Bibimbap and BBQ: an ode to Korean food

I had some sushi for lunch yesterday - the first rice I'd had in two weeks since getting back from South Korea. After a month in which I had either rice or noodles at at least one meal (and usually two) every day I felt the need for abstinence!

Not that I didn't really like Korean food. Here's a run-down of my favourite things and what it's like to eat out in South Korea.

Breakfast

The Koreans eat pretty much the same stuff for breakfast as they do for other meals, as far as I can work out. I know abalone porridge is supposed to be traditional. However breakfast is one of the few meals where I'm not good at being brave. I like Western-style breakfast - cereal, fruit, eggs, bread, pastries or cake if they're on offer!

At the traditional guesthouses and cheap hotels I stayed at, the options usually consisted of one brand of white sliced bread, one brand of butter and one brand of strawberry jam in those little square packets. No variation, no matter where I went! In Seoul I also got eggs and some sliced apple, in Busan and Gyeongju there was cereal too (there should have been cereal in Daegu but there was no milk).

In PyeongChang we were treated to a magnificent breakfast buffet every morning where you could have any breakfast you fancied - good for lining the stomach before a cold day in the mixed zone!

Other meals

Kimchi in Gyeongju

I didn't see any difference between what Koreans eat for lunch or tea/dinner. The staple carbohydrate is rice, which you even get with noodle soup and so on, served in little metal bowls with a lid to keep it warm. Plus with every main meal you get some sort of side dishes. At their best, this involves several different kinds of kimchi (fermented vegetables), always including the standard cabbage and usually some sort of radish too. Seaweed and beansprout options were quite common, as well as strips of a sort of omelettey fishcake thing. In the more fast-food type places there was usually a self-serve kimchi area which usually had cabbage plus a variation on the pickled radish that was bright yellow and slightly sweet in taste. I love that stuff! You can generally ask for more if you eat all your kimchi.

A lot of Korean dishes come in a hot stone pot and my favourite of these was definitely bibimbap. This is a bowl of rice with a variety of vegetables on top, topped with an egg. I think strictly speaking it's supposed to be a raw egg yolk that cooks as you stir it in, but I also had a version with a fried egg and one with strips of omelette.

Bibimbap in PyeongChang - I had this same dish at the same place three times

The next best thing I ate, a few times, was hangover soup (haejang-guk). Again there are variations; the first one I had had a white base and all the others a red base. The general idea is that they come with pork ribs on the bone, plus some vegetables (cabbage) and optionally some ramen. The best version was definitely the one in a little restaurant near the snowboard venue, where two of my colleagues ate pretty much every day, but there was a close second in Busan! It's a wonderfully comforting sort of dish.

Hangover soup near the Phoenix Snow Park

Other soup/stew dishes which are common include sundubu jigae, which is a soup made with soft tofu and quite a lot of chilli; and kimchi stew, which is simply a soup made with kimchi!

Kimchi stew at Gangneung bus station (yes really)

I only managed to try Korean barbecue twice, on consecutive nights with Olympic colleagues at the same restaurant, but it was lots of fun. You all sit around a table which has a barbecue in the middle - gas or charcoal - and they bring you big plates of meat and you cook them. The restaurant we went to also supplied lots of extras, including salad, garlic to cook, and spicy salt to dip your meat in. So good.

The Koreans have also adapted dishes from the nations that have occupied or visited them over the years. There's a lot of Japanese-style katsu curry, a lot of fried chicken and pork cutlets, and often an option to get cheese on top. Udon noodles are also popular.

Sundubu jigae in Gyeongju

Street food is a big thing in Korea with lots of things on offer, usually fried. I loved the green onion pancake I had in Busan and the grilled prawn skewer which followed it up. Some street food stalls and some shops sell a thing called gimbap, which is a bit like a sushi roll - a variety of ingredients wrapped in rice and seaweed. I got quite a good one from the supermarket in Gyeongju to take walking!

Supermarket gimbap

 Drinks and dessert

Coffee is a bit of a craze right now in South Korea but I didn't have much good coffee. Espresso is not on the menu at many places, although cappucinos, lattes and Americanos are. The latter tended to come huge and too weak for my taste and coffee generally cost a lot - as much as in London.

The other craze is dessert cafés, which all seemed to serve strawberry frappés, with a selection of patisserie style cake on offer. I kept meaning to go and have some cake and then never got around to it.

Otherwise they don't go in for pudding so much, which was probably good for my sweet tooth although did mean that I ate too many biscuits in PyeongChang. In Busan the street food stalls sold these amazing little doughnut things filled with sugar and nuts and seeds, fried in butter, called hotteok. I had one each day I was there!

Hotteok!

I drank quite a lot of lager in Korea - it's okay - and also tried the local liquor soju, which is a bit like vodka although less alcoholic. At one place I had some homemade rice wine, which was thick and slightly fizzy and actually pretty good.


Eating solo in Korea

My main challenges when travelling alone in Korea were a) being brave enough to go into a restaurant when half the time I had no idea what they were serving and b) finding places that didn't cater exclusively for groups. I went to one place in Gyeongju recommended by the Lonely Planet, which advertised a meal for 9,000 won, which was about the standard price. However when I asked for a table for one I got a stern refusal. A lot of Korean food is about sharing, whether it be a barbecue or a hotpot, which isn't ideal if you're on your own.

Luckily there were generally enough places to eat solo; I generally aimed for somewhere that looked busy with locals and this was usually a good bet.

I really enjoyed the vast majority of Korean food, but I did find myself missing good British fare - potatoes, and bread, and cheese. I had a baked potato with Cheddar tonight for tea and it was marvellous. But I'm kind of craving a bibimbap too ...

Peruvian cuisine

After getting a bit bored of Brazil's meat-rice-beans-chips combo of food I was looking forward to Peru, said to be a culinary destination in South America. By and large it didn't disappoint, although I wasn't expecting some of the best food I had to be in a series of tents on the Salkantay trek!

Basics

Traditional Peruvian food is vegetarian and simple and revolves around a few staples: corn, potatoes, quinoa and rice. Corn and potatoes are grown in staggering numbers of varieties and the individual corn nibs are gigantic compared to the sweetcorn you get in the UK.

Potatoes are generally served boiled. In Arequipa I went to a restaurant called Hatunpa where they give you a plate of sliced, boiled potatoes (I had the 'special' with seven sorts) topped with your choice of various toppings including tuna, beef and chicken. 

Quinoa has shot up in price since the West discovered it as a superfood, and even more super-foody versions which are finer but a little less common are supplanting quinoa in Peru. Nevertheless you find it in soups and as an accompaniment to other things pretty often. They also make pretty good energy bars from quinoa and its relatives kiwicha and kaniwa, which are handily light and quite tasty.

Rice is also common as a side dish and as the base for chaufa, which is a sort of fried rice that has developed from the large-scale Chinese immigrants of the late 19th century. Like Brazil it's not uncommon to get rice plus another starch, mainly potatoes. An Aussie couple I met in Cabanaconde said they'd been given quinoa and rice and nothing else as dinner in Colca Canyon. Yum.

Luckily Peruvians love a bit of spice and often serve a sort of salsa called pico de gallo with meals – a bit of chili, tomatoes, peppers and onions and herbs, usually coriander, all chopped up and adding just a little kick to your soup or whatever you're eating.

Fish and seafood

One of Peru's best-known foodie highlights is ceviche, which is a simple, effective dish of raw fish (or seafood, or indeed vegetables and even (cooked) meat) marinaded in lime juice, fish sauce and chillies. I had ceviche in a cevicheria in Barranco, Lima, which was pretty good if spicy and overloaded with raw onion, but it wasn't until we made our own on an excellent 'culinary experience' afternoon in Cusco that I appreciated how to properly make it. You need the freshest fish, which you mix with lime juice and finely-chopped chillies, salt and pepper and a little fish sauce. You let it marinate for only a few minutes, add a little milk if you wish to take the edge off the spice, and serve with a little boiled potato or sweet potato and the amazing toasted corn nibs which are found everywhere in Peru. The idea is to mix the textures up.

You can also find grilled and fried fish everywhere in Peru. Around Lake Titicaca trout is common; they introduced it to the lake and it's now dominating. Tasty though. We had some amazing trout for lunch on our first day on the Salkantay, poached with a vegetable sauce. 

Chupe de camarones at 'Chicha' in Arequipa

In Arequipa they make a chowder from river prawns called chupe de camarones. The prawns are more like crayfish really and it has a bit of chili in it, potatoes, corn, and other vegetables. It's pretty good.

Meat

The best-known meat dish is lomo saltado, which isn't actually as exotic as it sounds. It's basically beef stir-fry with peppers, onions, coriander and yes, a bit of chili, served with chaufa. You can also have lomo saltado with alpaca meat. Alpaca is found everywhere in Peru although I don't think the locals eat much of it – it can be chewy but I had some really nice alpaca on my travels. It ought to taste like lamb or mutton given the similarities between alpacas and sheep, but is more beefy than that. 

Lomo saltado crafted by my own fair hands

I couldn't bring myself to try guinea pig, although it's reasonably common in touristy restaurants. When I went to the food fair in Arequipa there were stalls grilling loads of the poor beasts and serving them up on trays with all four paws sticking out. It's the paws that did it for me. I also never got around to trying anticucho, which are beef hearts on skewers. I had chicken hearts in Rio and I wasn't a massive fan – I know offal is good for you, but it just doesn't really appeal.

Guinea pigs grilling

One thing Peru does do well though is meaty sandwiches. Actual sandwiches, in bread rolls and sometimes with a bit of salad. (If there's one thing I've missed from the UK it's being able to get a good sandwich for my lunch.) The classic sandwich is chicharron, roast pork with crispy skin and plenty of fat. I had a really good chicharron sandwich for just S/. 5 (£1.18) in the market in Arequipa, with plenty of pork and some salady stuff, spicy sauce and mayonnaise. Impossible to eat neatly but incredibly tasty.

Fruit and veg

Peru is good for fruit. Like Brazil there are juice bars everywhere and especially in the markets, where ladies lean over elaborate displays of fruit and cajole you to buy one of their glasses of mixed juice.

In the markets there's lots of choice. At the culinary experience in Cusco we tasted seven sorts of Peruvian fruit including the best mango I've ever had, completely string-less and melting in the mouth. I tried a few other mangos but never found another quite like it. Passionfruit is common and I got fond of granadillas, which come as hard-shelled orange fruit that you can peel open, sinking your nails into the thick skin, to reveal the greyish interior of pips like any other passionfruit. It's sweet and juicy and very good, plus convenient to carry in a bag because it's not easily squished.

Vegetables are less exciting. Apart from the ubiquitous corn and potatoes, tomatoes and peppers feature in sauces, but getting vegetables with your main course isn't that common. I'm sure some of the vegetables I was served as main courses in homestays and in the Colca Canyon were tinned or frozen – diced beans and carrots!

Drink

The main drinks in Peru are tea, pisco, beer, chicha, and the fluorescent yellow soda called Inka Kola which I didn't try.

They serve a lot of coca tea to tourists in Cusco and in the other towns at high altitude. Coca tea is made by steeping the leaves of the coca plant (from which cocaine can be and is extracted) in hot water. It's quite a nice taste, unusual but it grew on me, although I didn't need the tea much to help with altitude sickness because I didn't suffer from it much.

Capachica tea

On the Capachica peninsula my homestay host gave me tea which is also made from steeping a local plant in water. This time it was some sort of thyme, slightly minty, and really lovely. I drank quite a lot of that.

Pisco is a spirit akin to grappa made from grapes, grown on the coast south of Lima where the climate produces very sweet wine (I did have some Peruvian wine, it was fine but not exceptional). Pisco is very clear and strong and can be drunk straight or in cocktails, notably the pisco sour which is ubiquitous throughout the country: pisco, ice, lime juice and an egg white, shaken until the egg white is frothy and seasoned with a couple of drops of bitters. I like them; I had a passionfruit version a couple of times which was arguably even better and pisco also lends itself well to other cocktails like the Chilcano which features ginger beer. 

Beer is mainly lager – Cusquena is the brand you find everywhere, drinkable enough. Sadly the Brazilian habit of providing a cooler for your large bottle hasn't yet caught on. There are some good craft beers around, with an emphasis on IPA and pale and amber ale and I enjoyed some decent brews especially in Cusco and Arequipa.

Chicha was the Inca alcohol, beer made of corn. I saw people drinking this cloudy brew but didn't try any. For a more refreshing option chicha morada is a sort of non-alcoholic juice made from purple corn. It's a bit like grape juice, and is better cold. We had it on the Salkantay but it wasn't chilled (fair enough, we didn't expect them to carry ice!) and wasn't quite as nice.

Inka Kola isn't cola at all. I have no idea what it's made of, although I think coca is a component. It's such an artificial colour it didn't appeal.

One of my biggest Peruvian culinary disappointments was that I still drank mostly instant coffee, although finding cafés serving coffee made in a machine was a bit easier than Brazil. Staying in cheap hostels means that instant is the option in the morning. It gave me the caffeine hit, but I am looking forward to decent coffee again. I bought a bag of beans from the coffee farm we visited on the Salkantay, where we had the best coffee on the whole trip, and am going to invest in a grinder when I get home.

Food and drink in Brazil

There's a fair bit I'll miss about Brazil, but I'm not sure the food is really one of them. Don't get me wrong, I've eaten well, but I've got a little bored of the monotony of the cuisine - you have to go out looking for alternatives.

Brazil's cuisine is best known for and mainly characterised by meat. Lots and lots and lots of meat. I'm not sure I've managed more than one or two days without meat in at least one meal in some form or another. To be fair, when it comes to steak the Brazilians have it nailed - their beef is superb. The best steak I probably had was in a restaurant in Rio called the Braseiro da Gavea, along with a bunch of ONS-ers, but I had a pretty good and very rare one for less than £10 in Lapa one night too.

To accompany the piles of meat Brazilians like to add piles of carbohydrates. Now, I'm not a carb-hater, but I do feel that bringing a massive dish of rice plus a massive dish of chips or potato to go with your steak, fish or whatever is overkill. The most popular forms of rice are plain, or broccoli rice, which is rice mixed with very finely-chopped broccoli - it's rather good actually.

Typical mixture of salad, rice, beans and farofa (the meat came later)

To go with your rice and meat you must have two things: beans, and farofa. At the Olympics and Paralympics every meal had the option of rice and beans. The beans are usually black, sometimes red, and at weekends the thing to eat is feijoada or bean stew, which is essentially the same thing with extra meat in it.

Farofa was quickly christened 'sand' by us ONS gringos. It's toasted cassava flour which sometimes has other stuff mixed in, such as eggs, bacon, or garlic. I've actually come to quite like it; farofa adds texture to your rice!

Tilapia seems to be the most common fish and we had it loads during the Olympics. 

Brazilians have big lunches - when we were staying in Centro the restaurants opened at lunch and then closed at dinnertime, although in less business-minded areas there are plenty of places for dinner too. Buffet restaurants are the thing, either for a set price or with prices per kg or per 100g.

When I'm travelling I don't like big lunches, and at the Olympics I tended to have a massive lunch and then not need much dinner. So I've also investigated Brazilian snack and street food a fair deal.

Their biggest thing is pasties of various descriptions, usually containing meat (of course) or sometimes just cheese. They're either baked or fried. I think the most unfortunate one I got was a bit like a doughnut, except filled with the rubbery white cheese they eat a lot. The mortadella pastel I had in Sao Paulo was excellent. You can find variations on on the pasty everywhere for very little money - usually somewhere around R$5, or just over £1. Some places also do 'sandwiches' for a similar price which are generally toasted and minuscule. A 'misto quente' is basically a ham and cheese toastie.

My first tapioca from a place in Rio

In Rio I also tried both kebabs from street stalls, which were great, and had tapioca pancakes once or twice too. 'Tapiocas' are incredible things. The stallholder has a hot plate and a ring mould and spoons raw tapioca flour into the mould. They flatten the flour down and let it toast and somehow it all sticks together. Then they put a toppping on (ham and cheese and tomato was my favourite), flip it, let the topping cook, fold it and serve it. They're really good.

Although Brazilians have pretty sweet tooths (teeth?) they're not massive on pudding. But I did have a lot of cake with my breakfasts. Cakes are often made in ring moulds, usually involve coconut, and are called 'bolos' when they're that shape. Churros on street corners are also common and you can get sweet tapiocas too.

The breakfasts everywhere have been the same rule of thumb: fruit, usually melon and pineapple and sometimes mango; bread; scrambled eggs if you want them; and cake. Sometimes yoghurt. Also pao de queijo, which are little balls of a sort of cheesy bread and are very good.

Brazil is a pretty multicultural country and there are places serving foreign cuisine, but mainly in the big cities or touristy areas. Italian is everywhere but quality varies - I had a couple of very middling pizzas and a couple of really good ones, for instance. The other night in Foz do Iguacu I had a good Lebanese meal - apparently Foz is one of the biggest Lebanese settlements anywhere. Sao Paulo is a massive Japanese city and there are a number of Japanese restaurants as a result. That said, the Brazilian combination of meat/fish plus rice plus other carb of choice is common in many restaurants, even those which profess to be serving other food!

Decent coffee has been surprisingly difficult to find. In hotels and at the Olympics it was generally filter and very strong and the Brazilians normally drink it in tiny cups the size of shot glasses with masses of sugar. I don't drink milky coffee but reports from friends suggest that cappucinos and lattes came with sweetened milk too. I've had a few good coffees but it's been hard to find, which is weird when you consider Brazil is the world's largest producer of arabica!

All the snack bar, or 'lanchonete', places serve juice, freshly-squeezed, which is lovely to go with your pasty. Brazilians also like iced tea, and here it's a version called mate. If you buy it readymade in a bottle it's exactly like the iced tea you get in the UK but if you get it in a cup as I did once from a chain which specialises in mate it's more bitter in taste.

As a side note to this, on the Argentinian side of Iguazu Falls loads of people were lugging around huge thermos flasks and little cups, which I think is to provide them with mate throughout the day. A bit like the good old British flask of tea I guess, but we don't tend to carry ours around while we go on a walk to a waterfall.

The two principal alcoholic beverages of choice in Brazil are beer and cachaca. Beer is drunk everywhere, at any time, mostly very very cold lager-style beer. You can get cans at street food stalls and snack bars and petrol stations (yup). It's mostly served either draught, in small glasses which are called 'chopps', or in 600ml bottles to share between your party with tiny glasses to drink it out of. The big bottles come in their own special cooling covers to keep them icy. Beer also comes in 'long necks', which are usually 355ml bottles. The most common brands are Skol (the Olympic/Paralympic beer, tasteless and cheap), Brahma (drinkable) and Antarctica (similar to Brahma). Slightly up-market are Bohemia and Original and Serramalte is another step up in price usually, if a bar serves it. I found a couple of microbrewery places which had a wider range of beers such as wheat beer or stout but generally lager's what you get, and very nice it is on a hot day.

Cachaca is a rum-like spirit distilled from sugarcane which is the base ingredient for the ubiquitous, lethal capirinha - usually made with a base of lime juice and sugar. But you can get it with pretty much any juice. Capiroska is made with vodka.

Cheers!