Now that we have travelled all over Busan, let me post more about the food I
tried. I looked up specialty dishes in each town that I visited, but I didn’t
specially aim to visit a particular shop. In general I just kept an eye out
for the specialties.
The first specialty of Busan is
dwaeji gukbap, basically pork rice soup. It is supposedly something we
can only get it Busan (or the taste in Busan is different from elsewhere), so
I was definitely on the lookout for it. The first morning in Busan, even
before reaching the hotel, I spotted a 24-hour place selling rice soup, and
they had this on the menu. So I went in to try it.
I had heard that the Koreans (like the Japanese) frown upon wasting rice. So I
tried to ask for a half portion of rice, but the shop owner emphatically
refused. (I’m confused why) But later, at another shop, I asked again and they
refused again…and I saw them take out bowls of rice from some sort of oven for
keeping warm. Maybe they already prepare all their rice in bowls, so they
can’t just decide to give less than a bowl?
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| side dishes arrived |
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| follow by the simmering bowl of soup |
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| this is what was inside the two covered bowls in the first photo |
The bowl on the right contains some sort of salty fermented shrimp. It tasted a bit like ikan bilis, I would say (because it's fishy?) Maybe the Korean version of cencalok. But the taste is milder than cencalok. It seems that all rice soup places have this?
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| another photo to show the pork slices |
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| price list |
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| the side of the shop |
All in all, not bad but not that good. I figured out later that we were supposed to season the soup ourselves (there were salt and pepper at the table). Maybe I didn't season it well enough?
Then on to some street food...this is a ssiat hotteok (seed pancake) stall at BIFF Square. It seems to be a famous one; I had seen it mentioned in my research. So I joined the queue.
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| frying the pancakes |
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| my hotteok |
I like how they serve it in a paper cup. Easy to hold and eat!
Seed hotteok is also a specialty of Busan...it seems that normal hotteok has red bean or honey filling. Whereas here it's filled with kuaci.
This was yummy. 👍🏼
And then, another thing I wanted to try: teokbokki! (rice cakes) This stall sold it together with sundae (blood sausage), which suited me fine; I wanted to try both.
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| the stall also sells fish cakes |
I ordered a mixture of teokbokki and sundae, and they served it with a cup of fish cake soup.
This was soooo spicy. I couldn't handle the spiciness; and the soup was hot so it didn't help. I tried scraping the sauce off, and also washing them in the soup, but the sauce was so thick, I couldn't clear it away.
The aunty selling it told me later in Mandarin that one tray was spicy, and the other not spicy. (or maybe just less spicy?) Anyway it was too late... I had seen the two trays but I simply pointed to the one that contained both items (the other had only teokbokki if I remember correctly). But probably the items could still be added in.
Both the teokbokki and the sundae were very chewy...I didn't like them so much. The taste of the sundae was rather covered by the sauce. There is also a sundae soup dish which wouldn't have this sauce, that I had planned to try if I came across it, but after trying this, I didn't think I would like the taste even without the sauce.
I don't think I tried the fish cakes here; I probably wanted to try it if I still had space in my stomach, but that dish had already numbed my tongue.
So I went to a nearby convenience store, and decided this was the best time to try banana milk.
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| also bought a donut peach-flavoured jelly |
I didn't find banana milk that special... it's just milk with a banana flavour. There were lots of other flavours too, from the same company. But in the store, they actually mark the banana flavour as a must-try for tourists.
And here I should mention that one very strange thing about Korea is that there were no public rubbish bins! Remember the hotteok that came in a paper cup above? I couldn't find a bin to throw away the cup after eating. For this banana milk as well, I couldn't find a place to throw away the bottle after drinking it. It was only in Gamcheon Culture Village (because it was a touristic village?) that I saw plenty of rubbish bins on the roadside.
I also tried kimbap from a convenience store. This was the first time, and I didn't know we could reheat the kimbap in a microwave, so I ate it cold. It was still pretty good.
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| eating kimbap at a bus stop |
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