(You’re going to want to view this post outside of your Dashboard to get some of the other pictures I’ve included in the sidebars. They’re not at all relevant to food, so don’t feel pressured.)
개불 (Urechis unicinctus): OK, man, so this is worse than I thought. These ill-fated little suckers are worms. Spoon worms, if you wanna get all specific-like. There’s a part of me that wants to be cavalier about this — marine worms? don’t faze me — but I have totally eaten this particular dish multiple times in its prepared form before last week without ever having known what the live beast looked like or was named. (This is the omnivore’s dilemma more closely aligned to foreign eating.)
Like most other forms of raw seafood not typically served at restaurants with rock’n’roll rolls, spoon worm is slippery, chewy like cartilage, and intensely salty. Maybe “oceanic” can be our all-inclusive descriptor for marine worms, slugs, cucumbers, and the like. But worm, to be fair, is not as tough as slug. It’s also salty the way blood tastes salty, but without the particular rustiness of blood, leaving a slightly acrid finish. (God, I suck at this. It’s 3 a.m.) I don’t really think other “weird” sashimi can compare in terms of ichor-to-volume ratio.
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Sidebar 1: Getting flashbacks to my childhood reading:
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Sidebar 2, a.k.a. “The More You Know”: There’s some great info on Zen Kimchi regarding Korean raw seafood, which differs from its other Asian counterparts.
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Sidebar 3:
