Post Date : 09-07-27 23:35
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Summer Seoul Food –Fight Fire with Fire
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It’s summer in Korea, and with everything, food is an integral part of the experience. Like all Asian cuisines, there’s a medicinal aspect to Korean food that makes it a holistic experience, not just filling the gut. Though if you’ve seen Korean school children hurry through lunch, there’s something to filling the gut too.
For summer, the basic concept is eating foods thought to have warm properties, which can mean spicy as hell, but not necessarily. Food with warm properties are thought to prevent the chi life force energy in the abdomen from getting too cool from being sweat out too much. Got it – when it’s hot, you fight fire with fire.
Specifically there are three days of summer, as determined by the lunar calendar, that are thought to be the hottest days in terms of needing to replace chi that’s been sweat out. These are the three “hot days” or sambok. This year the hot days fall on July 14, July 24, and August 13. On those days, you might see Koreans queued up outside restaurants that serve the traditional dishes associated with special warm properties needed to replace lost chi.
What foods are those? Well first there’s sam-gye-tang. This is a whole chicken stuffed with sticky rice, ginseng root, garlic, other herbs and spices and boiled, resulting in succulent whole chicken served in fragrant broth. Not just any chicken – only young chickens are used, and none of the herbs and spices are broken or cut, only whole herbs and spices used, presumably to keep their nutrients as fresh as possible before cooking.
Sam-gye-tang shouldn’t sound so exotic as a health food to Westerners. Except for the ginseng and garlic dosage, it’s not a whole lot different than the chicken soup your mom gave you when you were sick. Same in Korea. It chock full of nutrients for replenishing a body that’s been sweated out in the summer. The ginseng flavor of the dish is often paired with a ginseng-flavored rice wine called insam-ju.
The second recommended dish for “hot days” really is quite spicy hot – yuk-gae-jang. It’s a stew of beef and vegetables. Will definitely cause a sweat, but in this case that’s what you want to jump start your sweat glands, which after all exist to keep you cool. This dish also is loaded with nutrients. The amount of beef isn’t actually that much, just enough to flavor the broth and give a few morsels. The real nutrient firepower comes from the mix of veggies that sweat out their potent goodies into the broth. Veggies in yuk-gae-jang include green onions, leeks, gosari (fernbrake), daikon radish shreds, and other greens. Plus loads of garlic of course. The taste is best when the balance between sweet and sour is still there as a subtle undercurrent to the overall spiciness.
The third food for “hot days” is the purely vegetarian kong-guksu. This dish of noodles in chilled soybean milk may seem plain, but again it’s got tons of nutrients for refueling a tired body fatigued by heat. Traditionally the noodles are made of wheat flour, but enterprising restaurants also offer buckwheat noodles. The better restaurants will make their own soy milk broth by hand-grinding their soy beans of choice, and possibly adding some secret ingredients to the ground-up mixture, such as sesame seeds, for a little nuttier note. You can find this dish either cheap or expensive. All worth a try.
The best way to find a restaurant for sam-gye-tang, or yuk-gae-jang, or kong-guksu? Ask a Korean. Restaurants for these are everywhere. Just ask and for sure a helpful Korean person will direct you to his or her favorite place for “hot day” food. You don’t have to worry about how to order at the restaurant. It’s summer – they’ll know what you want.
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