A note to my friend Lisa who checks my blog every morning at 5.30am.
Li, you don’t want to read this post. Trust me.
Dan, that goes for you too.
. . . . .
I’ve been on a quest!
It all started when Maude’s oldest daughter made kim chee, a traditional Korean cabbage pickle, and brought me some to taste (photo above). This in turn led to a discussion about Korean pickles in general, and I thought it might be fun to explore the different varieties on offer.
So off I went, with my family chanting “Ni! Ni! Ni!” in the background (obscure Monty Python reference there), to the nearby suburb of Strathfield, enclave of Korean stores and food supplies.
Inside Strathfield Mall, I found a fascinating store, simply named Food World, selling all sorts of wonderful and bizarre pickled offerings…
It was like uncovering treasure! I bought a few samples to try, then went back and bought a few more. These aren’t “pickles” as most of us know them – they’re unusual and spicy and, to me, very delicious. Pete won’t go near them with a barge pole.
It’s difficult to discern from the photo above, but the offerings ranged from the more mundane seaweed pickles to pickled pollack tripe (raw fish stomach) and salted pollack roe (raw fish eggs). I must admit the tripe wasn’t to my liking, but the others have been tasty and sooo interesting!
These sesame leaf pickles are in a hot red pepper sauce – each one unfolds like a large vine leaf. Maude and I both found them a little salty…
All the pickles seemed to be either hot and spicy, or sweet – these lotus root pickles, dusted in sesame seed, were the latter…
Spicy dried pollack in red pepper paste and sesame was chewy in a beef jerky kind of way…
An interesting duo here – both were hot and crunchy! On the left is bamboo flower root, and on the right is radish pickle..
My very favourite of them all – a hot and spicy dried anchovy pickle in red pepper sauce – just the best thing on a bowl of steamed rice!
The almost fluorescent green of this seaweed pickle made me wonder if it had been artificially coloured…
Finally, another one of my favourites, raw squid pickle. It’s chewy (in an edible rubber band kind of way), hot and very moreish. Pete, however, refused to be in the same room when I was eating this…
I love trying new flavours, and these were certainly different from anything I’d tasted before, although I do apologise if I’ve grossed anyone out too much. For what it’s worth, Pete’s on your side.
Pete: “I’m not giving you a kiss unless you’ve drunk a bottle of mouthwash”
Me: “You can’t say that, you took a vow to smooch me!”
Pete: “I didn’t take a vow to kiss a squid-mouth!”
Sigh…at least Maude was willing to taste these with me!
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 