Tips for Korean Cooks: Play with your food!

Here are some tips on how you can play with your food according to Chef Anna Kim.

Focus on Playful Deconstructions of Korean dishes. The elements and the textures should be looked alike but in different ways. For example, omija can be used as a mixer for drinks or as a dressing on barbecue meat. I think that the taste is similar to cranberries in a way so it would go well with roast duck and turkey as well.

Persimmons can be mashed with sweet potatoes to add a bit of mellow sweetness and it would accent the color.

Kimchi can be chopped up super fine and used as a relish on hotdogs or chili or even tacos

Korean pork belly is amazing and if you just slice it thin and throw it in a pressure cooker with sour kimchi and apples, it makes an amazing Kimchi sloppy joe.

Korean beef, Massimo Botturo and Chef Pierre Gagnaire went on and on about the quality of the meat, so Koreans should use it with their amazing aptitude for pickling and make great corned beef or pastrami- now this would require the butchers to cut the meat in different ways.

Korean pears make a great filler for pies, in salsas, as marinades and even with buckwheat noodles. Pears also work well with omija. I like to take pear juice and add omija to it.

Black Garlic. YES! I saw some amazing mashed potato dishes made with this ingredient. The color and the taste are amazing.

Eat Well!

Anna Kim

About the Author

Daniel

Daniel Gray is a Korean adoptee that returned to Korean in 2005 because he wanted to try and find his birth mother and to learn about Korean culture. He started a restaurant review blog in 2007, www.seouleats.com, that became a local and international hit. He and his blog has been featured in the New York Times, Monocle Magazine, The Kimchi Chronicles, Bizarre Foods, Rudy Maxa, Olive Magazine, Euronews and much more. He now is a partner at O’ngo Food Communications (www.ongofood.com), which is a culinary tourism and consulting company that offers Korean cooking classes and restaurant tours to travelers. Their food tours and cooking classes are ranked as one of the top attractions in Seoul according to tripadvisor.

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