K-Recipe: Vegan Recipe Trending in Korea After Youn Stay

In my talk about the TV Show Youn Stay (which you should all watch,) I’ve let you know about the vegan menus they introduced and started trending in Korea. The easiest menu that you could try out home is the Youn Stay’s main appetiser, bugak & bean sauce. 

“Bugak” includes a number of different deep-fried vegetables that are covered in glutinous rice paste 🥦 🥒 🥬 🌽 🥕 🥔 🍠 It may sound a bit awkward, but it is actually quite an appetite stimulator 😂 The most common bugak is the seaweed bugak, made with dried seaweed that Koreans call “Gim”. In Youn Stay, they made bugaks with dried seaweed, perilla leaf, kumara, and squid ink - if you’re confused about how one would deep-fry squid ink, continue reading 🦑

www.tvn.tving.com 

The traditional way to make bugak is to mix glutinous rice powder with water and apply them to whichever ingredient you want. You would then dry them up in the sun for a couple of hours and then deep fry them 🍳 That’s the way they did it in the TV show, which is the proper way. As for the kumara & squid ink bugaks, I found a Youtube video that replicated the recipes and it looks pretty promising! They’ve mixed kumara powder and the squid ink in the glutinous rice paste and dried them in multiple shapes on a silicon baking sheet before frying 😮 If you’re curious, here’s that recipe video that I watched.

If you’re a loyal reader, you’ll know that our TMIs only tell you recipes that are quick & easy, and all the glutinous rice thingys are do not sound like the easiest to try right away. So I bring you an simpler version of making the bugak original, Gim Bugak! (Recipe sourced from SpoonB’s channel).

www.youtube.com/c/SpoonB

Ingredients:

• Seaweed / Gim (6 sheets)
• Rice paper (12 sheets)
• Oil
• Bean sauce: ½ pc Tofu, 1Tb Jin soy sauce, 1Tb Chosen soy sauce, ½ Tb Perilla oil 

You might be wondering why there are two types of soy sauce used for the bean sauce. In Korea, they got multiple types of soy sauce, Guk & Choseon (saltier versions) for soups, Jin & Yangjo (sweeter versions) for stir fry dishes, and many others! These can be found at your local Korean supermarkets, and they definitely do make a difference to your cooking so maybe try them out if you’re interested 👩🏻‍🍳 👨🏻‍🍳 p.s. Perilla oil can be replaced with sesame oil!

This bugak recipe is quite simple: 1) slice up the rice papers and the gim into quarters, and 2) wet the rice papers to stick on ONE side of the gims - in the video, SpoonB used two rice paper quarters for one gim quarter to cover up all corners! While drying them up for 30mins, 3) mix all sauce ingredients together in a blender to make a creamy bean sauce. THIS SAUCE IS REALLY GOOD, trust me and give it a go. Some say that it’s somewhat similar to hummus, but I reckon that this bean sauce tastes a little more savoury. 4) When the gims are dried, fry them up in hot oil, making sure you fry the rice paper side first for a prettier shape! 🖤

This is an easy-make snack that’s traditional, unique, plus both yummy AND healthy! You don’t get a lot of those, so I say try them out yourselves and find your new favourite vegan menu to nibble on 😘