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One of my fave dishes. Especially in the stone bowl! Where you get the crispy rice!
There is a grocery store in my area that gets a lunch bowl from a local Korean place that specializes in bimbibap. The best take out meal ever!
AHH I hate the crispy rice. It hurts my teeth/gets stuck in them!
To the OP:
Even though some countries like Korea (kim chi), eastern European countries (sausages, sour kraut, pickled fish), and France (cheeses and wines) rely heavily on fermented/preserved products I would say that the majority of countries around the world rely more on good quality ingredients ("fresh" or not) to comprise their meals than many people realize.
In other words, you mentioned Indian food as possibly being "lower quality" but in rural India, if they're eating vegetables they're probably higher quality than what many people eat in America. No one in rural India is getting their veggies from Wal*Mart super center.
If you're talking about your average restaurant in America as opposed to the actual cuisine people eat in a country, Turkish, Greek, Lebanese, and "Mediterranean" places tend to use very fresh ingredients as many of their dishes are simply spiced or dressed. I would call Americanized Chinese places the worst by far as most people do not give 2 shakes of a stick if the things they eat from those places are quality as long as it is smothered in Soy Sauce and MSG. (Delicious but not so good). Pizza places are also pretty bad but that isn't really a "cusine" so to speak.
I believe most Asian foods stress freshness more than actual presentation. Yes, OP, American foods are inclined to consentrate on freshness as well, especially the upper end eateries. Probably the two ethnic foods that I don't associate with truely fresh would be Mexican for sure and tue Spanish foods.
You are eating the wrong mexican food. In Mexico, they are making fresh tortillas and salsa to go with their meals. "fresh" mexican is amazing. Especially fresh tortillas!
LOL! I love the crispy rice in paella and persian food too!
nope. I always eat the rice that isn't on the bottom in paella. love paella (seafood wonderland!!) but not the crispiness.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jade408
You are eating the wrong mexican food. In Mexico, they are making fresh tortillas and salsa to go with their meals. "fresh" mexican is amazing. Especially fresh tortillas!
So true. Even taco shops have fairly fresh food going on much of the time. If you read about or get a cook book on legit mexican food, you will be in fresh food heaven. Even the cheese they use are mostly "fresh cheeses".
I went-a-googling on Korean food to make sure this wasn't just my imagination that so much Korean food seemed to be sold or served fermented/pickled/dried/preserved....
One of the most interesting characteristics about Korean food is that the preparation of it often involves the process of fermentation. Fermentation was frequently utilized by enlightened spiritual practitioners of ancient Korea to create food that would benefit all people. In the old days, fermented foods such as soy sauce were important source of protein for Koreans, and they remain popular even to this day.
Koreans eat many preserved foods because these had to be made for keeping over wintertime. Every traditional household has large earthenware pots filled with pickled vegetables (kim chee), soybean pastes, and chile pastes. Even today, apartment buildings in any city will have row upon row of preserving pots set out on apartment balconies. Dried fish, meats, and vegetables remain staples of the Korean diet and make it unique from all other Asian cuisines.
Koreans have perfected the art of preserving food over thousands of years, so many of the side dishes are pickled, salted, or fermented and many are spicy.
Various preserved food, such as kimchi (fermented spicy cabbage), jeotgal (seafood fermented in salt) and doenjang (fermented soy bean paste) are particularly popular due to their distinctive flavor and high nutritional value.
Nah, I don't think it is crazy to say a common characteristic of Korean food is preserved items.
You are eating the wrong mexican food. In Mexico, they are making fresh tortillas and salsa to go with their meals. "fresh" mexican is amazing. Especially fresh tortillas!
o o
I think yor are missing the point, of course in Mexico they make some of the foods fresh; I didn't mean anyplace or ethnic food is all one way of the other, but basically, and I have eaten in many places in Mexico as well as Ca, etc. Mexican foods use less fresh products than many countries. Being raised in So Ca and spending many years in NM and Texas I certainly have had my share of fresh tortillas and yes, salsa for starters. This goes for guacamole as well. We have a few Mexican restaurants in NWA that make home made tortillas and have fresh or semi fresh salsa. Most people are not aware of the high Mexican population here. We even have several Mexican grocery stores. This is where I get most of my Mexican ingredients...I will add, as much as I love home made tortillas, I think of the word "fresh" as meaning ingredients that are not processed, flour and lard,which are pretty much the ingredients of tortillas are procesed. Maybe you and I just intrepreted the word "fresh" differently. This is why our opinions can differ so much and still be right and this is why I love City Data.
I'm pretty familiar with it, and I'll stand by my post that Korean food has a lot of preserved items, more so than many other cuisines.
Stand away! And I'll stand by my post describing the emphasis on fresh food in Korean cuisine. There is a WHOLE LOT more to Korean cuisine than kimchee. Fresh veggies by the bushel, meat grilled right at the table, seafood literally caught a block or two from the restaurant and taken right over there to be prepared (sometimes raw) - all that sort of food is very common in Korean cuisine.
Just because Koreans ALSO use fermented foods (often as a garnishment to the main, very fresh, meal) doesn't negate their emphasis on whole and fresh foods.
It's a very healthy diet as well. LOVE me some Korean food!
Your post, by the way, about fermentation and pickling of Korean food, was excellent. I noticed that there were several references in it to the fact that these practices are predominately on SIDE dishes and for flavoring. In fact, kimchee itself is considered a SIDE DISH, not a main dish, and is often used for garnishment. The banchan (literally "side dishes") that you have referred to several times are usually various forms of kimchee. They are included IN ADDITION TO the fresh dishes.
Here's some additional info about Korean cuisine:
Fish and seafood
Fish and shellfish have been a major part of Korean cuisine because of the oceans bordering the peninsula. Evidence from the 12th century illustrates commoners consumed a diet mostly of fish and shellfish, such as shrimp, clams, oysters, abalone, and loach, while sheep and hogs were reserved for the upper class.[26] Both fresh and saltwater fish are popular, and are served raw, grilled, broiled, dried or served in soups and stews. Common grilled fish include mackerel, hairtail, croaker and Pacific herring. Smaller fish, shrimp, squid, mollusks and countless other seafood can be salted and fermented as jeotgal. Fish can also be grilled either whole or in fillets as banchan. Fish is often dried naturally to prolong storing periods and enable shipping over long distances. Fish commonly dried include yellow corvina, anchovies (myeolchi) and croaker.[26] Dried anchovies, along with kelp, form the basis of common soup stocks.[27]
Shellfish is widely eaten in all different types of preparation. They can be used to prepare broth, eaten raw with chogo****ang, which is a mixture of go****ang and vinegar, or used as a popular ingredient in countless dishes.[28] Raw oysters and other seafood can be used in making kimchi to improve and vary the flavor.[29] Salted baby shrimp are used as a seasoning agent, known as saeujeot, for the preparation of some types of kimchi. Large shrimp are often grilled as daeha gui (대하구이)[30] or dried, mixed with vegetables and served with rice. Mollusks eaten in Korean cuisine include octopus, cuttlefish, and squid.[31
Vegetables
Korean cuisine uses a wide variety of vegetables, which are often served uncooked, either in salads or pickles, as well as cooked in various stews, stir-fried dishes, and other hot dishes.[32] Commonly used vegetables include Korean radish, Napa cabbage, cucumber, potato, sweet potato, spinach, bean sprouts, scallions, garlic, chili peppers, seaweed, zucchini, mushrooms and lotus root. Several types of wild greens, known collectively as chwinamul (such as Aster scaber), are a popular dish, and other wild vegetables such as bracken fern shoots (gosari) or Korean bellflower root (doraji) are also harvested and eaten in season.[33] Medicinal herbs, such as ginseng, reishi, wolfberry, Codonopsis pilosula, and Angelica sinensis, are often used as ingredients in cooking, as in samgyetang.
Gui are grilled dishes, which most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetable ingredients. At traditional restaurants, meats are cooked at the center of the table over a charcoal grill, surrounded by various banchan and individual rice bowls. The cooked meat is then cut into small pieces and wrapped with fresh lettuce leaves, with rice, thinly sliced garlic, ssamjang (a mixture of go****ang and dwenjang), and other seasonings. The suffix gui is often omitted in the names of meat-based gui such as galbi, the name of which was originally galbi gui.
Hoe (raw dishes): although the term originally referred to any kind of raw dish, it is generally used to refer to saengseonhoe (생선회, raw fish dishes). It is dipped in go****ang, or soy sauce with wasabi, and served with lettuce or perilla leaves.
Sannakji (산낙지) or live octopus. Sannakji is served live and still moving on the plate.
Yukhoe (육회), similar to beef tartare
Sukhoe (숙회), parboiled fish, usually made with squid or octopus.
Ganghoe (강회), a small roll of scallions,carrots and eggs made with scallions or garlic chives http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...woUYYRdZTT4JXg
Korean food is very highly seasoned - therefore chili pastes, pepper sauces, mustards, soy sauces, etc are used a LOT. Kimchi is a staple, but as stated earlier, rarely the main dish in a meal. Fresh ingredients - meat, veggies, greens, and herbs - are an integral part of Korean cooking and most dishes.
That being said, Korea has a long, cold winter, so Koreans have a very strong tradition of preserving foods as well, and many of their dishes include preserved foods. I wouldn't say that the EMPHASIS is on preserved foods however.
My son has been living in Korea for the past four years. He and his Korean fiancee is really into cooking, and when he comes home, we head straight for KoMart in Dallas and our kitchen turns into a Korean restaurant! Also, my daughter recently adopted a Korean child, so she and her family are very much into Korean cuisine as well. We eat Korean food more than any other type (other than American Southern of course!).
If I had a dollar for every hour I've spent chopping fresh ingredients up for a Korean meal, I could go on a VACATION to Korea!
Last edited by KathrynAragon; 10-02-2012 at 08:35 AM..
I went-a-googling on Korean food to make sure this wasn't just my imagination that so much Korean food seemed to be sold or served fermented/pickled/dried/preserved....
Nah, I don't think it is crazy to say a common characteristic of Korean food is preserved items.
You're absolutely right - it's NOT crazy. Koreans do use preserved items in many side dishes and for flavoring. However, that's nearly always in conjunction with plenty of very fresh ingredients, except in the dead of winter when that supply is naturally limited. Even then, their diet includes a lot of very fresh seafood.
Just sayin'.
But I'm not going to spend any more time arguing about this. It's just that Korean food is a passion of mine, and I want to be sure that people realize just how much of it is based on fresh ingredients, since it is so often stereotyped as "all about fermented cabbage."
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The first cuisine that came to mind was Japanese. They don't just eat fish sashimi but the likes of shrimp, sea urchin/urchin roe, octopus, squid, scallops, clam, beef, chicken and even horse - all raw. In fact there's a Japanese dish where a fish is prepared while still ALIVE - it's cut open in such a way that preserves it, and served while it's still thrashing about. It's horribly cruel but talk about obsession with 'freshness.'
Korean food has a lot of preserved/pickled stuff. It didn't spring to mind for me, but one thing I did see on Bizarre foods was a lot of LIVE food. People actually will eat live squid, baby octopus - yes, that's right, while they are still squirming about. People have died when octopuses blocked off their windpipes from this. Pretty crazy. Also live loaches and shrimp are slurped up like snacks.
Freshness is greatly emphasized in Chinese cuisine as well. Part of it is the belief that consuming the animal's 'life force' is good for the health and your own life force. That's why a lot of Chinese restaurants have tanks with seafood. In Asia, animals are often butchered and served within hours or even minutes. I recall eating at a pretty upscale Vietnamese restaurant and hearing a **** crowing - nothing unusual except that it was coming from the kitchen! I'd say cuisines based a lot on traditional practices are like this. Funny you mention Ethiopia, because they actually have a lot of dishes that feature raw and very fresh meat. Goats that've just been killed are cut up and served raw with spices within literally minutes.
Cuisines that seem to have a lot of fresh uncooked vegetables seem to include Greek, with their salads, some Italian, Mediterranean and in Asia Vietnamese with their fresh vegetables and herbs.
As for cuisines with a lot of preserved foods. As I said Korea comes to mind, as does German, and especially Scandinavian and British cuisines. German sausages and cured meats were developed in a time before refrigeration. Cheeses were also another way to keep food. Which reminds me of Mongolia. Huge emphasis on dairy food, much of it preserved, as one had to keep the animal and animal product for as long as possible on the Steppes.
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