I went out for dinner with a bunch of my teachers last night and I though I would fill you in on some of the fantastic dishes I sampled.
First of all when I say we went out to dinner, what I really mean is we went out for dinner and drinking, then went to a bar for more food and drinks, then if you didn't have kids waiting for you at home, out for still more drinks... This is a very common occurrence so I have learned not to make plans for after "dinner".
We went to a makgeolli house for most of the evening. Makgeolli is a Korean drink made from fermenting a mixture of boiled rice and water. It is milky and sweet, and pretty good.
On to the food. The first dish was raw anchovies, or myeolchi hoe, with an assortment of vegetable, all smothered in a spicy red sauce. This was definitely the best food of the night, other than nogari, a dried fish served with drinks at the bars.
Next up was whale, or gorae. Yep that's right, little slices of whale, each with a chunk of blubber on the end. The meat tasted like fishy steak, and the blubber had a very strong, oily, almost buttery taste. Not terrible but I don't think I'll be eating it for awhile. Oh and I checked online and whale meat is legal in Korea, but only if it is caught accidentally or washes up on shore.
Lastly was the food that Mr. Kim, the gym teacher, had been raving about to me ever since I told him I would try anything once. This food is popular among Korean men because of its health benefits, but definitely not because of its smell of taste. It is called hongeo hoe, or raw, fermented skate fish. If you don't know, skate is a type of ray (ex. stingray) and is closely related to sharks. Now most people cringe when I say fermented, but that isn't really what gives this food its exceptional taste. Many things are fermented that we eat everyday - bread, cheese, yogurt, anything alcoholic. What makes skate so appetizing is a characteristic of the animal itself.
Skate, along with other rays and sharks, don't pee. Instead, the uric acid waste produced by its body, that would normally be peed out, seeps out through its skin, in the process making all parts of the animal taste like its pee. Then, when the meat is fermented, the uric acid turns into ammonia, which as we all know, our nose and especially taste buds have a natural aversion to. They do serve the hongeo with cooked pork and kimchi to help mask the taste (yes I officially use kimchi to help improve the taste of other things), but that doesn't even begin to help you forget what you are eating. One of my co-teachers related the taste to "an old fashioned outhouse that hasn't been cleaned in a long time." So I didn't puke, but I am not going anywhere near hongeo for the rest of my time in Korea.
