K-Food: Korean Home Cooking and Street Food - Da-Hae West, Gareth West (2016)

Introduction

HOW TO USE THIS EBOOK

Select one of the chapters from the main contents list and you will be taken to a list of all the recipes covered in that chapter.

Alternatively, jump to the index to browse recipes by ingredient.

Look out for linked text (which is blue and underlined) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between related recipes.

Mostly about my mum...

I was born in Busan, South Korea but moved to England when I was three. Raised by my Korean mum and English dad, I couldn’t really speak much English when we first moved here. When my mum dropped me off at nursery school for the first time, she worried about how I’d interact with the other kids with the language barrier - fortunately, kids are kids and just get on with it, creating strong bonds over toys, biscuits and nap times - so things actually turned out pretty well and language was never an issue.

It was incredibly important to my mum that I knew about the country that I came from, and I think this is why I was so proud of being Korean when I first started school. I’d write my name in scrawly Korean on top of all my school work (it was even mentioned in one of my school reports), and I’d always be the first to point out where Korea was on the world map.

My dad travelled away a lot for work, so whenever it was just my mum and I at home, we’d have Korean food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Having eaten rice and kimchi for every meal since she was young, it was initially difficult for my mum to adapt to Western foods. Every time we visited Korea, she’d make sure to bring back enough bags of dried anchovies and gochugaru (Korean red chilli powder) in her suitcase to last us until our next trip. It was difficult to get Korean ingredients in the UK back then, so my resourceful mum would adapt recipes so that she could use the ingredients she could get hold of, along with the ones she’d snuck back in her suitcase. Kkakdugi, a Korean radish kimchi was made with swede or turnips in our house, gochujang (Korean red chilli paste) was homemade (there are photos of a three to four-year-old me, licking it off my hands and elbows), and my mum would also forage for the tips of wild fern (often eaten in bibimbap) and young rapeseed leaves to make her summer kimchis. Gradually, my mum took a little more interest in cooking other foods and, bit by bit, she learnt more about different non-Korean ingredients. Soon enough, Korean food became just one of many types of cuisine we enjoyed at home (much to my dad’s relief).

While I was growing up in the UK, Korea went through some really tough economic times and was hit hard by the IMF crisis. Things looked pretty bleak for the country, but my mum would be insistent that one day Korea would become this great big economy that other countries would aspire to be. She’d try and push the importance of learning Korean, but going through my trickier teenage years, I took little interest in my lessons. They felt like a waste of time because, back then, it looked like Korea was always going to be this small, hidden country that no one knew anything about - at least to me.

Despite my disregard for my Korean lessons, I did look forward to our trips to Korea, and I was lucky enough to visit pretty often as I was growing up. Visits were packed full of rushing around to visit relatives, eating lots and revisiting my mum’s childhood haunts, but in hindsight, it was the everyday things I loved most. Going to the market with my mum - so different to the markets in the UK and filled with such sights, sounds, smells and hustle and bustle. Going to the beach with my cousins. Going fishing. Swimming in the bath houses… I’m so thankful to have so many childhood memories there.

There was one particular holiday though that really cemented Korea as a second home for me. It was during one summer holiday while I was at university, and I went (slightly under duress at the time) to spend a few months living with my cousin Jisoo on Jeju Island. Jeju Island is the honeymoon destination of Korea and for good reason - a volcanic island full of mountains, surrounded by crystal blue seas and with its own sunny microclimate that’s warmer than the rest of Korea. It’s impossible not to fall in love with it. I grew a whole new appreciation of Korea that I’d never had before. That summer was one of the best holidays I’ve ever had. Jisoo and I had such fun swimming, watching Korean dramas, ordering takeaway and eating Baskin Robbins until late into the night. It was the longest time I’d ever spent in Korea since moving to the UK, and I loved it.

Ever since that summer in Jeju, I started to take a lot more interest in Korea. I started speaking to my mum in Korean (she had persistently never given up trying) and I started to seek out more and more information about the country, and particularly the food. As I’ve grown up, I’ve seen Korea go from strength to strength and I couldn’t help but sit up and take notice when Korean food and flavours started to creep onto small segments on TV and appear in fancy restaurant menus. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to be part of this - to link back to my Korean roots and promote the food I loved; I just didn’t know how or where to start.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A MCDONALDS…

Gareth and I met through mutual friends in my last year of university and one of the reasons we got on so well from the beginning was because of our shared love of food. Gareth has always loved food. All food really. When he was growing up, he never really watched children’s TV and instead was always fixated on cookery shows. He loved cooking and probably would have made a great chef (I think), but he’d never thought of doing it as a career. Instead, one of his first jobs was working at a pub and from there he worked his way up through hospitality until he reached the head offices of the restaurant group D&D London.

We got married in 2012 and went to Korea on our honeymoon. We’d spent several days with my family feasting on huge Korean dinners, with Gareth proclaiming that everything he ate was his new favourite dish. It was his first time in Korea and he hadn’t known what to expect, but he was completely blown away by it all - and particularly the food.

In the past, it had always been difficult to try any sort of non-Korean food in Korea. Korea is full of really great Korean restaurants (most of which specialize in just one dish) but had resisted much culinary influence from other countries. Despite this, for as long as I can remember, it’s always been possible to get a bulgogi burger at any one of the fast food restaurants. One night, we were walking from my aunt’s house to our nearby hotel, when we wandered past a McDonalds. Like most global fast-food chains, McDonald’s adapts their menu to the country that they’re in, and in Korea, they have a bulgogi burger. It’s a standard

McDonald’s beef burger that’s marinaded in a sweet, sticky soy glaze based on the Korean BBQ marinade. I’d told Gareth about this Korean twist on their burgers, and he was insistent that we try one. It wasn’t the best burger that Gareth had ever eaten (though it was the best McDonald’s he’d had), but the idea of marrying those Korean flavours with Western-style food stuck in our heads.

When we came back to England, we decided to try making some bulgogi burgers at home. They turned out better than we’d ever imagined, with the sweet, salty bulgogi marinade teasing out the meaty flavours from the burgers. Gareth ended up eating three in one sitting. As we ate them, we kept saying that if someone sold them in the UK, they’d be a real hit. Then it struck us… why couldn’t that be us?

The more we thought about starting a Korean burger business together, the more it made sense. After those first bulgogi burgers we made at home, we started putting some plans together, finding some fantastic suppliers and testing lots of new recipes. Eight months later we traded at our first market as Busan BBQ.

Since starting Busan BBQ, we’ve been back to Korea a few times and have seen how the food is really starting to change there. Though great Korean food can still be found everywhere you look, there’s been a wave of fusion Korean restaurants that have opened, which take Korean flavours and mash them with different cuisines. A lot of Korean Americans have taken the foods that they’ve grown up with and brought them back to Korea, and young Koreans are excited by the change.

Similarly, when we started Busan BBQ, very few people had heard of Korean food. We’d offer kimchi on our burgers and would have to explain what it was to almost every customer. Now, we can go easily go through 20 kilos of it in a weekend, with customers asking for more. There’s been an explosion of interest in Korean cooking and ingredients over the past year or so, and we’re so proud to be part of that.

This book is a combination of the recipes I’ve grown up with, along with new recipes that we’ve thought up along the way. Some of the recipes might not be as authentic as you’d imagine, but then, what is authentic nowadays, anyway? This is Korean cooking as we know it - the kind of food that’s often thrown together to create something delicious. This is the food we love and we hope you’ll love it too.