K-Pop Meets Kitchen

Back from my break! Better Reading: BTS Taste Buds

From eye-rolls at K-Pop to falling in love with Korean cuisine!

I’m especially nervous when it comes to cooking for teenagers.

What started as my teenager's BTS obsession led our whole family on an incredible culinary journey. Today I'm sharing how Korean cooking transformed our dinner table - plus my tried-and-tested kimchi recipe that's become a household staple!

If you are a parent of a teenager, you might already be inundated with sights and sounds of BTS mania around you. The talented Korean septet seems to be everywhere - playlists, walls of teenagers’ rooms, clothes, bags, coffee mugs and other merchandise. While my initial reaction to the K-Pop wave was like that of most adults 🙄(rolling my eyes in exasperation!), I spent some time researching about the Hallyu wave that’s taken the world by storm and got introduced to the amazing world of Korean food that, like most Asian cuisines, can be customized easily to be healthy and tasty without much effort. While my tryst with healthy cooking began much before this, one is always looking for new tips, tricks and cooking techniques to add to the repertoire and to counter the constant rants of “Oh! This is so boring!”.

For me, food is an expression of love and I’ve always loved cooking for family and friends. But, I’m especially nervous when it comes to cooking for teenagers! Adolescence seems as much about food as anything, possibly more so. Food plays a major part in the physiological and psychological development between ages 10 and 18. It is reflected in the way they embrace popular culture and the global nature of their aspirations and choices. Their sense of dependence and independence, both in body and mind, and past and future, manifest on the plate and the palate. Some teenagers tend to gravitate towards bad dietary habits due to the lack of restrictions or better alternatives, feelings of stress, peer pressure and body image issues. Food can be just one of the issues up for debate amongst the many power struggles that come with the territory of being a parent of a teenager. At this age, your children can be very easily influenced, by basically everyone except the hand that feeds them!!

I had read somewhere that exposing kids early on to a variety of tastes and flavors minimizes food struggles in their teens. When we were growing up, healthy and wholesome foods were not a fad! It was the norm and our mothers didn't worry so much about junk and processed food since it was not available easily. But, our children’s generation faces a world of abundant options and the problems that come with it, especially the health risks. Hence nuances around nutrition become very important in the teen years as they begin to shape their own thoughts about food and eating.

My teenager is not a fussy eater and my culinary pursuits and experiments have exposed her palate to different cuisines over the years. Korean food is her current favorite! In this article I would like to share a few tips, tricks and healthy substitutes that I’ve used over the years. I will also share my recipe for making Kimchi which is now a staple in our household. I often joke that my food prep looks more like a Korean Mom rather than an Indian one!!

Korean food, like most south-Asian cuisine is generally considered healthy since they incorporate lots of veggies, meat or fish and rice. Their meals called “bapsang” are served with many small sides called “banchan”, broth-based soups, and of course, “kimchi”, a fermented cabbage dish. Besides fermentation, Korean cooking includes blanching, boiling, pickling, and grilling which helps retain the flavors and nutrients of the ingredients while using very little oil(usually sesame oil). Some of the healthy Korean dishes that we frequently make at home are

• Kimchi (more discussion on this follows soon🙂)

• Bibimbap (Korean rice bowl) - made with rice, vegetables, meat, and egg, this bowl is a balanced and nutritious meal. You can skip the meat or replace it with tofu/paneer if you follow a vegetarian diet. I usually add some cucumber juliennes for extra crunch.

• Kimbap/gimbap(seaweed and rice rolls) - these rolls resemble sushi and can be made with vegetables, meat, eggs, and/or fish, pickled radish, etc. They make a good on-the-go meal or snack. I haven’t tried making a vegetarian version of this, but I guess some paneer bhurji along with sauteed carrots and cucumber should make a wholesome veggie version. Instead of sticky rice, mostly used in Asian cooking and is very expensive in India, I use Indrayani rice (grown in Maharashtra/Gujarat) which is a bit sticky when cooked and is so fragrant that it works very well.

• Soondubu jjigae(soft tofu stew) - made with soft tofu, mushrooms and other vegetables, and sometimes meat, this spicy stew is a complete meal in one bowl. I’ve also tried replacing tofu with paneer and it’s just as tasty! I also serve a bowl of plain rice along with this and it blends so well, a lot like rasam-rice, a comfort food for most South Indians!

• Kimchi Jjigae - similar to Soondubu jiggae but this one is flavored with kimchi.

• Kimchi fried rice - Kimchi elevates your humble fried rice to an entire new level. This is a must-try!

• steamed, stir-fried, and seasoned vegetable dishes - works well with palak, zucchini, broccoli, julienned carrots. Drizzle some sesame seeds for extra flavor and crunch.

• Yachaejeon - this is a veggie filled pancake, a lot like our chilas/dosas but with a bigger portion of veggies compared to the flour. Most recipes online call for refined flour/maida, but I use a mix of millet flour (ragi or kodo millet) and whole wheat flour and it is a hit with the kids. It is best eaten warm, straight off the skillet, along with some light soy sauce or as is.

While most Korean food is healthy, the sauces used for seasoning do contain high amounts of sodium. I tend to use very small quantities and use low sodium/light soy sauce instead of dark soy. I recently heard about fermented soybean paste from my niece's Japanese husband. Apparently, this is a good substitute for dark soy sauce and Japanese have this with rice for breakfast. I managed to source it on Amazon and have been using this instead. The flavour is slightly stronger than the usual soy sauces and work well mostly for stir fries.

Another pet peeve about Korean food is that it largely caters to a non-vegetarian palate. Trust me, this cuisine lends itself equally well to veg food as well. However, I’ve tried making Jain versions which did not taste that great. Maybe some expert cooks/chefs can figure this out!

Any discussion on Korean food is not complete if it doesn't mention Kimchi or some anecdote on this ubiquitous, flavourful, stinky, fermented dish! I must have tried at least 15 different recipes, some epic failures included, before putting together a combination of spices and other ingredients to make my version of Kimchi that is liked by my family. I’m sure every Korean household has its own kimchi recipe that’s handed down from older generations, modified and adapted by the women in the house to suit the palates of their family, much like the Indian aachaar. Every house has its own recipe! I mostly eye-ball the quantities of the ingredients based on the quantity of napa cabbage used, but I will attempt to provide an approximate measurement in the recipe that follows.

My version of Kimchi

Ingredients:

Napa cabbage/Chinese cabbage - 2 heads

Rock salt (regular salt is also fine) - 1 cup (standard measuring cup)

Rice flour - 2 tbsp

Water - 1 ½ cup

Sugar - 2 tbsp

Red chilli pepper - 1 ½ cups (I use a mixture of Korean gochugaru and kashmiri chilli powder)

Garlic chives/ spring onion - 1 small bunch

Garlic, finely chopped - About 20 medium sized cloves

Ginger, finely chopped - 2 inch

Steps:

1. Prepping the cabbage:

Slice the cabbage lengthwise into quarters. You could also chop them into smaller bits. I have found that retaining the length helps retain the freshness and crunchiness longer. If you plan to consume them quickly or are making a smaller batch, chopping should be ok. Wash them well under running water and let the water drain out a bit for 15-20 mins

Next apply salt on each of the quarters separating the leaves to salt them well. Place these salted cabbage leaves in a large bowl and press them down with some light weight on the leaves. This helps release the water quickly.

Once the water is released from the leaves(should take about 2 hours or so), wash them again under running water to rinse off excess salt. Give it a light squeeze and let it drain in a colander for an hour or so.

2. Chilly paste :

The chilly paste that is applied on the leaves consists of 2 parts:

1. Rice paste - take water and rice flour in a pan. (I use organic rice flour). Stir it until there are no lumps. Now place this on the gas on low heat and add the sugar (I use brown sugar instead of white sugar) and keep stirring until it thickens to form a thick paste. This paste should not be too dry. Let this cool down completely

2. Chilly mixture - Once the rice paste has cooled down, add the chilli powders, ginger, garlic, chives to the rice paste and stir well until they well combine. At this point, you can add some salt to taste if you wish. You can skip adding salt altogether too .

3. Applying the paste prepared above to each of the quartered cabbage heads, separating each leaf as you apply. Once you apply the chilli paste, roll them tightly and place in an airtight container. Do this with each quarter of the cabbage. Close the container tightly and leave it to ferment for about 24 hours. In Mumbai weather, leaving this overnight should also be sufficient. You will know it has started fermenting once you notice bubbles on top of the kimchi liquid. Once you see this, press down the cabbage rolls and place the container in the fridge. Kimchi is now ready to eat!! Make sure you keep pressing down the leaves often to let the trapped air escape.

While it might seem like a daunting task initially, trust me, once you get a hang of this, it will begin to seem easy. I normally make about 2 cabbage heads at a time since I don't want the fermented cabbage to be left too long in the fridge. Use fresh Kimchi for fried rice or bibimbap and as it ages, they taste better in soups and kimchijeon(kimchi pancakes with veggies, kimchi and flour). The recipe above is for the vegetarian version of Kimchi. Traditionally, fish sauce and fermented shrimp are added to kimchi, but I wasn’t very confident about using these ingredients. But, if you like these flavours, please feel free to add them for extra flavour!

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