If you read most Korean food blogs, they will tell you that Koreans don’t eat coriander, aka cilantro. They’ll tell you straight to your face that cilantro and Korean cuisine have never crossed paths before.
As the Ask the Korean blog reported a couple of years ago:
“Korea has never grown cilantro, and cilantro is not a part of Korean cuisine. …
But Korean people’s cilantro-hate is nonetheless interesting, because it is a nice reflection of Korea’s insularity.”
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Adzuki are small red beans commonly used in Korean, Japanese and Chinese confections. Called 팥 pat in Korean, these beans have a natural sweetness uncommon in legumes. Added sugar or honey during boiling to make the bean paste accentuates the sweetness for use in a number of East Asian desserts. Based on archaeological findings,...
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The onion does not have an ancient connection to Korean cuisine. But you wouldn’t know that, based on how popular the root vegetable is now in Korea. That’s in sharp contrast to the milder green onion, which has been a part of Korean cuisine for hundreds, even thousands of years. Onions were introduced to Korea just...
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Twitter makes it so much easier to “eavesdrop” on conversations of random strangers, which I do via a list of search terms related to Korean cuisine. For every person who asks a question, many others have the same one bouncing around their minds. Even random comments that don’t ask a question, but should ask a...
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On the everything-you-know-is-wrong front, Korea Beat translates a story from Naver that a Korean scholar claims he has found evidence that Korea did not get hot peppers from the Americas by way of European traders—you know, how historically the rest of the world got them. He claims that they evolved independently on the peninsula,...
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