Mikura

Hi, I thought I’d share some untraditional things that I absolutely love. Not sure if they’re all “fusion” but hope its interesting nonetheless.

1) Adding maple syrup to dried seafood dishes. Like myeolchi bokkeum and ojingeochae muchim. Replace the sugar with maple syrup, and it gives a more complex sweet taste that complements dried fish very well… absolutely delicious! I wouldn’t do this for any kind of soup or stew though.

2) Doenjang guk with non-traditional greens, particularly kale and beet greens. Beet greens gives it a nice color too. The doenjang tones the strong bitter flavor of these greens and goes very well with them. I like to not boil it too long though, just enough to soften them a bit, but not too much so the flavor of the greens isn’t all boiled off.

3) “kimchi” salads. One that I love is mixing really fermented kimchi, steamed, cubed potatoes, cooked peas and carrots, raw onion, cucumber, and seasoning it with some kimchi juice, a little gochujang, sesame oil, and extra salt, vinegar, and sugar. Kind of like koreanized russian salad. The cucumber gives a nice refreshing taste, and the potato cuts through the other strong flavors. You can also omit peas and carrots and replace the potato, cucumber, and vinegar with some corn, cilantro, and lime juice to make a “koreanized” salsa. Lovely!!

I have a bottle of soup soy sauce in my pantry that does not contain wheat. It is made by Sempio and the labelled has red, orange, and yellow coloring.

Theres another product also made by sempio called chosun (korean) soy sauce that doesn’t contain wheat. I believe its supposed to resemble more traditional Korean soy sauce without and wheat and lighter in color and flavor. It’s in a cute plastic bottle thats shaped like a traditional korean onggi, its white and orange colored with a picture of an onggi on the bottle. Link below shows a picture. Again, check labels to make sure.

http://www.lotteplaza.com/product/product_view.php?lan=ENG&Category=62&id=873

Actually, small correction. If you’re talking about the big dried thai peppers (around the thickness of an adult male’s thumb), NOT the small one (thinner than a pinky finger), you can probably use those with decent results. I just saw them at a thai market today and realized that might have been what you were talking about.

I think germinating perilla seeds can be fickle due to dormancy issues. Some people say they may be dormant for over a year. Personally, instead of dealing with the seeds, I just take cuttings from an existing plant and root them to keep a constant supply of new perilla plants. They are very easy to root in my experience, as long as you keep the cutting in soil in a quite humid container until they form roots. The only drawback of course is that you need an existing perilla plant, but I’ve even been able to root cuttings found in a korean grocery store. Hope that gives some good suggestions. I’m zone 7 so I guess your mileage may vary.

In addition to the above post, a lot of the bigger Korean markets now sell doenjang made without wheat from most big Korean food manufacturers. They are usually labeled as 콩된장 (kong doenjang) or 집된장 (jip doenjang), to emphasize that they are made with soybeans or the kind of doenjang that is traditionally made at home. However, these labels dont guarantee that its gluten free. Look for those words on the front, and double check the back ingredients list to make sure theres no wheat products in it.

Freezing tofu absolutely destroys the texture (I speak from unfortunate experience). However, it resembles the texture of tofu skin, so you can actually still use it in stir fry dishes, or marinated in sweet sauce (similar to the taste in yubu chobap).

Hope that helps!

I can attest that the sauce described by ze125 makes a good substitute to jjajang sauce because I make a very similar version. Because chunjang can be hard to find, I found that using Chinese fermented black beans (called douchi 豆豉) or Chinese yellow bean paste (huangjiang 黄酱 or some brands say ganjiang 干酱) lends a very similar, though not identical, taste to chunjang. Just use it like you would chunjang in Maangchi’s recipe or in the recipe above.

I find that this soup can be fishy too if not prepared correctly, but if you follow Maangchi’s recipe correctly, it should taste fine. The most important thing is to put the bean sprouts in the pot along with cold water, put on the lid, and keep it closed throughout the boiling process until it is cooked. If you dont cover it throughout the entire heating process, the soup tends to taste fishy. Also, the roasted flavor of sesame does an excellent job of cutting fishiness, so its important to use well roasted and crushed sesame seeds as well as sesame oil. Hope that helps!