Messy and Picky

The people over at Drexel's Goodwin College shot an email to me for a cool event going on later that day: their Advanced Korean Cuisine course had come back from a two week stint in Korea (sponsored by the Korean government!) and were preparing a feast and presentation about their trip. I just happened to be free so I hurried over to the Academic Bistro for what I hoped would be similar to my mom's home cooking. I was sweaty from the bike ride across town and when I got upstairs, I was greeted by a very cool scene. Hannah Hutt was dressed up in a traditional hanbok and demonstrating how to properly serve and drink tea.

Inside the bar area the dishes started to come out. The crowd was a mix of faculty, administrators, friends and family. I could tell right away that there were definitely people there who had never eaten let alone seen Korean food before from their body language. This was a pretty cool setting to try it all out for the first time.

So what's at the center of every proper Korean meal? Kimchee. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Brunch, lupper, midnight snack. Koreans eat it all day and with everything. I love the stuff. At this point, I eat a fraction of what I used to eat growing up and I love each and every time I get a chance to have it. This was a very different take on my people's national dish. In fact, most of the dishes prepared were interpretations of traditional dishes. There were hits and misses according to my native tongue. This kimchee missed. It was beautifully presented, but it was just plain sweet. The water it was sitting in was an odd purplish-red. I thought this was a harbinger for the rest of the food given the Americanized palates of the students regardless of their fortnight spent in the motherland.

Kimbap. Korea's on-the-go food which is similar to Japanese maki. Cuts of thinly sliced and cooked beef, julienned carrots, zucchini and pickled daikon rolled in vinegary rice, rolled into dried seaweed. This stuff was closer to what I grew up with. Proportions weren't quite where I like it, but that's being nitpicky, but hey, that's me, right?.

Scallops on fried lotus root topped with a soy, scallion sauce. This is something I've never seen before. Maybe it's a take on something they saw in Korea, maybe it's something I just didn't grow up with. I'm not the biggest lover of seafood and I thought it was quite tasty.

Ah japchae. It's a time consuming noodle dish which I'll describe as fried rice, but with noodles. This take on japchae was rolled into [wonton?] wrappers. Not quite salty enough, but very well done.

The guests happily dug into everything.

A shot of one side of my overflowing plate.

A shot of the other side.

Into the presentation we went. The class presented their professor, Dr. Jeehyun Lee, with a lovely gift in a familiar white ribboned, turquoise box. She brushed away a few tears as she soaked in the applause. She was the one who tirelessly led them across her homeland.

Here's Andrew Haught talking about some of the things they did early on. The group went up to the Seoul Tower where they decorated a tile commemorating the trip. Tiles are stuck onto the observation deck of the tower by visitors year round.

Marilyn Miquel spoke of the facilities at Youngsan University. You can see in the photo all the monitors at each cooking station. I've had a tour of Drexel's kitchens and while they are very nice and well equipped, there's nothing like this anywhere. The instructor can place cameras in various spots to give students the best view possible, she explained.

After the presentation, the students peeled off to the kitchen to put the final touches on each of their dishes. They then manned their station and dished out portions for all.

I lined my plate with bulgogi, ttokbokki and spicy chicken. The bulgogi was on the grainy side and that may not have been the fault of whomever prepared it. The ttokbokki's sauce was a little gloppy and there was a big thing missing from it: the heat! The spicy chicken had a nice meld of oniony heat to it. A few days after the event, I was talking to my sister in law and she remarked at how hard it is to make ttokbokki and I gotta agree, it's tough to get the cylindrical rice cakes cooked well. But like most of the other dishes, it was the spice factor which was most bothersome.

The students and guests tucked into their food in the bistro. As I watched everyone enjoying themselves, I thought of what an experience it must be for all of them. It's one thing to learn classic French techniques, but Asian cuisine is a different set of tastes which haven't fully saturated this continent. I have to commend Drexel for taking the leap to create the country's first and only Korean Cuisine course. I spoke with Dr. Lee, whose mother is a culinary instructor in the southern end of Korea, as everyone was eating and she told me a little about the journey.

She's a food science person, so not a classically trained chef and hopes to hand the course over to a chef in the future, but she knew she, a native Korean, would have to be there at the start to get the relationship with the Korean government on solid ground. She said some of the students struggled with the different coursing and portion sizes of Korea. She sent a group of them to Outback Steakhouse to get their fill and they were fine for the rest of the trip. But the first thing they said when they landed stateside was that they missed everything about Korea. She had them hustling around 10+ hours a day and I didn't have to ask her how much sleep she was getting; close to none. I thanked her for her time and let her get back to her guests.

From all of the empty plates skewed across the room, it was obvious that most of the guests enjoyed their eats. And looking at this photo, I see that I forgot to mention the drinks! They had a ginger-cinnamon drink which was just about perfect&emdash;it was just missing the pine nut floating garnish. I learned later that the bartender of the group was allergic to nuts so I understood their absence. There was also a raspberry wine and a few other drinks I can't recall.

I had a great time at the event. IT's always wonderful to see people discover what I consider to be the best food on earth. I know I'm biased having grown up with it (and with excellent cooks in the family), but I truly do believe that it's the best. Thank you for having me Drexel!

The full set of photos all at 1200px size