Renowned food expert and Korean-American master chef who has made a name for herself across the UK and the US hosting her own TV show Korean Food Made Simple, was doing just that at the Cookery Corner of the ongoing 40th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) – teaching avidly watching visitors to make simple Korean dishes.
Chef Joo was making something simple yet delicious – pan fried salmon, spring onion salad and rice. The end product is an exciting burst of well-balanced flavours inside the mouth, characteristic of far east Asian cuisine – spicy, tangy, slightly tart, and so on.
She first gets the rice ready in a rice cooker, a short grain one that is in-between the Thai sticky rice and Chinese rice in texture. Then she goes on to prepare a light soy sauce vinaigrette – made with soya sauce, sesame oil and seeds, rice vinegar and a little sugar. For the spring onion scallion salad, the onion is soaked in water to subdue its strong flavour. The salad greens are then tossed in the dressing.
The salmon is placed in the pan skin down when it is sizzling hot. She professed to liking her salmon retain some of its rawness. Once it is ready, the chef places it carefully on top of the rice and salad, and the simple, healthy, pretty-looking dish is ready to be sampled by the eager audience.
A highlight of this demonstration was the way Joo familiarised the audience with the culture of East Asian countries. “In Japan they have small dishes for everyone with individual chopsticks, in China the dishes are large so that everyone can share, and hence, the chopsticks are the longest and widest. In Korea, which is between these countries, there are lots of dishes for everyone to share and so the chopsticks are of medium length”.
Chef Joo will be coming up with other popular dishes like kimchi in the coming days at SIBF 2021, which runs until November 13 in Expo Centre Sharjah. Her book Korean food made simple is available at the book fair.