Korean tastes

Some interesting things I have discovered about food in Korea in the past few weeks:

First, I taught a lesson on recipes to my students last week. The recipes chosen as examples for an activity were chili con carne and pancakes. I expected that these dishes would be popular with students since brown-sugar filled pancakes are a popular street food and the flavor of chili closely resembles several spicy Korean dishes. While showing a cooking video of a chef making chili, the students were fine...they watched intently as she cooked the onions, peppers, and ground meat in a pan. Then came the time to add the beans, and in each class, the pouring of the beans into the pan aroused a sound of protest from the students. This sound of protest turned to utter disgust when she added tomatoes (according to the co-teacher they were saying "dog-food" in Korean), and finally outright indignation when she plopped a dollop of sour cream on top. One student asked me "Do you eat that?!" I realize in hindsight that Koreans really do take seriously the idea that tomatoes are a fruit (as evidenced by their appearance in several sweet cafeteria fruit salads - to my dismay) and beans are typically seen as a sweetened filling for rice cakes or candies. They did like the pancakes though. Second, with the advent of Thanksgiving, I have been trying to find turkey. When talking with my co-teachers about turkey and telling them how much I like it, I was surprised to find that those who had tried turkey before (usually on trips to the US or Canada) absolutely hated it. I don't really understand why. I tried to tell them it's just like chicken, but better, and they give me a weird look. Could all of America really be wrong? Is our most delicious poultry product really that disgusting to the rest of the world? While Koreans eat chicken, I think they are much bigger fans of pork and beef (and various types of disgusting-looking seafood). Maybe they just don't love poultry the way we do in the US. It explains why on my first trip to Costco in Korea I found spicy pork bakes instead of the classically delicious chicken bake. Luckily when we went yesterday the chicken bakes magically appeared and I heartily indulged myself.

While restaurants in Korea are cheap and plentiful, it's just not the same as home.

By Katie