this photo is a little gross for a food blog but bear with me.)



Afterwards, I took the bus to PNU (home of Busan’s best Takoyaki) to get one of those spicy Pork Skewers I’ve been thinking about so much recently.



They weren’t how I remembered. The pork was creepily soft and tender, leading me to the conclusion that it was in some way reformed. It was also for that matter cold inside, something that wouldn’t have bothered me too much if it wasn’t a balmy May evening. As for the spicy barbecue sauce slathered on during cooking, it did little to stimulate my taste buds. And I was left holding a skewer I had no means to dispose of.

Then I got my ass kicked in Tekken 6 (I'm the one with no shirt on.)

San Nakji: Tying Up Some Loose Ends

I’ve wanted to try San Nakji (live baby octopus) ever since I first heard about it, some six months before touching down in Korea. When I finally got here, I made a few attempts to search out and consume this alien delicacy, but price and scarcity defeated me too easily and I climbed up onto my laurels and rested awhile. Luckily, however, neither were an issue last weekend as a trip to Geoje Island presented the perfect opportunity to get my gums moving.

Geoje lies about three hours west of Busan in Gyeongsangnam-do province. It is a popular tourist destination in the summer months, when both population and prices swell like a pigs head that’s been in the water too long (something we encountered there on a previous trip.) May, however, is a great time to visit so we spent the weekend in a sea view pension on Wayheon beach with my visiting aunt and uncle, Joan and Eric, and my cousin Steve and his girlfriend Vicky.



As usual food was never far from the centre of things, with highlights including an extensive Saturday night terrace barbecue capped with a bottle of beautifully smoky Bowmore Single Malt sent over by my parents. Things started to get really interesting however on Sunday, when on returning from a boat trip to a nearby island we happened upon a pier-side tent selling fresh sea slugs, sea squirts and live octopus.

Vicky and I wasted no time ordering a portion of each (20,000 won in total) and were soon cheek to tentacle with a plate of wriggling baby octopus and another of sea slug and sea squirt. Naturally, I went for the octopus first, managing with some difficulty to pry it off the plate with my chopsticks (apparently it didn’t want to leave,) before dipping it in sesame oil and salt and popping it into my mouth. The first mouthful was strictly damage control, as I chewed ferociously to prevent the suckers from sticking to my throat on the way down and choking me (on average six people in Korea die each year in precisely this manner.) After Vicky assured me it was too small to be a serious choking hazard, however, I got stuck in more heartily and began to understand why this delicacy is so popular.



Texture-wise, it felt at first a little like I was eating a wriggly stick of jelly. As I chomped down this soft outer layer gave way to a surprising dense inner core, giving it a strange but satisfying chewiness. As for the taste, the dominant favour to start with was that of the salt and sesame oil or spicy pepper dipping sauce, but this too soon gave way to a deeper, more pervading bottom-of-the-sea freshness. This sensation stayed in my mouth long after I finished up and left the island, and remained in shades even after a (second) lunch of Daeji Bulgogi (spicy marinated pork) on the way back to Busan

After battling the Nakji I next turned my attentions to the much more colourful plate of sea snail and sea squirt. The snail, for its part, seemed to consist of mostly shell and cartilage but nevertheless delivered a strong sea punch. As for the sea squirt, it proved to be much softer than the snail, breaking down easily in my mouth and leaving a slightly bitter aftertaste (nothing a shot of soju wouldn’t take care of!) Both tasted good dipped in either the spicy pepper sauce or the sesame oil and salt, but it was the still moving Nakji that I returned to time and again.



Mid-way through my meal the captain of one of the nearby vessels came over, and by grinning widely and grabbing his crotch tried to impress on me the “stamina” giving properties of Nakji before he was shooed off by the attending ajumma. I’m not sure how true this is, but I do know the San Nakji was much better than I’d expected and provided me with one of the most memorable eating experiences of my life.

Keeping my Tempura

Next month we have open classes in our Hagwon. What this means is that for five weeks we must practice the same class over and over again with our designated students, culminating in a display of the kids’ educational prowess in front of their mothers in June. The whole practice is a complete waste of time and unfortunately pretty indicative of the Hagwon system as a whole. Education comes far down the list after money, appearances, and more money again.

It’s also pretty stressful. One of the classes I’m teaching has only been learning English for a few months now and are more preoccupied with shoving their shoes in my face than listening to anything the big red man at the front has to say. The other class, meanwhile, is composed mainly of the most disruptive kids in the school thrown together where they can tear each other, and their teacher, apart in isolation. Neither class is particularly bad, but they don’t make it easy on themselves and I’ve found myself shouting at them for all the wrong reasons.

As such there have been some pretty dark moods of late and none of these more so than on Wednesday, when after a ten hour day I decided to take the long way home by heading down to Seomyeon to check out the street food situation. I’d seen various pochamanchas in the area before and half-remember some really good noodles on the street there after a night drinking, so thought that if anything could lift my mood, it would have to be some serious kerbside eating action.


Upon exiting the subway the first food stall I saw was one selling an all star line up of street food. A great big ban-marie of deokbokki sat next to another filled with compressed fish jelly on sticks, while next to these a coil of soondae steamed away and tempura of various shapes and sizes bubbled and spat in a large metal pan of oil. It all looked pretty good but the trouble was that it was just too busy. As such I walked by in search of something-else-I-thought-I-might-have-seen-sometime, but finding my minds eye to be out of tune with my sense of direction, I somehow ended up back where I started. This time, however, the stall was a little quieter and with time pushing on I decided to jaw down and get it over with. It was then that my tempura education really began.

I should say re-education actually, because I’ve had this stuff before. The first time was at a hole-in-the-wall in Haeundae the first week we got here. On that occasion the tempura was soggy, old and greasy. Not the best start really. Later when I tried it again at various buffets and Japanese places I also found it lacking – not always disgusting, but just not great.


Happily, this wasn’t the case this time. On offer was a selection of octopus tentacles, mini kimbap (rice, ham and radish rolled in dried seaweed,) prawn, rice cake and green chili peppers, all dipped in a thin white batter then deep fried to perfection. Most of these stalls work on a trust basis and you simple select what you want to eat from the trays in front of you with a pair of mini tongs, then tell the vendor what you’ve eaten. In the interests of diversity, I chose one of each to start.

First down the hatch was the octopus tentacles; long spindly pieces of tender octopus covered in a salty, crisp, light batter that kept slipping off in places and exposing the good stuff underneath. Great on its own, the accompanying dip of soy sauce (strong, salty, and loaded with sliced chilis) transported the octo to another realm. I soon found out that the same could be said for most of the other tempura on my plate – fresh ingredients cooked in the same light batter then elevated with a timely introduction to the soy sauce. Fantastic.


However, the real pay day undoubtedly lay in the battered green chili pepper. I’d seen these boys before in passing but had assumed that a whole pepper in batter would be a mix of sensations my body wouldn’t be receptive to. I was wrong. The pepper was fresh, crunchy and to my surprise, stuffed with glass noodles (these things get around!) Having been emptied of seeds, the heat was of a manageable temperature, though you can never quite tell when you bite into these which way it’s going to go. The batter and soy sauce naturally worked their magic and it quickly became the best thing I’ve eaten all week and trust me, this week’s been good.

I paid up feeling full (the whole thing cost a mere 2000 won) and left in much better spirits than I arrived, proving to myself once again that salvation often lies in a humble streetside food cart. Well done me.

Toa-se-ted

Toast, pronounced toa-se-te, is the pot noodle of Korean street food. Sold at literally hundreds of hole-in-the-wall counters across the city, it consists of an omelette-like mixture of egg and onion, a slice of spam(!) and some slightly sweetened bread cooked on a larded-up hotplate and made to resemble a toasted sandwich.

Sound unappetizing? It kind of is, but something about toast nevertheless keeps me coming back. One of these occasions was Thursday afternoon when I decided to bridge the gap between lunch and a late dinner of Shabu Shabu with a trip to my local toast counter after school (I say local, but it actually took me a good fifteen minutes walking in the opposite direction from my apartment.)



Once there I wasted no time in ordering the usual (ham yachae toast) and before I knew what was happening I was ready to go. Approaching it with my usual disregard for cooling time the first bite was mainly heat, as the scalding egg omelette insinuated itself around my mouth. This part of the sandwich was firm, reedy and largely inoffensive, though probably would have benefited from a bit of salt. Underneath the egg lurked the spam, which also by and large managed to stay out of the picture. Instead, the dominant taste undoubtedly came from the liberal amount of yellow and pink sauces applied at the end of the cooking process; a synthetic and oddly chlorinated mustard cocktail that left me feeling a little like I’d just done ten lengths in the baby pool with my mouth open.

No doubt about it, toast leaves you feeling slightly sheepish, but there is something about this amalgamation of wrongness that I can’t help but revel in. It is also cheap, portable and filling, and although I may from time to time balk at its ingredients, toast somehow manages to transcend the sum of its parts and provide something uniquely Korean.

Soondae Bloody Soondae

OK, I know this pun is both ripped off from the Simpsons and in slightly bad taste (it is, after all a U2 song) but given the subject matter, I really couldn’t title the post anything else.

Soondae is a Korean sausage consisting of pigs blood, barley and glass noodles stuffed into a casing of small intestine. It is a popular street food, and with a soondae van making regular appearances in the street by my school, one I just had to try.

I love blood sausage. A thick slice of black pudding nestled underneath a plump queen scallop or drenched in brown sauce next to my bacon and eggs is one of the things I miss most about home. I’m also quite partial to a few slices of Morcilla now and again and am open to a relationship with any other member of the blood sausage family that comes my way. As such, it was with some deal of excitement that I found myself striding towards the van on a muggy and wet Tuesday afternoon.

Once there negotiations began in the usual vein (name the cheapest price displayed, point and grin) but the vendor on this occasion seemed to take genuine pleasure from my obvious novice status. As he pulled each item out of a mammoth steam-belching pot he displayed it for my approval, before deftly slicing it up at speed and piling it thick and high on a polystyrene tray.

First came the soondae, a good-sized length of glistening black tubing looking a little like Morgan Spurlock’s intestines must have after eating McDonalds for 40 days straight. This was followed (to my surprise) by a few pieces of tripe, then some bits and pieces explained comprehensively as “small intestines.” The whole lot was sliced up and packed away with a sachet of pinkish salt and a tub of sauce for a mere 3000 won, making it by volume the best value food I have written about to date on this blog.

Naturally I tried the soondae first, finding it much more jelly-like and glutinous in texture than the dense, blood-cake character of the stuff I’m used too. This was undoubtedly due to the effect of the glass noodle filler, but also probably had something to do with the fact that the soondae was steamed as opposed to grilled or fried, leaving the intestinal casing almost as slippery as was intended for its original use. Despite this textural difference however, the soondae left a familiar and welcome iron-y taste in my mouth akin to the other blood sausages I’d tried elsewhere. When dipped in the salt and sauce, a spicy, watery ssamjung (bean paste) however, the effect was entirely unfamiliar and for me, a little at odds with the rest of the flavours.

Next came the extra bits. I’ve never been a committed nose-to-tailer so for me this was a little further away from charted territory. For it's part the tripe was pretty inoffensive; Mild and chewy it reminded me more of an oyster mushroom than anything which might come from the wilder and more unpalatable parts of an animals anatomy. Next to find themselves between my chopsticks however were some of the pieces that the vendor described as “small intestines.” These ranged from a wobbly jelly-like cut that was rather mild but pleasant in flavour, to a denser, richer cut that was much more flavourful. The later was much darker in colour and incredibly tasty, reminding me unmistakably (but perhaps erroneously) of roast beef. Not being a connoisseur on the finer points of intestines I am at pains to find out just exactly what this was, and have to date spent some time trawling the web in a fruitless search for an answer.

Although I found the huge portion a little too rich for one sitting, all in all it was a pretty good tray of animal parts. Soondae and its accompanying unidentifiables was a tasty and worthwhile diversion on a wet Tuesday and definitely something I will eat again.

As street food goes, not even a bad pun can eclipse that.