Da-Hae West - K-food : Korean home cooking and street food

Select one of the chapters from the and you will be taken to a list of all the recipes covered in that chapter.

Alternatively, jump to the to browse recipes by ingredient.

Look out for linked text (which is blue and underlined) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between related recipes.

I was born in Busan, South Korea but moved to England when I was three. Raised by my Korean mum and English dad, I couldnt really speak much English when we first moved here. When my mum dropped me off at nursery school for the first time, she worried about how Id interact with the other kids with the language barrier fortunately, kids are kids and just get on with it, creating strong bonds over toys, biscuits and nap times so things actually turned out pretty well and language was never an issue.

I t was incredibly important to my mum that I knew about the country that I came from, and I think this is why I was so proud of being Korean when I first started school. Id write my name in scrawly Korean on top of all my school work (it was even mentioned in one of my school reports), and Id always be the first to point out where Korea was on the world map.

My dad travelled away a lot for work, so whenever it was just my mum and I at home, wed have Korean food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Having eaten rice and kimchi for every meal since she was young, it was initially difficult for my mum to adapt to Western foods. Every time we visited Korea, shed make sure to bring back enough bags of dried anchovies and gochugaru (Korean red chilli powder) in her suitcase to last us until our next trip. It was difficult to get Korean ingredients in the UK back then, so my resourceful mum would adapt recipes so that she could use the ingredients she could get hold of, along with the ones shed snuck back in her suitcase. Kkakdugi, a Korean radish kimchi was made with swede or turnips in our house, gochujang (Korean red chilli paste) was homemade (there are photos of a three to four-year-old me, licking it off my hands and elbows), and my mum would also forage for the tips of wild fern (often eaten in bibimbap) and young rapeseed leaves to make her summer kimchis. Gradually, my mum took a little more interest in cooking other foods and, bit by bit, she learnt more about different non-Korean ingredients. Soon enough, Korean food became just one of many types of cuisine we enjoyed at home (much to my dads relief).

While I was growing up in the UK, Korea went through some really tough economic times and was hit hard by the IMF crisis. Things looked pretty bleak for the country, but my mum would be insistent that one day Korea would become this great big economy that other countries would aspire to be. Shed try and push the importance of learning Korean, but going through my trickier teenage years, I took little interest in my lessons. They felt like a waste of time because, back then, it looked like Korea was always going to be this small, hidden country that no one knew anything about at least to me.

Despite my disregard for my Korean lessons, I did look forward to our trips to Korea, and I was lucky enough to visit pretty often as I was growing up. Visits were packed full of rushing around to visit relatives, eating lots and revisiting my mums childhood haunts, but in hindsight, it was the everyday things I loved most. Going to the market with my mum so different to the markets in the UK and filled with such sights, sounds, smells and hustle and bustle. Going to the beach with my cousins. Going fishing. Swimming in the bath houses Im so thankful to have so many childhood memories there.

There was one particular holiday though that really cemented Korea as a second home for me. It was during one summer holiday while I was at university, and I went (slightly under duress at the time) to spend a few months living with my cousin Jisoo on Jeju Island. Jeju Island is the honeymoon destination of Korea and for good reason a volcanic island full of mountains, surrounded by crystal blue seas and with its own sunny microclimate thats warmer than the rest of Korea. Its impossible not to fall in love with it. I grew a whole new appreciation of Korea that Id never had before. That summer was one of the best holidays Ive ever had. Jisoo and I had such fun swimming, watching Korean dramas, ordering takeaway and eating Baskin Robbins until late into the night. It was the longest time Id ever spent in Korea since moving to the UK, and I loved it.

Ever since that summer in Jeju, I started to take a lot more interest in Korea. I started speaking to my mum in Korean (she had persistently never given up trying) and I started to seek out more and more information about the country, and particularly the food. As Ive grown up, Ive seen Korea go from strength to strength and I couldnt help but sit up and take notice when Korean food and flavours started to creep onto small segments on TV and appear in fancy restaurant menus. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to be part of this to link back to my Korean roots and promote the food I loved; I just didnt know how or where to start.

Gareth and I met through mutual friends in my last year of university and one of the reasons we got on so well from the beginning was because of our shared love of food. Gareth has always loved food. All food really. When he was growing up, he never really watched childrens TV and instead was always fixated on cookery shows. He loved cooking and probably would have made a great chef (I think), but hed never thought of doing it as a career. Instead, one of his first jobs was working at a pub and from there he worked his way up through hospitality until he reached the head offices of the restaurant group D&D London.

We got married in 2012 and went to Korea on our honeymoon. Wed spent several days with my family feasting on huge Korean dinners, with Gareth proclaiming that everything he ate was his new favourite dish. It was his first time in Korea and he hadnt known what to expect, but he was completely blown away by it all and particularly the food.

In the past, it had always been difficult to try any sort of non-Korean food in Korea. Korea is full of really great Korean restaurants (most of which specialize in just one dish) but had resisted much culinary influence from other countries. Despite this, for as long as I can remember, its always been possible to get a bulgogi burger at any one of the fast food restaurants. One night, we were walking from my aunts house to our nearby hotel, when we wandered past a McDonalds. Like most global fast-food chains, McDonalds adapts their menu to the country that theyre in, and in Korea, they have a bulgogi burger. Its a standard

McDonalds beef burger thats marinaded in a sweet, sticky soy glaze based on the Korean BBQ marinade. Id told Gareth about this Korean twist on their burgers, and he was insistent that we try one. It wasnt the best burger that Gareth had ever eaten (though it was the best McDonalds hed had), but the idea of marrying those Korean flavours with Western-style food stuck in our heads.