Re: Halal Korean Ingredients/Korean Foods Suppliers (online????)

Salam all,

I’m half Korean grew up with a Korean mom and live in the US. I am a Muslim and my husband and I stick to halal only. When addressing halal Korean food first most if not all of the essential ingredients are either vegetable or seafood in origin. The only time you run into problems is when you go to Korean processed foods such as ramen, mandu, soup bases, some cookies and crackers. In addition almost all Korean recipes can be tweaked to be made halal. For instance. When I was pregnant with my daughter I started craving Korean food like nuts. Mostly kimchi pancakes ( which I craved during both of my pregnancies), but what I really wanted was rice cake soup. Before I got pregnant it had when over 12 yrs since I had rice cake soup. The issue was that the soup base of rice cake soup is beef bone based. Our halal store didn’t carry the type of bones you needed to make it so I did research on how to make a vegetarian option. Basically you chop up daikon ( Korean radish) into cubs, a yellow onion, and chunk up 2 carrots place in a large soup pot w 10-12 cups of water and boil for 30-40 minutes . Remove all the veggies and place in a cheese cloth or a new clean dig cloth and squeeze the water out into the soup pot. You either can eat the smushed veggies or discard. You can use this soup base to substitute for any of the meat broths for soups. Kimchi is not made w pork or any meat produces just pickled seafood usually shrimp. The reality is the Korean diet is heavily vegetable based w a small amount of meat. Now a days because of wealth people can afford meat. My mom even told me kimchi stew was traditionally made w beef not pork and that is how I make it.