I know I don't live in Seoul, but I'm pretty darn close, and it's a great pun that I've been wanting to use since before I even made the blog, so here's my ongoing series of food from South Korea.
I love cooking, and trying new things, and considering I'm in Korea I'm currently in the mindset of "why don't I try making Korean food?"
I know what Korean food tastes like, I eat it every day at school, and once or twice a week in restaurants, but I'm struggling to get my versions to taste anything other than...Filipino-esque. There are a lot of crossovers with Filipino food, and even mostly the same ingredients, but there's a definite difference that I am missing out on, no matter how closely I follow an authentic recipe.
So it's an ongoing project. I was craving some siopao asado the other day, but I'm struggling to find yeast, so I thought I'd browse Maangchi's excellent blog for some ideas. In doing so, I discovered mandu and got a bit excited. I threw in a pack of mandu skins in our next grocery trip and got cooking.
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| Big nooby noob forgot to take any progress pics until now. |
I made gunmandu (fried instead of steamed or boiled) because I prefer the crispy texture to chewy, but I'll have to try the boiled and soup varieties sometime soon.
I assume they're more of a side dish, but we ate all 12 with plain rice and it was great. I threw together a dipping sauce with vinegar, soy, and sesame seeds and everything was wonderful. I had some proper fried mandu a few days later to compare, and...I prefer mine. The taste and texture was VERY similar, but mine was a bit richer. Mine's probably wrong but oh well ;)
UPDATE: at school today we had what I can only assume was mandu and it tasted a LOT more similar to the ones I made, so yay~~
