Korean Cuisine

From aromatic hot pots to kimchi to classic bibim bap, Korean cuisine's exhilarating harmony of robust flavours, colours and textures spices up any meal. And though Korean is an increasingly popular dining-out option, few people venture to explore the peninsula's rich culinary arts at home.

Korean food is very special and has its unique flavours and cooking methods. The best known Korean food is definitely the tangy kimch'i dish of pickled vegetables that challenges the palate withal hot and sour taste that takes a few tries to get used to.

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Korean Food:

Rice

Rice is the central element of the main course in any Korean meal. Korean rice is different from most other rice in the world. It is known to Koreans, as sticky. Unlike rice from Southeast Asia or North America, Korean rice is moist and sticks together rather than falling apart. It makes it rather easy to eat with chopsticks. Rice along with kimchi, soup and some other vegetable side dishes is the typical meal eaten in most Korean homes.

Soup

Soup is the second element. It comes in a bowl to the left of the rice bowl and ranges from the bland vegetable soups. The seaweed soup called miyol-kuk, is often called breakfast.

Examples of soups:

1. Fiery tubu chige- a stew made to tifu (tubu) and red pepper paste with addition of boiled clams.

2. Mae'unt'ang (broad variety)- popular fish soup containing white fish, scallions and other chopped vegetables, and sometimes egg.

Panchan

Side dishes that are around rice and soup.

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Ways to eat food / Korean:

For mixing, stirring things as well as for eating soup, Korean people do not use knives or forks. Instead, they use spoon. Korean people use chopsticks for rice and side dishes. For them, lack of chopsticks is not a problem at all since the cooking process involves cutting things into bits can easily be managed with chopsticks.

Things eaten with fingers:

Lettuce (leaf rollup of rice), Kochujang pepper paste. For samples for the side dishes, Korean people usually popped them into the mouth.

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Here is the result of the popularity of Korean food in Hong Kong. We have interviewed 61 people.

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