Nice article. Makes me hungry. Must add that namul isn't necessarily sauteed. In our household, for example, spinach and bean sprout versions are blanched, then dressed.
Seoul Food: Bibimbap
By
Enlarge Image
Credit: Todd Coleman
Korea's national dish, bibimbap, is colorful, refreshing, and infinitely varied
For years, I thought I knew bibimbap (See the Bibimbap recipe). It's on just about every Korean menu in the States, and what you get, from restaurant to restaurant, tends to be consistent: a kaleidoscope of vegetables arranged atop steamed rice. Maybe there's some minced beef; often there's a fried egg on top; always, on the side, there is gochujang, the fermented, deep-red chile paste. You drop in a spoonful, mix up all the ingredients (bibimbap literally means mixed-up rice), and wreak havoc in that bowl. It's interactive and dramatic, all the more so if it comes to the table sizzling in a dolsot, or hot stone bowl, which continues to cook the bibimbap as you eat. Then there's that crust of toasted rice when you reach the bottom—a delicious reward.
Yet when I was traveling in South Korea recently, I had a revelation. It was in Dong-daemun market, a sprawling, glass-roofed arcade in East Seoul. With my traveling companion, Jimmy Cho, a native of the city, I walked down the rows of hawkers tending bubbling pots and steaming woks. But one stall stopped me short. Lined up along the counter were about a dozen bowls, each one overflowing with a different leafy green, kimchi, or namul (quick-sautéed vegetables). It was all brightness and abundance. There was fresh chicory leaf, raw green chiles, perilla leaf chives, and soybean sprouts. Jimmy pointed out the moo saeng chae (radish with chiles) and bom dong kimchi (fermented spring cabbage). I recognized gosari, bracken fern fiddleheads. Displayed there in front of me was bibimbap, deconstructed, as I'd never seen it before.
The lady in charge, whom Jimmy introduced as Soon Ja, invited us to snack on dried anchovies as she bustled around her open kitchen, filling a metal bowl with steamed barley and rice and then using tongs to pluck the ingredients, one by one. When she'd gathered everything she needed, she went at the bowl with a pair of scissors until the vegetables were snipped down to bite-size, then garnished the dish with sesame seeds and gochujang. It was clean and bracing, more like a rice salad than the heavier dolsot versions I'd tried. Who knew bibimbap could be so light and fresh?
There were other epiphanies, as I learned about all the regional versions. The luxurious bibimbap of Jeonju, in the southwest, is made with rice cooked in rich beef stock, the region's succulent soybean sprouts, and a mound of raw minced beef with a raw egg yolk quivering on top. Jinju bibimbap, from the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, near the sea, gets a briny boost from the addition of marinated clams. For the fabled Haeju bibimbap, a hearty North Korean specialty, the rice is cooked in pork fat and topped with pan-fried pork and strips of chicken. Some of the versions were served in a dolsot; more often, they were presented in a metal bowl. When I asked Jimmy about it, he said, "Dolsot is something you see only in restaurants. We never make it that way at home." Though stone bowls were used centuries ago, they were limited almost exclusively to royal tables and then disappeared from use entirely during the Japanese occupation of Korea, from 1910 to 1945. It wasn't until the 1960s that restaurants began reintroducing this method of serving bibimbap—a novelty, bringing a dash of drama to the homeliest of dishes. Still, my favorite of all was the summery version I had in that market in Seoul. The meal was simple and satisfying, and the ritual of assembling it before my eyes made me feel cosseted and fussed over—no small comfort when you're 7,000 miles from home.
