This time I’m in Seoul Korea for only 2 days, short stop – to set up my wine dinner with Marchesi Antinori Winary next week at The Kitchen Salvatore Cuomo Shinsa-Dong Seoul.
I managed to spare a little time during the preparation of the menu, so I decided to visit a food market close to my restaurant just to find some new interesting ingredients.
When we talk about ingredients, one immediately thinks about wet / farmer’s markets, however sometimes it is also interesting to visit department store markets simply allowing you to better understand the local trend of products favored at that time.
The thing that interests me the most are the vegetables in Korea. Most people think of Korean BBQ (hence meat) when talking about Korean food, however, I think the Koreans are actually real big eaters of vegetables eaten raw, marinated, fermented, boiled, grilled etc. Of course they also have fantastic fish here, but this time I wanted to focus more on Wakame, Seaweed & Kombu.
You are probably asking what place wakame and kombu have in the Italian cuisine, or possibly how Salvatore can incorporate such “foreign” ingredients in an Italian menu?!
Don’t forget that I’m half Japanese… And though I don’t like to fuse too many exotic ingredients into my normally authentic Neapolitan dishes, it is one of the flavors I use often in my fish dishes.
If you are in the area of Shinsa-Dong in Seoul, try to visit this place Galleria Department Store Gourmet 494, where you can find these beautiful ingredients I have posted here.
