Korean food: Samgyeopsal (삼겹살)

Everyone, everywhere loves BBQ! There is something about the fats and oils dripping into the flames and the wonderful smells billowing off the table that makes BBQ undeniably yummy. It doesn’t matter if your from Korea or from The Southern part of America. 

Samgyeopsal is a very popular Korean dish. This dish is made with high-quality cuts of pork belly that are utterly delicious. The dish looks like bacon but it is not cured like bacon, so the taste is rather different. It tastes much earthier and more like pork cutlets than bacon. Either way the flavors are unbelievable and the experience is visceral.

When eating samgyeopsal you feel completely involve in the process. You are cooking your own meat and preparing your own lettuce wraps with a great variety of condiments and sides (banchan). When the meat is cooking you given scissors to cut the pork belly into small inch by inch slices for easy access to the mouth. The sides involve lettuce, garlic, onions, chili paste, soy sauce, kangnamul (bean sprouts), kimchi, peppers, samjang (chili bean paste) and so much more. The variety is so great the eating experience can feel overwhelming at times. To top everything off, samgyeopsal is an anju, a dish intended to involve alcohol drinking, so you are encouraged to drink, have fun and really let loose.

You can always eat the pork from grill to mouth but the wrap method is popular as well, and my favorite way to eat it. You take a lettuce leaf, curl it in your hand and plop on the ingredients. Typically, I put rice, pork, kimchi, onions, chili paste and garlic on mine. It is incredibly good and packed with so much flavor that I usually end up eating more than I should and have to unbuckle my belt.  For such a popular dish you would think it would be rather cheap but it is slightly costly. A typical meal is about 20 USD for two. Besides the slightly expensive price, the meal is fantastic and very worth the few extra bucks. The experience is so hands-on and you get completely involved in the process. From the grilling to the cutting to the wrapping to the eating, you truly feel in touch with your food. Eating can be quite benign at times but when eating samgyeopsal you let the beast out a little bit and get down to the true essentials of eating.