Korean Food

A Taste of KoreaMany people are familiar with Asian food such as Thai, Japanese, and Chinese. Recently Korean food has been growing in popularity. We attended a Taste of Korea which was a reception hosted by the Korea Agro-Trade Center. The reception provided very interesting information about the history of Korea as well as their food culture. We discovered that Korean food has three main ingredients -- garlic, green onions and hot peppers as well as three essential sauces -- ganjang, doenjang and gochujang. Ganjang is a soy sauce. Doenjang is a fermented soybean paste and doenjang is a red hot pepper paste.

One of the main traditional Korean dishes is kimchi. There are different kinds of kimchi but the most popular is made from cabbage. The cabbage is pickled with red chili pepper, garlic, ginger, green onion, radish and salt. We sampled cabbage kimchi accompanied by rice and it tasted great. Kimchi is also very healthy and low in calories. Another traditional dish we sampled at the reception is Bibimbap which is rice with Korean mushrooms and vegetables. This was also very delicious. Barbecued meats are very popular in Korean restaurants as you will see many of them have a barbecue pit built right into the table. The meats come marinated and you grill them to your liking. We tasted boneless beef ribs that were well seasoned and tender. Barbecuing your own meat definitely adds extra fun to your meal!

The drinks are delicious too. We tried two soju cocktails- a strawberry lemon martini and a ginger lime martini. Soju is a Korean distilled liquor derived from wheat, sweet potatoes and tapioca with a pretty high alcohol content- about 50-70 proof which has a bitterness to it. The martini glasses were rimmed in sugar which took some of the bite away. We found the drinks to be an excellent balance of bitter and sweet as well as refreshing. We also sampled two Korean drinks- Bokbunjajoo and Bekseju. Bokbunjajoo is a raspberry rice wine and Bekseju is an herbal white wine which includes herbs and spices such as cinnamon, dried ginger, arrowroot and Korean ginseng. The Bokbunjajoo had a sweetness that was not overpowering and while the Bekseju had a strong herbal aroma it tasted quite mellow.

We here at TheCelebrityCafe.com loved Korean food and we urge you to try some at your local Korean restaurant.

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