About Korean foods : How you serve them & how you eat them

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Korean traditional meals consist of personal steamed rice* called 'bop', shared side dishes*, shared main dish*, and personal soup or shared stew (all links).  You don't always get dessert* after a dinner party Korea, but sometimes we have fresh fruits or snacks such as rice cake.

Usually once you cook a side dish, it will last a couple of days and you will eat it several consecutive days except naeng-chae*, which is cold mix of strip-shaped ingredients. 


Links with * will show the examples of foods in this blog.


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Koreans like to drink with main dish type food called Ahn-joo.


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Any meat or fish main dish which is fried or grilled, can be eaten as a ssam. 'ssam' is meal when you wrap meat or fish in a vegetable leaf , such as red leaf lettuce, romaine lettuce, or steamed or fresh cabbage.




Traditional ssam is meat wrapped in red leaf lettuce optionally with,


1)steamed rice*,
2)cooked meat or fish
Bulgogi
3)raw or cooked garlic slices,  
4)side dishes :
pah-chae(green onions strips with red pepper),
ssam-radish (cold sweet and sour Korean radish),
radish-chae (Korean radish strips with red pepper),
kimchi
5)Grilled vegetables(potato slices, kimchi) & cooked mushrooms (white mushrooms, minibella mushrooms, and king oyster mushrooms are good),
6)Fresh vegetables (carrots, any salad vegetables)
7)Sauce : ssam-jang, sesame seed oil & salt mix, or other various sauces.



When we eat ssam, we add a soy bean paste tofu stew or egg custard, or a little portion of cold noodle(naeng-myoun) after ssam.


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*Steamed rice in Korean foods
I used Korean rice which is short and round and sticky.
Usual long grain rice would be okay with this dish.
But, when you make sushi rolls, rice wrapped in seaweed (kim-bop), fried rice,
or when you eat rice with Korean soups
or when you mix steamed rice with sauce,
better use short grain rice.

Bop (steamed rice) from the picture above is purple because we mix short rice with black rice. This is better for health. When you make 'bop' you can add a various of crops to short white rice, such as barley, many kinds of beans, sweet white rice, black rice, etc.