A love affair with a roll of rice.

I just realized that the title I just wrote for this post is a bit ridiculous, as a love affair with a roll of rice could certainly only be a one-time thing and it would be messy with potential for serious injury. What's with all the Korea posts lately anyway? The only thing I can say is that our time in Korea is evaporating. It seems like yesterday that we were dreading flying back from the US on our month-long winter vacation to visit family and friends to do a second year here. Now, I'm kind of dreading flying back to the US and figuring out just what to do with myself for a career. In fact, the figuring out should probably start sooner than later at this point. I'd rather write about the time we're spending in Korea so that I have something to look at in a year or two and say "Man, that was a hell of an adventure." Meh, none of this is the intended topic of this post. Today I want to talk about kimbap (or gimbap, depending on how you prefer to write it...I prefer the 'k').

Kimbap means literally, to my most educated guess "seaweed rice," and is often compared to the wonderful, incredible delicacy from right across the Sea of Japan that is so popular at home sushi (vinegar rice). Anyhow, It took me more than a year to really enjoy kimbap. It's not even really an acquired taste, it's just that you have to remove the thought of "I think this should taste like sushi" from your fat American brain before you dig in.

In true expat blog fashion, I will show you the formation of the word "kimbap" in Hangeul, so that you can think I'm super fluent in Korean even though I can't speak Korean but can read Hangeul because it's actually quite intuitive and has a lot of English cognates.


김- the green papery seaweed used to wrap kimbap and sushi, in the US we call it nori
밥- rice

There's a few different kinds of kimbap.

The most common, perhaps, is the regular kimbap roll, filled with cham-chi (canned tuna), bulgogi (marinated/cooked beef/pork), spam, or some other sort of protein, and then most likely mu (pickled radish), some sort of root-y looking thing, and mayonnaise. it's similar to an inside-out roll that you would buy in the US in the sense that the kim is on the outside. The outside of the roll is painted with sesame oil, and the rice isn't vinegary. This gives you a sweeter roll than you would expect, and the textures, especially that of the radish, are a bit more woody than you normally feel with a bite of rice. It took me a long time to actually want to eat kimbap, but now it's my go-to savory snack.

My favorite kind of kimbap gives you a bit larger kim:bap ratio, along with the opportunity for more exciting fillings. This is a triangular blob of rice with a protein either in or on the slab, completely wrapped in kim. In Japan they call these onigiri. I often pick one up after school, usually SPAM or tonkatsu filled. I genuinely love the idea of a tonkatsu filled kimbap, because a deep fried pork cutlet really can't go wrong. SPAM kimbap reminds me of the good old days in Hawaii when I would have SPAM musubi for breakfast. As far as a snack goes, it's not super healthy, but really there's a lot worse you could do than eat a 200 calorie blob of rice and protein, right?

My next exciting kitchen project, in fact, is going to be making kimbap. I might even take a cooking class at some point here in Korea (not might. I should. I definitely should.) Since I'm not really in a position to sign up for a class this very second while I'm motivated, I think I'll use this video as a guide. You can make kimbap in your own home, too!