After the Pacific Program ended, my journey headed towards Seoul, South Korea to visit my sisters and my dad. One of my favorite part of being in Korea (other than the friendly family company) is the food! I LOVE Korean food so so much. I have been craving authentic (accent on AUTHENTIC) Korean food for such a long time now, ever since I last visited Korea 2 years ago. I thought I’d share all the food I got to eat/try out while I was in Korea (not all food are Korean sorry not sorry haha), to show everyone my wonderful experience in Korea.

04.01

Budae-jjigae, which means an army base stew, is a type of a stew made with ham, sausage, spam, baked beans, kimchi, gochujang, ramen, and rice cakes. This dish was first created after the Korean War, where Korea had abundance of smuggled surplus foods from the U.S. army bases.

This is probably one of my favorite Korean dish because it has everything I like: the spice, the soup based food, ham/sausage/meat, and ramen/rice cakes. It’s so delicious, and I love having this dish so much!

04.02

Créme Brûlée is a dessert consisting of a rich custard base topped with hardened caramelized sugar. It was served with mochaccino, also called caffé mocha in Korea, is a chocolate-flavored caffé latte. I never tasted Créme Brûlée before, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it or not, but my oldest sister told me it’s one of her favorite dessert and that I should try some. I tried it, and it was surprisingly yummy! I especially liked the hardened sugar part hehe. Mocha was yummy as always.

These are Vietnamese dishes called Bún Chà and Phò. Bún Chà is a dish of grilled pork and rice noodles, along with a dipping sauce that had a sweet/sour taste. Phò consist of broth, rice noodles, and meat (beef in this case), along with traditional Vietnamese herbs. A mutual food that my sister and I love is Vietnamese food, so we decided to go to a place that she likes near her school, and this was such a good meal. The broth of Phò was seasoned great, and Bún Chà was also nice to eat with the sweet/sour sauce. I hope to visit Vietnam one day to taste all of their street food and take a food tour (my sister did this with her fiancé, which I am so jealous about).

04.04

Dak-bokkeum, literally meaning chicken mixed with sauce, is a traditional Korean dish made by stir frying chunks of chicken with ramen, vegetables, spices. Although the traditional way is more so to boil it to have a little bit of broth, the new trend of dak-bokkeum is now stir frying it and then serving with mozzarella cheese. This was a yummy dish to have when you want spicy food. I love how mozzarella cheese is mixed with ramen and chicken as it gives more flavor to the dish (and also can make the dish not as spicy if you’re not good with spice).

Soufflé pancake is a Japanese style dessert dish, which is super airy and fluffy pancake. This type was served with special mango sauce, along with frozen mangos, mango ice cream, and whipped cream. I didn’t know what to expect when I had this dish. It was a mix of a lot of feelings haha. The pancake itself is very fluffy indeed, but it has a little bit of a doughy feeling/taste with it. However, this was offset with the frozen mango bits and the whipped cream/ice cream, as it gave more flavors to the pancake. Although it took me a little bit to get used to it, I liked the dish a lot.

04.07

Okonomiyaki is another type of Japanese pancake (this time a main dish). It consists of a pancake that has cabbage, mayo, katsuo bush, onions, squid, etc. along with dried octopus on top of it. This was suggested by my sister, as she also loves Japanese food (she’s a huge foodie). I really liked this dish because it had a familiar texture of Korean pancake, but served with different type of seafoods. The dried octopus moving due to the wind was also fascinating.

Taco wasabi is another type of Japanese dish that is a mix of raw octopus along with cucumber and wasabi. This had a distinctive taste, not because of the raw octopus (as I had this before many times – I’m actually fond of this, it’s yummy), but because of the wasabi sauce. It was definitely very unique and also took me couple bites to get used to the taste. However, once I got used to the taste, I found myself keep going for more and more.

Mojito is a cocktail that consists of white rum, sugar, lime juice, soda water, and mint. I like mojito because of its sweet, citrus taste offset by the refreshing mint flavor. This mojito was the best mojito I ever tasted. Oh my gosh it was so yummy! I kept drinking it because it barely had any alcohol taste whatsoever, and it had a great balance of sweet along with citrus and minty taste.

04.09

Soy sauced shrimp is a dish consisting of raw shrimp marinated with a soy sauce based sauce along with cheongju, rice wine, sugar, ginger, pepper, and lemon. This was once again a unique dish, as I never had a raw shrimp before. However, it tasted really good! The soy sauce covered up the rawness of the shrimp but wasn’t overpowering to make it too salty. Eating it with rice made it more tasty. I had it with lemon shrimp, which is boiled shrimp with lemon sauce. These two were a nice combo because it was a good difference between sweet/sour and salty. I would have 1 shrimp of the soy sauce and 1 shrimp of lemon and switch it off to give more flavors to the food.

04.10

04.11