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[Gorgias]

Inspired by the currently running tread "What do you think about Korean food in general?"

Please feel free to post recipies and information about Korean cooking below, or correct any errors in my post.

Gimbap is nothing but a 'California roll.' It is eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner and is almost always composed of at least the following:
Laver (the 'gim,' seaweed paper, unsalted),
white rice (the 'bap'),
a strip of Spam,
a strip of imitation crab, pollack,
a thick strip of danmuji (sweet pickled daikon radish),
a strip of fried egg,
fried carrot allumet,
ganip (sesame seed tree leaves),
mayo,
and candied ueong (a root).
Brush on a little sesame seed oil once rolled.
Popular additions are processed cheese, kimchi and tuna.

Cone gimbap entails breaking the square laver into triangles and forming cones. This is the high-end gimbap and contains only white rice and is often garnished with roe and radish sprouts.

Koreans almost never use that wood mat for rolling, just use your hands.

Pizza is a hit in every country and Korea is no exception. The usual toppings are available, but, veggie pizza almost always comes with corn on it. Also, potato, sweet potato and squid pizza are available too. You can also get kimchi pizza.

Donkkaseu is nothing but a deep fried pork cuttlet. Pound the pork, flour it, dip it in egg wash and then into panko (Japanese breading). Fry it. Donkkaseu is served with white rice, miso soup and a shreded cabbage, carrot allumet and corn sallad with a dressing which is really just mayo and katsup. The cuttlet is covered in donkkaseu sauce: this sause is a typical brown sause thickened with a browned roux and then had vinegar and a fair amount of sugar added to it. Donkkaseu sauce is to brown sause what katsup is to tomato sause. Donkkaseu is eaten with a knife and fork. Feel free to drink the soup straight from the bowl.

Most chewing gum in Korea is fruit flavored. Chewing gum is frequently flavored with xylitol. Xylitol is a sweet tasting more or less sugar free derivative of the xylitol plant.

Korea's most well known alcoholic beverage is soju. Soju is similar to vodka except that it is made from sweet potaos. It has about half the alcohol percent that vodka does. It tastes a little bit softer. Drink it from soju glasses: shot glasses.

Makkeolli can be nasty stuff. It's a strong rice alcohol. It is associated with the country and hikers will drink it. Makkeolli is an off-white-yellow color and has rice floating in it. It is often drunk from a bowl and must be the moon-shine of Korea.

Corn tea: Koreans refer to this as water. It is exactly what it sounds like, coursely ground corn steeped in hot water. This tea is in every Korean home's refrigerator as filtred water might be in yours.

Water: Koreans are very picky about their water. They gernerally believe that one should not drink the tap water. In the winter, it must be as bad as the water in any major city, but in the summer it can carry cholera, so do boil it. It may be the Korean's history of drinking fresh mountain water that has made them despise tap water. Most Koreans drink bottled water, or trek to the area spring if one exists.

Korean street food is great. The most popular is ddeokpokki. Ddeokpokki is rice sticks in hot sauce. To make this:
Cut ddeok (moist, sticky, dense, rice tube) on a bias into inch-and-a-half segments,
mix with:
water,
a good amount of red pepper,
odeng (see just below) cut into bite size pieces,
fish soup base,
yeot (traditionally a syrup derived from pumpkins, these days just a simple syrup)
chopped green onion,
and chopped ganip (sesame seed tree leaves).
Simmer the mixture until it is almost thick.

Next most popular is odeng. Odeng is fried fish cake, served on a long skewer, and having been simmered in a 'broth.' Obviously you can not make the fish cake at home, but it's available at Korean specialty shops abroad, or in any grocery store locally. Odeng is the Spam of seafood. To make the soup which odeng is served with/in, simmer the odeng in water with:
soya sauce,
salt,
black pepper (one of it's few appearances in Korean cooking)
and a chunk of daikon radish and a yellow onion.
Sometimes fresh hot peppers or even a crab are thrown in.

Odeng is sometimes served in a spicy soup, just add a good amount of red pepper, and no black, to the soup just above.

Odeng is generally dipped in a small dish of soya sauce which has been garnished with a drop of sesame oil, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced green onion, and/or red pepper.

Ddeokpokki and odeng are usually sold in the evening from 'ddeokpokki trucks.' Another popular item sold from the trucks is steamed mandu. Mandu is a dumpling or pot sticker, similar to a perogie.
To make mandu, first form a dough, with no yeast,
set that aside and fry the following in soya bean oil with a few drops of sesame seed oil:
tofu and/or pork,
boiled and strained potato noodles,
a generous amount of chopped garlic,
chopped yellow onion,
chopped green onion,
chopped kimchi,
season with red pepper and salt.

This constitutes the filling. Now roll out the dough and cut circles about two to five inches across (five for wang mandu: king mandu).
Fold these in half and seal; if you want, after, pull the tips together to form UFOs. Steam, fry, or very carefully, simmer the dumplings. Mandu is generally served with soya sauce, "kicked up a notch" as described above.

The 'ddeokpokki truck' also sells twigim. Twigim is a battered and fried: rice roll in laver (seaweed paper) or squid tentacle, or fried mandu. It is served in ddeokpokki sauce. Make the batter the same as you would for fish'n'chips (omit any leavening agent).

Lastly, sundae. Sundae is bite size pieces of tripe, liver and a potato-noodle sausage. It is served steamed with a little salt. Not everyone will enjoy this.

Most of what the 'ddeokpokki truck' sells is tasty, or for the squeamish, at least worth trying.

A popular sort of street dessert food is hot ddeok. It looks like a pancake. To make hot ddeok, make a batter with corm meal, omit leavening agent, form a pouch, and put cinnamon and white sugar in, make that into a ball a little smaller than a tennis ball and drop it onto a well oiled flat top. With a spatula flatten it into a pancake. Fry and flip and fry some more. Serve.

Bondegi, meddugi and daseulgi are something of a culinary oddity. Bondegi is boiled silkworm larvae. It is served from a large pot of the larvae usually into a paper cup. Bondegi has a distinct smell and is not popular with foreigners, though, it tastes rather bland. Koreans seem to like it, as it is for sale everywhere that street food is sold.
Meddugi is a little harder to find, but rather more palatable. Meddugi is candied grasshoppers.
Daseulgi is served boiled and lightly salted from the same style large pot as bondegi, and it is equally tasteless. Daseulgi are tiny snails with heavy conical shells, they are also served in a paper cup. The shells have a small hole punched in them so you can suck the snail right out. This food is primarily associated with certain costal areas and is therefore not always seen everyday.

Side dishes make up a big part of Korean cooking.
The most common and important is Kimchi. Kimchi is spicy pickled cabbage. Apart from being a sidedish in itself, it finds its way into soup, dumplings, fried rice and so on. Kept cool, buried underground, or these days, in a 'kimchi refrigerator,' it will keep for more than a year.
This is how to make it:
Salt the cabbage, to extract water. Either soak Sui Choi in heavily salted water, or liberally pat salt on. Leave it for a day or two, in a collander if you aren't soaking it.
Next wash off the salt and chop the Sui Choi into bite size pieces. In a bowl mix:
the prepped cabbage,
minced garlic,
very little ginger,
salt (only sea-salt is available in Korea),
a good amount of red pepper,
daikon radish allumet,
a little sugar,
and some include a little fish sauce.
Mix well, and put into jars and cover. Leave it out for a few days if you plan to eat it soon, refrigerate if you don't plan to eat it all so quickly.
There are thousands of varieties of kimchi, cucumber being the next most popular. Extract the water from the cucumber as described above, substitute cucumber for cabbage and just follow the directions. Radish kimchi is also common, the Daikon radish should be chopped into large bite size chunks and prepared as above, it is not necessary to extract the water from the radishes.

There are so many side dishes, it might almost be impossible to describe them all. But, roughly some of the most popular are:

Danmuji is sweet pickled Daikon radish. When served as a side dish it is presented either as stubby botonets, 'silver dollars,' or when those are cut in half: half moons. Danmuji can be yellow or or white. People will tell you that the bright yellowness is caused by vinegar, however, it is yellow number 5, so eat the white danmuji if you ever have the choice.

Hard boiled quail eggs are served with a tiny dish of salt for dipping the eggs in, which you peel yourself.

Acorn jelly is translucent, tasteless and very difficult to eat with chopsticks.

Ggolddugi are tiny candied squids.

Pajeon is a sort of crepe or thin pancake. Form a thin batter, throw in some chopped squid, lengthy pieces of chopped green onion and fry. It is genarally served to be dipped in a kicked up soya sause.

[Zenpickle]

You should make some contributions to the "Korean Cuisine" entry in Wikipedia.