mouthfeel

제주 돼지 항정살: Pork collar — also known as neck or jowl — from Jeju island, famous for its black hog. There’s not much you can say about pork that hasn’t been said a thousand times over. If you’re an omnivore, you’ve already experienced how crap most of it can be. Dry pork-chops that belong in a Raymond Carver story… you know how it goes.

So if you haven’t had the opportunity to eat Jeju black pork in Korea, you’ve been gypped a thousand times over. It is special. It has an intense, free-range, Berkshire-ish flavor. (My limited research indicates that there is some relation between Jeju pork and the famed Berkshire/Kurobuta breed.)

And the collar? It’s out of this world. In contrast to the crispy/chewy thing going on with the common belly (also delicious), the collar’s fat distribution renders each piece texturally consistent, juicy, tender, melt-in-your-mouth, religious experience, etc., etc., etc., and so on and so forth. I’ve been habituated to the taste by the steady availability of the stuff — meat crack is what it is — though I can tell you that the first time I tried a bite, fresh off my pitiful electric stove-top, my eyes totally bugged out and I gasped and everything. Now, lesser pork will not do. A bit sad, but once you go black pork…?

꿀사과: Koreans call the particular fruit above, in direct literal translation, “honey apple,” which is not to be mistaken for literally honeyed apples (happy belated new year). Slicing one open reveals threads and globs of translucent tissue, as if drizzled honey were suspended within the flesh. The apple itself boasts a crisp, crunchy texture and subtle moisture release: sweet, but not juicy. I feel like I keep repeating myself here re: fresh produce/seafood/etc., but the Korean apple just tastes clean.

I used to have this thing for Pink Lady; I still do, for its tartness as well as the lovely and distinctive shade of its peel. Ironically, these qualities call to attention the fact that I am eating an apple that does not really look or taste the way I think an apple should. However much the Pink Lady charms, it strongly asserts its thoroughly modern conception upon first glance, then bite. The honey apple, in contrast, tastes like what you imagine an apple would have tasted like before mass agricultural industrialization rendered many a common fruit bland — the neo-original, with its frills discreetly contained within.

한우 (Korean beef): I don’t know if you can tell from this crappy cellphone pic, but high-quality Korean beef is elegantly marbled, with taste and texture similar to Wagyu. Look at that gorgeous, even distribution of fat. Marinating it should be a crime; all it needs is some downtime on the grill.

The guy who figures out how to export Korean beef to the rest of the world gets to cut the Kogi line in perpetuity.

(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.

* * *

Sidebar 1: Getting flashbacks to my childhood reading:

* * *

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.

* * *

Sidebar 3:

I forget what this unsightly, yet cheerful-looking, little sea creature is called but the butchering process is gruesome. (Click through if the animation aint workin for you.)

I’ll update this post with flavor details after I ask my cousins, unless any of you can recall the name?

Late-night post-Moderat feast. Slow-cooked onsen egg nestled among the firm bosom of ramen noodles. Wood ear mushrooms, a cluster of green chives, a sounder of tender pork belly, all treading a cloudy miso broth. Momofuku-ish, but which came first — the American take, the Korean copy? (probably the latter) Are they fusion interpretations or foreign attempts at the real deal? (David Chang/the former, Korea/the latter)

This is just a dumb memo to myself punched out on my iPhone1.0-turned-iTouch.

God, the egg—the EGG!

Sometimes, all you want is some succulent pineapple-on-a-stick, kept cool on a rather large-ish block of ice and bought for under a buck on a hot, humid summer day in a metropolitan city.

Oh, would you look at that. Your move, western world.

니이스 컵 닭 (Nice Cup Chicken): No ddukbokgi and bland odeng combo of the traditional takeaway stand, here. Instead, the proprietors of Nice Cup Chicken serve up the perfect golden ratio of fried chicken to ddukbokgi to tater tots in a small paper cup, all mixed up with a sweet, extra spicy red sauce guaranteed to cause labored breathing and runny noses. Oh, how your snout runneth over.

For the uninitiated, ddubokgi refers to a dish made of those white dduk tubes, center front. People call them rice cakes, but they’re really more like thick, solid, glutinous pasta noodles. At Nice Cup, the dduk itself is cooked, then fried, for a crispy skin and chewy interior. The chicken pieces are lovely strips of boneless white meat prepared with that secret Korean frying technique. The tater tots kick ass simply for being tater tots. Each component in the cup could do just fine on its own, but the sum of all parts elevates three classic Korean and American junk food staples into a street dish nonpareil. Located on the main drag in the Myeongdong shopping district AND IN MY BELLEH.

The next few days promise to be a glut of work things, so I’ll just leave you with this: summer is officially here. The subways have turned up their air conditioning systems. It is warm, tee-shirt-at-night weather, heady and debilitating. Peep this street stand in the Myeongdong shopping district, serving you mini cocktails on your retail binge for less than a buck. Why the good ol’ USA condemns outdoor drinking, I’ll never know.

더덕동동주: The aroma of this unfiltered wine (very similar to makgeolli) carries an earthy aroma disclosing its roots in… roots, specifically of the bonnet bellflower. It is initially unassuming, typically home-brewed and served in glazed earthenware bowls. But the first sip — such elegant sweetness, a tease of carbonation and perfume, with the barest suggestion of grain and malt (and it’ll stay that way if you don’t drink down to the bottom of that bottle). This beverage is your genteel elderly relative, who had, unbeknownst to you, lived a playboy’s life, traveling around the globe and mucking it up with the upper crust, before some political regime took over, leaving him with only a great deal of pride and a wish to retire to the mountainside to read Milton.

OK, real talk: shit is lethal. You can’t taste the booze at all, but it will fuck you up. Three bowls, and I was rocking back and forth inside my head while sitting still. I don’t know where the hell to get this stuff outside of the Taebaek Mountains, so you are shit out of luck in Seoul or wherever the fuck you are, friend.

비빔밥: When my mom came to visit me in March, she woke me up early before work to shower and eat breakfast — her own special version of bibimbap for her wittle woman. Kidding, my mom doesn’t actually talk like that. But, dude. I haven’t had breakfast at the top of the day since high school. And I never used to like bibimbap that much, either: restaurants always skimp on the toppings, confusing the eyes and stomach with rice overload. Yet here was this fresher-than-Doug-E. sprinkling of radish and red cabbage sprouts nestled above its perfectly proportioned counterpoint: a small child’s fistful of sticky white grains. (“You need to lose some weight,” my mom explained helpfully.) It was topped with a cheerful sunnyside up, a glob of hot pepper paste, a bit of sesame oil and soy sauce to taste, and finally served with a side of kimchi and a cup of instant coffee (not so vilified here). All ready upon completion of shower at 7:15 a.m.

Fun fact: Korean supermarkets sell a really awesomely-sized variety pack of sprouts. It’s enough to last a few days, and screams, “I’m single, no kids, don’t judge me.”

몸국: A Jeju island specialty called “mohm-guk” — literally, “heart soup.” “Mohm” is kind of a special word and, depending on the context, can mean heart, body, mind, spirit, etc. In other words, broth for the soul, made from black pork and a special type of seaweed.

No, it doesn’t look so appetizing, and I myself was not terribly impressed when it came out. The crazy thing about Jeju, though, is that everything that is not fish tastes like the embodiment of some terra firma faerie: rich, earthy, heartening, life-affirming.

I cannot impress upon you the bewilderment I experienced as the spoon first dribbled its contents on my lips, the astonishment and delight of two plentiful native ingredients — an emotion welled up so wholly honest and astonishing and foreign, I still can’t quite grasp it. I’ve never tasted anything remotely close in flavor to this soup. It was as if, for that one weekend in Jeju, I had discovered the island of lotus eaters, and, when forced to leave, bitterly wept at my loss.

바나나맛우유: Binggrae’s very popular banana milk would not be out of place next to the Yoo-hoos at the American supermarket. You might worry that something labeled as such would be overly saccharine or thick, but fear not. Just the merest hint of banana emerges from the perfectly regular consistency of whole milk. In fact, it tastes like the sweetened milk left over after eating a bowl of Cheerios (but not as sugary as something like, say, Lucky Charms).