Seoul Food Tour

If anyone has this post read aloud to them, I hope the reader spells out “Seoul” in “Seoul Food.” It’s not at all about soul food. It’s about a food tour I took in Seoul, South Korea.

In my morning and afternoon posts from today in Seoul, I proactively apologized, or if not exactly apologized, at least warned that the posts today will probably be briefer and more typo-prone than usual. Consider that apology/warning not just repeated here, but amplified.

I’m jet-lagged after arriving only yesterday evening. And I’m beyond exhausted from not sleeping much on the plane and having slept restlessly and only briefly in my hotel last night. And it’s now getting quite late for me. So, yes, I went on a Seoul Food Tour this evening. And, yes, I ate some Seoul food. But my condition won’t allow me to do the food tour justice in this entry. Sorry about that.

Let me cut to the chase before I try to flesh out the few details I can remember in my mentally blighted state, with my memory aided by some pictures. None of the dishes tasted bad, and some of the dishes were absolutely delicious.

However, there was one element of one dish that I couldn’t bring myself to eat, so I can’t say if it tasted good or bad. I’ll get to that one, because I’m not sure I’ll ever forget it, as much as I would like to.

The food tour started in a large, grungy, but character-rich market lined with food stalls and restaurants. We had a few stops in there.

Probably my favourite dishes were at the first place we stopped. There, we had a few varieties (three, if I remember correctly) of steamed dumplings. They were extremely tasty.

We then moved on to another place I quite enjoyed. We had two dishes there, both of which were delectable. One was a Korean version of gnocchi, but in a chilli sauce. The other was rice and some other stuff wrapped in seaweed. Some maki Japanese sushi is similar.

Then we moved on to the place on the Seoul Food Tour where I couldn’t bring myself to even try one part of one dish.

Wriggling Seoul Food

We had two dishes there. I very much enjoyed one of them. It was a yummy mung bean pancake.

The other one started with a large, plate-filling helping of steak tartare, with a raw egg on top of it. There were 11 customers on the tour, including me, so we had three plates to share. One person at each plate assumed responsibility for mixing the raw egg into the steak tartare.

I’ve never had steak tartare or knowingly had raw egg. It’s a health-related phobia about eating raw red meat or eggs. But I convinced myself that I would intentionally fall victim to peer pressure and try it today. However, the dish wasn’t complete yet. The tour guide added the remaining component around one side of each plate.

What was that component? Small, live octopuses. That’s what.

When I say “live,” I don’t just mean “uncooked.” I mean literally live. They were wriggling. Literally wriggling. One of the octopuses on the plate closest to me tried to make its escape and was wriggling off the plate

Don’t believe me about the octopuses wriggling? I shot a short video of it. The octopuses are up at the top. So look there to see them wriggling.

You’re supposed to eat them like that, chewing them up while they’re still wriggling in your mouth. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I liked the other Seoul food we had up to that point, but no. Just no.

After a lot of coaxing from a couple of the other people on the tour, I did try a single small chopsticks serving of the steak tartare, staying as far away from the octopuses as I could. So, at least I did that once in my life. Hopefully, it won’t cut my life short.

After that, we moved on to a stall in the market where we had small stuffed pastries, with a couple of different stuffings. They were tasty, but not extraordinarily so. What made them special was that they were in the shape of fish. Fortunately, they didn’t wriggle. They were solely pastry.

We then had some long fish cakes on skewers. There were three varieties. I had the spicy version and thought it was delicious.

We then had a stuffed roll that was nice, but not wonderful.

At one point, although I didn’t get a picture, we had a packaged cookie.

We stopped at one stall to watch a guy make a Korean dessert. I forgot the ingredients. But he reached into a square pan of some white stuff. He formed that into a circle. He stretched that and folded a figure eight of it onto itself to form a single circle again. He repeated that several times. I forget how many times, but he called out with each fold how many strands thick the circle was. Because each time doubled the number, it got very large very fast and ended in the thousands. Because he stretched the circle with each fold, each of the strands was hair-thin. And not particularly full-bodied hair, at that..

He then cut it into rectangles and rolled it around some stuffing. We had a sample there, and the Seoul Food tour guide bought some to take with us to our next and final stop, a tea shop.

We were offered a choice of two types of tea, or the unadventurous could have a more typical Western-type tea. (Nobody on the tour chose the unaventurous option.) One of the choices was a thick pear tea, with pieces of pear in it. The other was an herbal tea with lots of ingredients in it that I’ve forgotten. The latter was supposed to be medicinal.

I chose the herb tea. I quite enjoyed it. There were a lot of ingredients, including seeds of a sort I don’t remember that floated around and were intended to be eaten with the drink. Its taste resembled cloves to me, but I can’t remember if cloves were one of the ingredients.

And so ended the Seoul Food Tour. I might have forgotten a dish or two. There were a lot of them. It gave me a good introduction to a few Korean foods that I might not have otherwise tried. And one that I didn’t and never will try. But, enough about that. There was lots to savour.