Gastro-slut: Cook Like a Waygook

In case you haven't heard, about 5 weeks ago I packed up two bags of crap and relocated myself to the land of Starcraft and Gangnam Style: South Korea.

I also lost my passport in Japan on the way over here, but that's another story.

Aside from the typhoon which arrived just the day after I did, everything's been pretty fucking peachy. However, there was no real cookery going on for a while - I instead lived off of kimchi and triangular prisms of kimbap. I was pretty thrilled about spending little more than a dollar per meal until inundating my body with starch cost me my ever-enjoyable BM regularity. So I'm cooking again.

I'm determined to eventually get a decent handle on Korean cuisine, so I decided to first try a simple but awesome side dish of fried anchovies: myolchi bokkeum. I found a promising recipe from maangchi.com which is great, albeit a bit too sweet for me. I decided to futz with it because, really, what do I do better than fuck up perfectly acceptable things?

Myeolchi Bokkeum

-1 cup small dried anchovies
- 1 tbsp olive oil
-3/4 tbsp hot pepper paste
-2 tbsp water
-1 tbsp corn syrup
-1 tsp sugar
-1 t tbsp roasted sesame seeds
-1/2 tsp sesame oil

First order of business is figuring out your fish: dried anchovies come in all sorts of sizes, but google tells me that smaller ones are better for this purpose - no need to pick out little bitter spines and guts. I went for the 2 smallest sizes I could find to see which I'd prefer.

Making this dish is ridiculously easy. First put a pan over high heat and roast the fish dry (no oil!) for about 2 minutes. I must now insist that you refrain from trying to determine the palatability of this recipe based on the odors produced in the first minute of cooking. Your kitchen will smell like a barnacle's ass for a short while, but I promise that this is in no way an indication of what your final product will be like.

The fish will go from a gray pallor to more of a toasted hue as you dry roast them. At this point, add in a tablespoon of olive oil and continue to fry for another 30 seconds or so. Then push the fish to one side of the pan, and dump in all of the other ingredients to the de-fishified portion of your cooking vessel. I find it helps to tilt the pan - much easier to keep the sauce isolated as it cooks.

You'll want to cook the sauce until it gets thick and glossy - not much more than a minute. Then just smush the sauce and fish together and glop it all into a bowl. Act quickly, you don't want to burn the sugar. Below you can see how it turned out with both the small and ittty-bitty sized anchovies.

I prefer the smallest of anchovies to their slightly larger kin, however my favorite incarnation of this recipe happens to involve neither option. Instead, I use medium-sized dried shrimp and followed the exact same procedure.

I guess that makes it maleun saewoo bokkeum...er, I think...