My mom would often bring home kimbap, packed in two neat rows on a styrofoam plate wrapped in plastic, from the Korean grocery store and make tteokbokki as a snack, stirring rice cakes over the stove in a fiery red sauce. When I’m having a bad day or my appetite is off, I always want these dishes together.
Kimbap (김밥) is a roll typically filled with rice, vegetables and meat wrapped in dry sheets of seaweed. Common ingredients include vegetables, like thinly sliced carrots, cucumbers, danmuji (yellow pickled radish) and spinach; some kind of main protein, such as beef or tuna; as well as strips of omelet and fish cake. Since it’s so portable, it’s a go-to for picnics, field trips and hikes.
Some people refer to it as Korean sushi to describe it to people who don’t know what it is, or very wrongly as just sushi, which it is absolutely not. In my opinion, it’s better and it stands on its own. It deserves to be known as kimbap.
When I lived in South Korea for a few years as a young adult, there was a kimbap shop on practically every corner — equivalent to the ubiquity of Starbucks. They had names like Kimbap Heaven and Kimbap King. When I was too sick to cook, or too depressed to wash any dishes, I’d go to the shop right around the corner for a fast, tasty and affordable meal. Usually a roll was the equivalent of about a dollar.
In the Bay Area, not all Korean restaurants make kimbap. You can often find it premade at Korean grocery stores like Koreana Plaza and H-Mart. But it’s best when it’s freshly made and not refrigerator-cold because the rice can get unpleasantly hard.
Tteokbokki (떡볶이), meanwhile, is a popular street food of chewy rice cakes, fish cake, boiled egg and onions simmered in a spicy gochujang (red chile paste)-based sauce. Eating the dish, I always think of my aunt (이모), who taught me how to make it from scratch. My mom is a great cook. But she is so good that she doesn’t pay attention to exact measurements, so it’s hard to learn recipes from her. My aunt would take the time to carefully measure out the ingredients, even if it was something like 12 spoonfuls instead of ¼ cup, so I could learn. Since I am sensitive to gluten, tteokbokki is one of the Korean noodle-esque dishes I can still enjoy since it’s made out of rice. I usually ask for no fish cake. (Fish cake and gochujang usually contain traces of wheat.)
Having just kimbap or tteokbokki alone doesn't feel like a full meal, so having them together feels more nourishing. Sometimes I like to dip the kimbap into the tteokbokki sauce for a little spice. — Salgu Wissmath
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August 15, 2023 at 06:00PM
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Best Korean comfort food in SF Bay Area - San Francisco Chronicle
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