Breakfast in korea

Breaky is at home though I always get a vending machine instant coffee for the wee bits of change in my pocket. For those more in tune with breakfast,I got home around 7:20 a.m. on Saturday morning. Fourteen hours from New York to Seoul. The moment I stepped in the door, I could smell the breakfast my mother had been cooking. There was my favorite Korean cabbage soup, with the deep, dark flavors of doenjang, a fermented bean paste like miso but much more aggressive. There was rice, of course, the way my family normally eats it, packed with a lot of dark-purple beans. And also two little filets of pan-fried hairtail fish, cucumber kimchi, cabbage kimchi, sautéed bean sprouts, sautéed spinach, spicy dried anchovies, beef patties, and the most adorable, golden and round beans made sweet and salty with soy sauce.

My mom was celebrating my return, but her decision to lay out that spread had nothing to do with the fact that it was dinner time in New York. Traditionally, there’s not such a demarcation between Korean dinner food and Korean breakfast food. I once knew a girl who worked in finance in New York, an obviously stressful existence even before the current melt-down. When she felt particularly bad, she would wake up early and make herself a full Korean breakfast, soup, rice and all, before going to work. You might not think fish in the morning would be so soothing, but it is.
there are loads of breakfast cereals and toast and spread and fruit selections available. Traditional Korean breakfast is seaweed soup with turnip and often fish, served with rice and kimchi.

Lunch for me is something from a "pojangmacha" (side street cart selling food stuffs) or a quick "ajima" (Korean mother) cafe or "shik dang" (hole in the wall restaurant) where I have a soup or noodles or kimbab (kimpop) or virtually any plate of food for anywhere from 2000 Won to 5000 Won ($2-5USD).

You can do noodles or deep fried squid even cheaper or one of my favorites, oudaeng. Ask. Try. Enjoy.

Dinner is often a Korean BBQ house for me or a Chicken Hof (pub). I love the Korean chicken. The sauces are AMAZING. Do try. The bbq houses are also something to behold. Dinner there can be as cheap as 5000Won for one. Best to dine with a partner and get a couple orders. It will be served together, you cook together, you use scissors to cut the meat, you lay it on a lettuce leaf or catnip leaf and put on your special favorites to dress it, that could be kimchi or garlic or garlic cooked in seasame oil or bean sprouts or any number of combinations from the "pancheon" that is set on your table and constantly refilled each time a side dish plate empties. YUM YUM YUM. Look to the bottom of this page for some favorites.

Korean food is quite distinct from Japanese or Chinese cuisine. Short grain sticky rice is the staple food of the Korean diet, and virtually every meal is served with kimchi, a fermented cabbage, garlic and pepper dish (think sauerkraut with hot sauce). Some people develop quite an affinity for it and other people can’t stand it, but face it, if you choose to live in Korea you will be eating it a lot. Kimchi, the national dish, is served with breakfast, lunch and dinner and if you don't like it when you first get there, you may find yourself craving it only months after and upon your return home you might even drive 30 minutes out of your way just to get "good" kimchi.

Korean food tends to be spicy and includes liberal amounts of garlic. If you can’t eat spicy food I suppose you can ask for non spicy food, but that is similar to walking into KFC and saying you don’t eat chicken. Cheap nutritious food can be bought everywhere in Korea. Popular dishes include kimbap- which is the Korean version of the California roll- vegetables and egg rolled in a seaweed wrap, mandu, which are meat dumplings which are steamed, deep fried or served in soup, kalbi, or Korean short ribs, pulgogi, which is grilled marinated beef, and bebimbap which is fresh vegetables and an egg mixed with rice. Korea also has a fantastic array of soups and stews, including naengmyon- cold buckwheat noodles- perfect on a hot summer day, kalbi tang, or beef soup, tubu chigae, tofu soup, samgyetang, ginseng chicken soup and kong kuk su, a noodle dish made in a soy milk broth. There is also a vast array of seafood dishes in Korea, including raw fish, or sashimi.Generally before a meal in Korea you will be given a hot, wet towel to wash your face and hands with.

Koreans eat their rice with a spoon and everything else with chopsticks- if you don’t know how to use chopsticks you will learn. The degree of difficulty is ratcheted up in Korea because they use slick metal chopsticks rather than bamboo or wooden ones. Personally I love this concept because they are recycled.I’m not sure how many people here still eat that kind of breakfast. Modern Koreans facing a day at the office obviously don’t need as much food as people facing a day of work in the rice fields. You can get Frosted Flakes at every supermarket, and “bagels” (the quotes are extremely deliberate) are sold at upscale department stores. You can even get decent coffee in Seoul these days, in a country where coffee used to be indistinguishable from dark tea. Thank you, Starbucks!

Then there’s the awesome phenomenon of the Korean bakery. Most of the large chains have the word “Paris” or “patisserie” in them, and the owner of my favorite bakery, Kim Young Mo, has built a small empire around his mastery of French techniques. But when you’re making green tea buns and loaves stuffed with sticky rice cake and sweet beans, it’s not really French any more.

The breakfast bread nearly every Korean bakery makes is a super-soft, squishy white bread, like Wonder Bread made a hundred million times better. When you toast it, it takes on this incredibly thin crunchy crust that gives way to chewy softness at the center. A slice with a smear of peanut butter just melting at the edges—I like it almost better than cabbage soup for breakfast.

So even if eating blueberry bagels for breakfast is definitely a step down from kimchi and rice, I’m not too heartbroken about changes in Korean breakfast habits. We’ll end up with new foods that are uniquely Korean, and every once in awhile, we’ll remember how good it tastes to eat a nine-course meal before nine in the morning.
This is one of the few environmentally friendly practises you will see in Korea - a country where cookies are INDIVIDUALLY wrapped inside a box of cookies... a genuine source of frustration for any person concerned about our environment.