Rice, Hammered Cake & Cold Noodle

The Korean cuisine culture is rich and varied with distinctive favor. Its features can be summed up as mainly a vegetarian diet that is pungent, cool and light.

The Korean nationality is adept at growing paddy, thus rice is the indispensable staple food every day. While hammered cakes and cold noodle are distinguishing foods favored by people and one never gets tired of eating the foods.

The hammered cake, which is further divided as that made of sticky rice, little glutinous millet and big glutinous millet, is the most famous among more than fifty kinds of cake food of the Korean nationality. The procedures of making hammered cakes go like the followings: first steam the sticky rice, and then put it on a wooden groove or slate, grind it into balls with a mallet, and beat the balls repeatedly until the they are completely broken into the shape of dough. When having the hammered cakes, people have them chopped into nubbins, and dip them into cake powder (usually made from soya beans, mung beans and little beans or sesame and perillaseeds) or white sugar or honey. It tastes fragrant, sweet, smooth and tasty.

The cold noodle is made from buckwheat, wheat, starch or flour from corn, jowar plus peels of elms. When making it, first put the noodles into a cooking pot with boiled water. When they are cooked, dredge them up, wash them continuously with cold water, and then drip the water for later use. In addition, stew a pot of soup with thin beef or chicken, and let it cool off for later use. When eating it, add the soup into the noodle, and mix it with condiments like balm, red pepper powder, soy sauce, vinegar, monosodium glutamate, sesame, and pickles, together with slices of beef, chicken or egg filaments. The soup plays a key role in making the cold noodle, and therefore we have a saying that "seven parts the soup, three parts the noodle". The soup includes broth, bean juice soup and pickle soup and so on, among which the choicest is the pheasant soup. When the soup is ready, one must cast aside the grease to get rid of the fishy smell.

The cold noodle is smooth, sleek and stretch, tasting sweet and sour, delicious and peppery, tasty and refreshing. As a result, men and women, old and young in the Korean nationality favor it all the year round. Now it has been spread all through the world, and favored by more people.

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