While big sexy dishes like their fabulous fried chicken and grilled meats tend to steal the show when talking about Korean food, there's a lot of other areas in which the South Korean food scene excel. One especially under-respected arena in both Japan and South Korea are their highly innovative approach to baking and bakeries, where uptight beliefs about traditional techniques can be tossed aside and unusual (at least compared to those who view French baking as the standard) combinations proliferate. Red beans and cream cheese? Sure! Handheld pizza with corn kernels and spinach? Why not! For a savory food lover like myself, who will generally reach for something salty or cheesy long before eating sweets, this seemingly endless variety of handheld baked savory goodies is a blessing. Any grocery store, whether it was the smaller farmer's market near the train station I loved to frequent, or the larger supermart buried underground down another corridor inside the train station itself, there was a bakery doling out goods. Heck, if I walked outside of the building I lived in with Yonie, there was a small standalone bakery just across the street churning out wholesome loaves baked in-house to fancy fruit-decorated cakes for special celebrations. Some of the best, though, were the ones you grabbed while hauling through the train station during the morning commute, heated to steamy eggy goodness as you mow through it waiting for the train to arrive... 
Speaking of which, coincidentally, brings me to another arena in which South Korean ingenuity avails: Convenience foods. Not only is there a convenience store nearly a stone's throw away from you at any point in the city of Seoul, but they are replete with an incredible array of ready-to-consume or can-be-consumed-after-minimal-effort-exertion foods, from hot and cheesy pizza buns to questionably made tubes of meat-like substance ready to squeeze into your face hole as your drunk ass stumbles home. There's also plenty of desserts, too, like this tasty little Cookie and cream parfait I devoured one chilly evening on my little sofa-bed in Hwajeong. Not the most glamorous thing, but tasty enough and undeniably convenient! Plus, it was marked down because with the cold weather rolling in ice cream sales had tanked. Is it weird that I like to eat ice cream when it's cold out? Maybe it's because I'm from a place where the summer temps are routinely over 110 degrees, so ice cream on a hot summer day doesn't stand much of a chance...
So, while it's maybe not the kind of thing you're used to finding at your local bakery or convenience store, don't be afraid to try new things when traveling! You could miss out on some real hidden gems!
Thanks for stopping by!
🍞
XOXO,
NAU
No comments:
Post a Comment