Introducing Korean Food to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Introducing Korean Food to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once my family had been to Orient Express in Seaside (California) and liked the barbecued beef called bulgogi and the array of little dishes called pan ch’an of sour vegetables flavored with sesame oil, I wanted to take my daughter Florence out for some more Korean food as an early dinner meal after picking her up from school.

My husband worked late hours at the time, so I treated early dinners with Florence as a cultural field trip when we went to ethnic restaurants.

I did some more background reading on Korean cuisine and called my editor at The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000).

I asked my editor, if I could review the Hidden Korea Restaurant in Marina to introduce Monterey County residents to some other restaurants that serve Korean foods in the County.

The editor agreed to let me review the restaurant for that reason.  My review follows:

Hidden Korea: Marina’s New Korea Restaurant is off the Beaten Path, but Worth a Few Wrong Turns

The New Korea Restaurant in Marina is tough to find.  But, its elusive location has not kept customers away for the past thirty years.  Word-of-mouth brings in most diners.

My husband’s Korean colleagues recommended it.  I immediately liked the place when I walked in and saw the wood tables and Korean script poetry on the walls.

We started our meal with what I dubbed a Korean pizza: the haemul pajon pancake, containing scallions and seafood.  The rice flour used to make haemul pajon gives it a chewy texture.

Sesame oil and soy sauce give the pancake a savory taste that accents the seafood flavors.

Golden crust covered in the haemul pajon , which was cut into squares for easy dipping in soy sauce.  I thought the Korean pancake was delicious.  Like pizza, this dish can easily serve as a main meal for two.

My husband Laurent alternated eating between the two main dishes he ordered:

-maemal soondubu and bulgogi

-the spicy, dark red soup that no doubt gets its kick from the addition of gochu jang : Korean hot chili paste made from melted glutinous rice, soybean cake, red hot chili, and salt among other items.

Laurent stifled a few snuffles as he ate.  He said the soup was delicious as his cheeks turned pink.

He especially liked the pieces of tobu (Korean tofu).  Fresh mussels, octopus, and shrimp made up of the seafood contingent in his soup, but they were more like condiments than the main ingredient.

The thin filets of beef were very tender and some of the best that I have tasted on the Peninsula.  Every cook has his or her own secret for this dish, but the meat typically marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, and sugar before getting broiled.

The meat comes steaming to the table on top of brown onions.

Korea is unique in East Asia for its beef consumption; the Chinese favor pork and the Japanese favor fish.  In the 13^th century, Ghenghis Khan’s Mongol hordes overran the Korean peninsula and brought their taste for beef with them.

Koreans are picky about their meat looking for all cuts to liven up to the reputation of the beef on Korea’s southern island of Cheju.

With their country surrounded by water on three sides, Koreans have always featured fish and seafood in their cuisine.  My main entrée, nakji bokum, octopus stir-fry, was one such dish.

This dish is a spicy mixture with lots of hot, green peppers, so the faint of spicy foods should beware.

Spicy gochu jang paste goes into the stir-fry along with chili powder, sesame oil, strips of red peppers, carrot ovals, and onions.

I loved the hot spicy taste with the chewy octopus.  Some of the thinner tentacles were a little tough, but that happens when you cook thin and thick pieces together.

My favorite part of a Korean meal is the mixture of side dishes called pan ch’an.  Usually they consist of pickled vegetables seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil called haemul.

I liked the kimchi, which left a nice tingle in my mouth as did the cucumber kimchi.  The cucumber kimchi had a slight fish flavor to it.  Several Korean cookbooks note that the oysters used to season kimchi dissolve, leaving only their briny tang.

The chilis and chili powder that seem so typically Korean have not always been part of Korean cooking.  Pickled cabbage has been around for 4,000 years.

Chilies, an American agricultural product, entered Korea beginning in 1592 according to food historian and cookbook author Copeland Marks in his book The Korean Kitchen: Classic Recipes from the Land of the Morning Sun.

It was during a seven-year war between Japan and Korea that Portuguese Catholic priests, who were accompanying the Japanese troops, took the chili seeds and/or plants to Korea.

The Portuguese got the plants from the Spanish, who had brought them from Central America to Europe.  Koreans adopted the chilies just like the Italians adopted the American tomato.

We drank Korean barley-corn tea with our meal, which is different from black and green teas.  The Koreans prefer decaffeinated brew made by boiling barley and corn and, then, straining the liquid.

The tea soothed our tongues from the spicy foods.  I felt like picking some up in a Korean grocery store after we left this restaurant that definitely deserves a detour.

End of Article

Since I wrote that article, a very good cookbook on Korean food has been published called Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin.

Before going to a Korean restaurant now, I would recommend reading that book, so you would know what is on the menu.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

In the year 2000, I began working as a restaurant critic for the Monterey County Weekly newspaper (Circulation: 200,000), which serves an area that is the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined.  (I have always been able to drive Big Sur.)

One of the reasons I was hired was that I have an excellent knowledge of foreign cuisines and cultures, lived overseas as an exchange student with the Youth for Understanding program, and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in East Asian Studies and an undeclared minor in art history. 

My husband Laurent and I both wanted our daughter Florence to know about world cultures, so we took her along on restaurant reviews.  I had a meal stipend from the newspaper for two diners, but paid extra for Florence to come along. 

Florence had excellent manners (i.e. she did not climb around seats and tables, throw things, or talk loudly).  She was actually pretty good cover for restaurant critics going to moderately priced restaurants.

The first place I reviewed for the Monterey County Weekly was the Orient Express in Seaside, California.  I went to the library and looked up Korean recipes, so I would know more about the spices, seasonings, and techniques used in the foods.  I cited the cookbooks I used in the restaurant reviews, if people wanted recipes or cultural information.

The following is the article that was published in the Monterey County Weekly.  The Weekly editors chose the headlines for my articles, which I have left intact:

Seoul Food

For twelve years I have been practicing what Raymond Sokolov calls gastro-ethnography learning about a country’s culture by studying its food, meal rituals, and history of the cuisine’s dishes.  I read some Korean cookbooks, made a list of questions, and set out to do some tasty fieldwork at the Orient Express Restaurant in Seaside, California.

I took a Korea travel guide to get a conversation going with our server.  Our server, who was dressed in a white-collared shirt and black slacks covered by a blue apron, asked if I was (sic) going to Korea.

I told her “not yet” and that I wanted to learn about Korean food.  She beamed a wide smile at me.  She said she would love to talk about Korea.

For lunch she recommended three typical dishes to us: bulgogi (grilled strips of marinated beef), jap chae (noodles with beef and vegetables), and dak man doo kuk (Korean New Year’s soup with beef and rice cakes).

We ordered tea and beer.  When I asked if there were Korean beers, our waitress smiled at me.

“Do women in Korea drink beer?” I asked.

She said they had just recently started to and disappeared into the kitchen.

She reappeared with a metal teapot that she held in her right hand.  She put her left hand under her right forearm saying, “This is how we serve tea.”

She served my husband Laurent first and said, “We always serve others before ourselves.”

She looked at Florence and said, “We never serve children like this,” as she poured Florence’s tea with her right hand only.

The tea smelled and tasted like corn on the cob, because Koreans use ground-roasted barley and corn to make their tea.  I wondered when and how New World food products like corn and chilis arrived in Korea.

The advertising slogan on the Hite beer cracked me up: Beer Rich with the Spirit of Pure Spring Water in Green Mountains.  Canada must share these same qualities, because the Hite tastes like Molson and Moosehead.

I easily understood why the Koreans eat duk man doo kuk soup as a New Year’s treat with its three-inch pork and scallion-filled wonton noodles, strips of beef, thin sheets of scrambled egg, and oval-shaped rice cakes floating in a chicken broth seasoned with scallions and garlic.

The bulgogi beef strips arrived sizzling with onions.  Florence claimed the bulgogi as her own.  The jap chae had strips of grilled beef in it, too, buried among the translucent noodles colored brown by the sesame oil used to fry shredded carrots and onions.

The Korean use of beef is unique in East Asia where Japanese cuisine revolves around ocean fish and that of China around pork, fresh-water fish, ocean-water fish, and chicken.  Koreans are partly descended from beef-loving Mongol invaders.  The pasturelands of Korea’s Cheju Island, south of the mountainous peninsula allow Koreans to regularly eat beef.

Our server told us that cooks marinate beef in soy sauce, water, sugar, garlic, sesame oil, and a little pepper before grilling it.

Our server brought out twelve vegetable side dishes, pan ch’an.  These included white, rectangular pieces of tasteless mung bean jello, bean sprouts, raw garlic cloves in soy sauce, potatoes in soy sauce with sesame oil, crunchy broccoli stems, seaweed, and spinach.

(Note: pan ch’an changes with the season and what is available on the market.)

There were three kinds of chili-coated kimchi (radish, cucumber, and cabbage).

I could easily make a meal of cabbage kimchi and rice like many poor Koreans have done.  (I was not being facetious when I wrote this despite what one book reviewer said when I put this article in my book The Edible Tao. I have had to be a vegetarian for financial reasons several times in my life and knew about protein combinations and vitamins that chase away colds.  Kimchi is the vegetarian elixir of life, if you can stand the garlic.)

From a gastronomic point of view, I love kimchi for its juicy, salty taste of the cabbage followed by a chili and raw garlic heat wallop that makes my nose run.  Eating rice cools off the tongue.

Some Korean restaurants give you gum when you leave to kill the smell of raw garlic on your breath from the kimchi.  I thanked our server and said I would be back to do more research.

End of Article

I took Florence back to Orient Express after school many times and to other Korean restaurants in our neighborhood throughout Florence’s youth, but the main spot we would go was Orient Express.

The owner of one of the restaurants even lent me bilingual Korean-English folktale books for children, so I could read them to Florence and teach her about Korean culture.

I am glad that my restaurant reviews encourage many people to try “strip mall restaurants.”  They soon found out that many of these strip mall restaurants have a lot of free parking and modern plumbing in the bathrooms and kitchens.

I liked our vacation in the US restaurant outings.  I also love all the Korean cookbooks that are coming out on Amazon Kindle now.  They are very reasonably priced.  My favorite Korean cookbook, though, was published by the Ten Speed Press out of San Francisco, California:

-Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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