Kimchi, Hotpots and Belly Fat
Dave Says:
We write a blog entry about food and drink for every country we visit. Why this is we don’t know, we are not gluttons, it just happened that way. Here comes the report for Taiwan: If you can kill it, you can fry it and if you can fry it, you can eat it. This may sound a little unfair and had I written this entry before we left the country it may have sounded a little different. Sure, the egg burrito things (gently fried) were nice and the dumplings (gently fried or abrasively steamed) were good too. However, nothing we ate in Taiwan appeared to be much better than cultural fast food. Their hotpot concept is quite good though - an all you can eat buffet of fresh veggies, meat and seafood that you cook yourself in a pot of broth at your table. However, much like poor Chang’s Mongolian Grill on Broadway, the excitement of creating your own custom soup wears thin once you realize that it all ends up tasting the same no matter how custom you make it.
The trick to Taiwan is to go to the harbour and buy the fish straight from the boat. Thanks to Ed and Sue we had the chance to do this. Not far from their vacation home is a harbour and fish market. We purchased about US$60 of crab, shrimp and fish, marched up the hill to a restaurant and paid them $10 to cook up the whole lot. Now, we realized that $60 sounds like a lot for backpackers but Sue negotiated a good deal and it took two of us to carry all the seafood away. OK, we are gluttons.
From a drink perspective Taiwan fares a little better. Ni-Cha is milk tea. Delicious hot or cold it is black tea with condensed milk and lots of sugar syrup. It’s cheap, good and too addictive. Starbucks, of course, is everywhere yet what is more pleasing to the eye is all the Starbucks clones that have sprung up. This is great because these are all domestic companies emulating the success of the big conglomerate. This provides the young people of Taiwan somewhere to hang out and meet friends, semi-decent coffee and, most importantly, employment and business opportunities. Starbucks isn’t all evil and although we have yet to succumb to our home brew, we are happy to drink from the fountain of their competitors when the need for the familiar arises.
Beer comes courtesy of the Taiwan Beer Company who produce a local brew unimaginatively called Taiwan Beer. $2.50 for 600ml is a fair price to pay and its taste is also fair. Not as vicious as Chang beer in Thailand and not as refined as Kingfisher in India, it does what you want it to do and probably what you bought it for in the first place.
What prompted the kill it, fry it, eat it remark was Korea. By comparison, the food here is great. Even without the comparison it is a pleasant and welcome surprise. It may even be good for you having the highest protein to fat ratio of any Asian country we’ve visited thus far. It’s also reasonably priced and most importantly tastes fresh and natural. Long gone are the hopes of finding a dinner for a dollar as in India but $8 buys you a finely prepared dinner here. The meal is based around a central dish. Perhaps a soup, or a bowl of tofu or even BBQ’d pork. The central dish is basic and perhaps a little bland but don’t worry because your table will soon be overloaded with anywhere between five and fifteen side dishes. Some sides are there to add into your basic dish and some are there to give your palate a little burst of life when it’s time to take a break from the spice. All the tastes are monochromatic, even the fiery hot dishes are just chili hot not curry hot. There is not the complexity of spices that are found, for example, in Indian food. Think of having a table of dishes like paints on an artist’s palate, primary tastes that can be blended to make an almost infinite array of secondary flavors.
The centerpiece of the Korean meal appears to be the DIY table barbecue. It used to be either pork or beef based but there currently seems to be some trouble with American beef and the Korean government have stopped imports from the US. This is putting up the price of US beef here to around $35/lb. The Koreans are very upset by this and just like the Iraq war we (Sarah and David) are personally asked/blamed for it. Not surprising I guess because I doubt the US government cares what the Koreans think when the domestic market is all that really matters. The BBQ is fun. Pig meat and table flamethrower. The natives let the waiter start cooking the meat and then take over but we are considered too inexperienced to handle cooking for ourselves so the restaurant staff do it all including using scissors to cut our food into more manageable chopstick sized pieces. It’s like being five years old again and I feel like it - the chopsticks are flat, not round, and are almost impossible to use with any grace. Secretly, I think the Koreans have a hard time with them too because a spoon is always provided and used by everyone. The Japanese, probably the most adept chopstick users I’ve seen, wouldn’t be caught dead with a spoon in their hand. The BBQ comes with lettuce leaves to wrap the cooked meat in and, again, many various side dishes. I mentioned earlier that there is practically no fat in the Korean meals, well, the BBQ is where they make up for it. The belly of the pig is considered to be the best part. Apparently a fat animal is a healthy one and a week’s worth of careful eating vanishes at the mercy of the cracklin’.
Kim Chi is the national dish. Basically it’s raw cabbage pickled in vinegar and chili and comes with every meal. I read in the newspaper that a Korean Tourist Board survey of foreign visitors revealed that 86% of tourists tried Kim Chi. From this statistic I can only deduce that 14% of visitors must eat exclusively at McDonalds because Kim Chi is served with every single meal in every single restaurant. And, should you polish off the whole plate of the stuff, another will arrive immediately. This holds true of all the side dishes, they just keep on coming, whether you want them or not. Our guidebook mentions the Korean government are trying to encourage restaurants to end this practice because of food wastage but I doubt that will ever happen.
The one thing the Koreans seem to be coming up short on is decent drinks. There are a fair amount of coffee-shops all serving lattes, americanos and whatnot but these are expensive and have the look of bad coffee. Perhaps it’s frothy Nescafe and at $3.50 a cup it doesn’t bode well for a value-for-money experience. Besides these Asian countries don’t really have a cafe culture where you can nurse the single cup you can afford for as long as you like whilst browsing the paper. Apparently their tea is very famous so we tried a $4 cup and it was good and fruity but the cup was small and instead of leaving with the taste of tea in our mouths we left with the taste of tourism. Haven’t tried the beer yet but again, the Hofs (bars) look very unappealing and the occasional Western Bar we run into just says $8 beer and ex-pats. I think we have to wait to get to China for beer again. In the meantime, we’ve bought green tea bags from the 7-11 and because every hotel has a hot water machine and mugs in their rooms we’ve been enjoying cheap tea in the comfort of home.
Breakfast? Forget about it. We’re buying the only box of cereal the 7-11 sells, a carton of milk and eating it from the coffee mugs in our room with our sporks.
Korean cuisine is not the most imaginative but it’s healthy and practical with just a little kick when you need it. A bit like Korea really.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Hey there you two! I cut my boys food with kitchen scissors!! It is very handy and easy way to divvy up the food. I feel downright international now.
Happy trails!