The Key Ingredient Was Confidence

At this point in time, Nady and I (with heavier tummies and lighter wallets) decided to take on the challenge of cooking Korean food. We’ve seen hundreds of online personalities try their hands at making Korean food and we thought hmmm we can totally do that.  

But the cooking wasn’t what stumped us (wow at our confidence). THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD DISHES TO CHOOSE FROM, HOW COULD WE ONLY TRY COOKING ONE DISH?! Should we try making kimchi pancakes, or that delicious looking bowl of jajangmyeon? But japchae looks simple enough to make! The possibilities were endless! But sadly our wallets were not.

So we watched (so many) cooking tutorials to determine which three dishes were the best for us; those within our budget and modest cooking skills.  We found the following videos on Youtube and decided that these dishes were simple enough to try!

1. Mini Kimbap (미니 김밥)

This is like the easiest Korean snack food there is. We treated this as level one of our quest; easily surpassing it by merely rolling the rice and fillings in the dried laver (seaweed). An important tip: to roll it tightly, put some grains of rice at the edge of the seaweed to act as a seal. We chose not to make the common kimbap because we didn’t want to be too full since we had two more dishes to go.

Rolling and rolling and rolling and...

Omnomnomnomnom

2. Egg-Rolled Kimchi Fried Rice (김치 볶음밥 계란 말이)

We didn’t want to simply make kimchi fried rice, so we decided to increase the difficulty of the dish by adding the egg component. Well, it didn’t turn out as how we wanted it to be (‘cos we took too much time figuring out how to roll the rice in the egg in the pan) BUT it still tasted great! We nearly finished off all the rice, when we realised we should leave some for Nady’s brother. The Kimchi added a different dimension to what would have been a typical asian fried rice dish.

We added more Kimchi after this 

Rolling and rolling and rolling and...

Omnomnomnomnom

3. Hotteok (호떡)

And now, my favourite dish out of all the three! Hotteok is a popular Korean street food and I thought that it looked simple enough to replicate at home. What made this dish great was that the dough mixture had to rise well and we had to make sure to put in a generous amount of filling in each one. We used cheese as the filling instead of the traditional fillings of brown sugar and chopped walnuts or red bean since we loved cheese (and thought there would be a good photo op). I had sooooo much fun watching the (second batch of) dough rise and later shaping, filling and pan-frying (not to mention eating) each hotteok!

Our second batch of dough finally rose like it should!

Look at that cheeeeeese!

Was Confidence Really The Key?

Before we started cooking, we were actually slightly anxious that things wouldn’t work out for us. Missing out some ingredients, going beyond our budget, dough that failed to rise and the fact that we weren’t Korean were some of the minor setbacks we faced. But we confidently continued, and at the end of our “quest”, we realised the reason why cooking (or simply eating) Korean food is such a treat for many people around the globe.

Oliver Windgätter, a food blogger, sums it up very nicely when he said “There is a simplicity that is not boring, and an honesty in Korean food that (he) greatly appreciate(s)… Korean meals are communicative”.  Meals are made with family, for the family. It is true that most Korean dishes contain few ingredients, but they bring about flavours that are far from simple, with so much depth, that it is easy to see why people keep going back for more. For Nady and I, there is no doubt that we are going to continue eating and (probably) cooking Korean dishes in the future. Sure, we had confidence and didn't really destroy the dishes, but the most important thing is that as long as we had fun and didn't give up, it was a success! There’s still so much more to try and maybe one day we can actually learn from a real Korean chef in South Korea! (One can always dream)