Sunday 30 September 2012

Royal Feast: Hwedupbap: Korean raw fish and vegetable rice bowl.








This is a very easy, very quick meal that is very healthy and very low fat. That's a lot of very's. Hwedupbap, a Korean dish translated as hwe: fish, dup: top, bap: rice, is as it says... fish on top of rice, with a few raw vegetables thrown in for good measure.

Base Ingredients: Cooked rice, small raw salmon fillet, small raw tuna fillet (both or either), red cabbage, spring onion, carrot, cucumber with skin removed, washed watercress and sesame seeds.

Wash and finely slice all vegetables, except watercress. This little gadget is excellent, it is a scallion slicer I picked it up at a Korean supermarket for about a pound:
















Amazon sell similar. Chop up the fish. Pop a rice bowl full of rice in the centre of the bowl, then arrange little piles of each vegetable separately around the sides. Pile them on, no need to be sparing. The vegetables I used are typical for this meal but use any you wish, cooked spinach, sesame leaves and bean sprouts work well. Pile the fish on top in the centre and sprinkle the sesame seeds on top of that.

Now for the sauce which will be poured all over the top. The proper Korean way is to have a spicy hot sauce on top, chogochujang, which naturally is the way King Kwak prefers his.



Chogochujang sauce: Red chilli paste, honey, rice vinegar and soya sauce, all mixed together.
Cho: vinegar/ acidity, gochu: chilli, jang: paste. I used to make it, it is easy. But you can also buy it if you know a Korean/ Asian supermarket, like so:


My preference for Hwedupbap is to top it with a simple dressing of sliced chilli's, soya sauce with a drop of sesame oil. Pour this on top and it is lovely.

I had best not class this as cooking, more slicing and arranging. Hands up, I didn't even cook the rice, we have a rice cooker. When I married my Korean, he came free with a rice cooker, like a little prize. It talks and sings in Korean, amazing. I have no idea what its saying but it is excellent, my babies even sing a long too, yay!! I am talking about the rice cooker, not the husband by the way. Though on occasion that sentence could be applied to both. ha.

This might work if you were on a raw food diet. Something I am keen to look into, but as not haven't so not sure how rice works on a raw food diet. raw rice? yuk.

No comments:

Post a Comment