Korean food has strong influences of soy sauce, soy-bean paste, hot pepper paste, parched sesame and sesame oil fish sauce, beef seasoning and most of all garlic and kimchi! Koreans love meat or seafood stew with rice or noodles.
 
Our rice is often sticky rice and noodles are like glass noodles but thicker — not the typical ones you see otherwise. Bibimbob, Bulgogi, Galbi and Kimchi are all famous globally. Many Korean dishes tend to embrace the harvest of each season, and mix different kinds of food.

But the country is also known for its history of developing fermented food products like the ubiquitous Kimchi. Eaten as a side dish or even tossed together with the mains to impart flavour, Kimchi is marinated cabbage almost like your Indian pickle, and has that distinctive sweet-chilli flavour of Korean cuisine.

Other side dishes include mushrooms, turnips, salads... Koreans eat their food plated very colourfully with a main dish, and many, many side dishes! And for dessert we love our variety of sweet drinks and rice cakes.

We have sweet rice drinks, Persimmon punch, Korean Schisandra tea and citron tea. Moreover, there are more than 300 kinds of rice cakes we make on occasions like birthdays.
(As told to Shweta.Kapur@timesgroup.com)

  Bulgogi (Marinated barbecued beef with steamed rice) 

Ingredients 

•   Rib-eye: thinly sliced
•   Onion: 200 gms
•   Leeks: 50 gms, sliced
•   Shitake mushrooms: 100 gms
•   Salt: to taste
•   Marinade sauce
•   Soy sauce: ½ cup
•   Brown sugar: 1–2 tbspn
•   Starch syrup: 2 tbspn
•   Chopped garlic: 2 tbspn
•   Sesame seed oil: ¼ cup
•   Beef seasoning: 1 cube
•   Onion: 1, roughly sliced
•   Small pear: 1, peeled and cored
•   Pineapple juice: ½ cup
•   Salt, freshly crushed black pepper: to taste

Method

•   Combine all the ingredients of the marinade and blend
•   Mix the marinade with the beef slices, cover with cling flim and marinate for one day in the fridge. This will help enhance the flavor and tenderise the meat
•   Heat oil, sauté beef for one minute, add onions, leek, shitake mushroom and stir fry for a few minutes more till cooked
•   Garnish with sesame seeds and sliced green spring onion
•   Serve piping hot with steamed rice

►   Chef Young-Joong Kim is a Sous Chef at the Oakwood Premier Coex Center where he enjoys whipping up a range of Korean cuisine. His work has ranged across the Renaissance Seoul Hotel, to the Club Horizon Fine Dining Restaurant and the Imperial Place Hotel’s Western Restaurant Steak House. When not whipping up Korean delights he also specialises in making all kinds of Western cuisine

Pics: Nikhil Ghorpade