Hi all,
today we will talk about korean rice porridge – 죽.
When we think about rice porridge, we consider it as a comfort food for someone who is sick or for elderly people but in Korea is common for everybody to have it like an everyday meal.
Apart from simple rice porridge made of just water and rice, restaurants have modified the original recipe and flavor by adding many different ingredients to it. Its common to find porridge cooked with vegetables, chicken, beef, seafood, cheese, abalone, mushrooms or . More traditional tastes include pine nuts, ginseng, black sesame, bean sprout and sweet pumpkin.
A lot of chain restaurants have been open that have only juk in their menu. You had lunch in one of these restaurants – Bon Juk 본죽 in Hongdae and ordered a tuna vegetable porridge (see pictures below).
The dish has been served with several side dishes (as always in Korea): chili sesame paste, kimchi, pickled minced squid (delicious) and a cold and watery clean soup made with radish.
The dish is delicious and just the idea of adding so many nice ingredients to a simple plain dish like porridge makes me wondering why we never thought about it in the Western cuisine. The mixture of flavour just matches perfectly and juk is the ideal meal if you want to have some healthy food or to recover from your hangover.
V&N