Kimbap

Having the house to myself for the past couple of days meant that I got to make whatever I wanted for dinner. I decided to be adventurous the other day and try making Kimbap. Kimbap is basically the Korean version of sushi. I'd never had it before, but I've seen it made a few times (thanks We Got Married and Family Outing!) and I thought I'd be able to do. The night before I glanced at a few recipes to make sure I had the correct ingredients and to re-confirm the process of how to make it. Then the fun part began!

Obviously I began with cooking the rice, but the next thing I did was I sauteed the cucumber and carrots. You need to cut them into thin, long strips so they fit easily inside the kimbap. I thought sauteing them before adding them really gave them a great flavor.

Next up was the egg. As you can see, I kind of failed at cooking the egg into a flat disc. Having the egg in a flat disc makes it a lot easier to cut the egg into strips. I used two eggs as I planned on making two or three rolls.

Even though my egg did not come out the best, I still got a couple of decent strips from it. The strips of all the ingredients should be about the same size so they are represented evenly in your roll. The ingredients of kimbap are pretty flexible and can contain basically anything you have available to you (which is something that I love about it, one of my greatest joys in life is re-using leftovers the next day or finding something forgotten about in the cupboard and creating something delicious with it). However, cucumber, carrots, and eggs are pretty standard for kimbap so I wanted to be sure to include those in mine.

The other two ingredients I chose for my kimbap was spinach and canned tuna. I decided to include spinach because I love being able to sneak healthy food into things that I am cooking. It worked out really well because you couldn't really taste the spinach at all. So you got all the healthy benefits from it minus the spinachy taste! I choose tuna as my meat because that was what I had on hand. Spam, beef, and imitation crab are all popular kimbap meat ingredients.

Now it was time for the scary part, assembling the kimbap. First I spread the rice on the seaweed wrap. Normally rice in kimbap is seasoned with sesame oil as well as sesame seeds but since I had neither I left that out.

Then I (generously) laid out the ingredients I prepared. I put a bit much in this roll pictured, it was kind of hard to roll up. For my next roll I did not add as much to it. And since I don't have a bamboo mat to roll my kimbap I used tin foil. It got the job done, but a bamboo mat would have been much nicer.

So that's what my first roll of kimbap looked like! I sealed the seaweed wrap with a bit of water. And once I got the hang of cutting the roll, this is what my finished product looked like...

Not too bad, huh? They tasted pretty good, I would definitely make kimbap again. Even my brother tried it and agreed that it was "good, especially since it's homemade". However, he wasn't a huge fan of the tuna as he enjoys imitation crab meat best when he eats anything resembling sushi.

I can't wait until I can try the real thing when I'm Seoul next week to see how it should really taste! I've read that you can buy a roll of kimbap from street vendors in Seoul for 1000 Won (which is about $1 US Dollar). So cheap! I know the travel doctor told me no street vendor food, but that is the one rule I plan on completely ignoring. Street vendor food in Seoul is supposed to be amazing (and cheap!), and I really want to experience as much food as I can when I am over there.

So what do you think of kimbap? I recommend it and I would love it if some of you would try it. Let me know if you do ^_~