The Challenge of Fusing Malay and Korean Foods

Things don’t always go as planned, and boy did Nady and I figure this out the hard way. For our last post, we wanted to go out with a bang - enrolling in a one-session Korean cooking class and dazzling everyone with our (subpar) skills. From our research we found out that there are many Korean cooking classes conducted in Singapore for those who want to learn a new hobby, are generally bored or want to have a team building sessions with colleagues. Classes are offered by culinary schools/centres, home-chefs and even neighbourhood community centres.

We were very excited at the prospect of learning Korean cooking in a ‘more professional’ setting...until we realised the price we had to pay for this happiness. Most classes have a starting fee that goes north of $120. Let’s be honest, for two very broke uni students this seems like the worst possible setback for us ($120 can give us 10 meals of Korean chicken!). Plan B it is. I reached out to a Korean friend of mine living in Singapore, to see if he had contacts working in the Korean culinary world. It turns out he had plenty of them who were willing to share with us (and the class)...it was just that language barrier was a problem and my friend couldn’t be our translator as he was relocating back to Korea in March.

Stalled but still determined, we went to Plan C. Coming up with our own ‘original’ fusion Korean food. We started researching on various different types of fusion food that has been done before and we stumbled upon the wondrous world of the Korean food online community, which Nady explains more about here. After stalking so many forums and interest groups, we decided on just trying to fuse the Korean foods we already tried making with foods we are familiar with in Singapore. We decided to make a fusion of Kimbap and Hotteok.

1. Chilli Crab Kimbap

We came up with this idea when thinking of Singaporean food - what better dish than the well known Chilli Crab. We cooked the chili crab sauce and marinated the crabmeat and added it into the kimbap with the same fillings like our previous attempt. Surprisingly, we liked it very much - especially Nady who has never eaten Chilli Crab before. The kick of the sauce was definitely what a sambal-lover like me needed. We shared the results to the Facebook group and we'll see if it takes off.

2. Sambal Ikan Bilis Hotteok

Since I liked hotteok so much (from last time) I insisted we try adding a more local filling instead. After wracking our brains, inspiration finally came from my family who were big fans of sambal. So we made hotteoks with sambal ikan bilis filling. After tasting them, it reminded us of the sambal ikan bilis buns you can find at malay food stalls. When my family tasted them, they shared the same sentiments but really liked the hotteoks.