I think I might be in love with my new neighbourhood in Seoul. It’s peaceful and dotted with small shops selling fish or vegetables or banchan or ttoek (떡) or meat with just enough cool cafe’s and big shops to keep life easy. There are old ladies set up on street corners selling pickles and lettuce from red plastic bowls, and an ever changing array of trucks hawking apples or dried fish, melons or nectarines.
In the afternoons when the weather is nice, a lady sets up a table that is a one-stop shop for dinner supplies. Banchan, ttoek, cut vegetables and a variety of pre-prepared just-add-rice meals all in one colourful spread. A few shops down is a dark room filled with grinding machines and sacks of dried chillies expelling the occasional waft of nose-numbing spice dust. People sit around waiting for bags freshly ground chillies, powerful and intriguing. This little shop captivated me. I’ve been in Korea for 9 months and never seen anything like it. Despite the abundance and popularity of big chain grocery stores I hoped there would be something like this, somewhere. I feared that all such places had been lost in a misguided push for Westernisation, for desirable shrink wrapped and zip-locked produce, all HACCP‘d and green starred by the authorities with no mind for flavour or freshness. This dingy little shop with it’s line of customers and it’s hard-to-breathe air has made me excited about Korean food. I told my friends about this little chilli powder storefront and none seemed too interested, until a good Korean friend of mine told me there were similar places making fresh sesame oil. This, I had to find.
We smelt it before we found it. In a street I’d never walked down before, a few minutes stroll from my house. We followed the scent of roasting sesame seeds past a dumpling house and fish and convenience stores to this shop, three old wooden baskets out the front hold still hot and popping sesame seeds. A roasting machine just inside the door heats the seeds, constantly moving them, adding to the intense sesame smell. Another machine, all polished stainless steels and clean and looking completely out of place in the worn-down surrounds extracts the oil.
Sold by the bottle (350ml for 8,000₩), the oil is dark, viscous and strongly sesame. Not being one to delay gratification we tasted it immediately, standing over the kitchen sink oil dripping from our fingers, the scent strong in the room. And it is most definitely the best sesame oil I’ve ever tasted. Roasted, but not bitter, strong, but not overpowering. I’ve eaten it every day since, in salad dressings with lemon juice and crushed garlic, and simply drizzled on steamed broccoli and bean sprouts. I have plans to eat it with chicken and fish, raw and cooked vegetables, or with anything else I can get my hands on. It’s really that good.
This oil, the dried, ground chillies and the fresh produce available in this area (not wrapped in plastic! Not attached to a polystyrene tray! Not displayed under fluorescent lights!) have combined to make me excited about Korean food, maybe for the first time ever. My new neighbourhood makes it easy to step away from the big chain stores and towards the old style, more traditional. And if this sesame oil is any indication, life is only going to get more delicious.
Sesame oil
8,000₩ (~$7AU) for 350ml.
