[Photo & Article] Traditional Korean Cookie Delights.

[Photo & Article] Traditional Korean Cookie Delights.
Cr. - http://english.chosun.com/

"Dagwa", the Korean word for refreshment, encompasses many traditional Korean cookies, candy, and cakes. These sweets are quite different from the shrimp crackers, chocolate biscuits and spicy potato chips found in Korean supermarkets. Yakgwa and dasik are perhaps the most notable in that they offer an insight into the traditional lifestyle of Koreans with their distinct social stratifications and unique taste.

'Yakgwa' was mostly enjoyed by the upper classes and was prized for being made of the finest ingredients. The flour used was cherished because it required four seasons of growth to ripen, and people thus believed that it captured the essence of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. According to encyclopedias from the Chosun era, flour was considered a source of many nutrients at the time.

In addition, the flour dough was then mixed with honey, which was also regarded highly due to its many healing properties. In fact, most food made with honey was considered medicinal. "Yakgwa" itself literally means "medicinal fruit". The cakes were then fried in oil, known for its detoxifying properties.

The sweet known as dasik also reflects Korean tradition. Various grains such as sesame, chestnut, green peas and flour are mixed with honey and pressed to form various patterns. Each piece has a different color and pattern.

As varied as the different patterns, ranging from flower, traditional symmetries, characters, and even to animal shapes, were the uses of dasik. It was served in customary formalities such as ancestral rites, weddings and banquets for honored guests, and for treats for members of the royal household.

Yakgwa and dasik remain beautiful manifestations of Korean heritage and are often served as desserts today at exquisite Korean tea shops or restaurants. They are usually served with hot or cold drinks like green tea, ginseng tea, citron tea, or fruit punch, as well as rice punch known as sikhye or cinnamon punch with dried persimmon called sujeonggwa.
















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[Article] Seollal Brings New Adventures, Old Traditions.

[Article] Seollal Brings New Adventures, Old Traditions.
Cr. - http://www.dynamic-korea.com/

The calendar year in Korea starts on January 1, but the Lunar New Year holiday of Seollal is considered much more important by most Koreans. Traditionally a time for people to return to their hometowns and pay their respects to their family, this year Seollal falls on February 2 to 4. Combined with the weekend, this means most Koreans will have a five-day break.

Most Koreans use the time to return to the towns where they grew up or where the most senior members of the family live, leaving the roads leading out from Seoul clogged with cars. Normally, it takes six hours to drive from the capital to Busan in the southeast, but with the added holiday traffic that time can double or triple. Train and plane tickets are usually sold out weeks in advance of the holiday, and travel within Korea can be extremely difficult during the holiday period.



Once home, most Koreans celebrate the New Year by playing traditional games like yunnori (a board game with marked sticks instead of dice), neolttwigi (a see-saw where players jump in the air instead of sit) or kite-flying. Other traditions include eating tteokguk, a kind of rice cake soup, which supposedly helps turn the eater a year older. For more modern entertainment, most major networks run special programs for Seollal, and many TV personalities like news anchors and show hosts appear in Hanbok, Korea's traditional clothing. Ssireum, an indigenous Korean form of wrestling, is also extremely popular, with TV stations broadcasting the colorful matches for people who can't make it ringside.



The most important part of the holiday is a ceremony called "charye". Performed only on major holidays, this Confucian rite offers food and sustenance to a family's ancestors to pay tribute and ask for their continued blessings. Usually, a large meal of meat, vegetables, rice and fruit is prepared by the women in the family, and set up on a large, low table. Families offer incense, food and wine to their ancestors and perform deep ceremonial bows. Then, the food offerings are turned into a meal for the family to share. In some provinces, people turn the offerings into bibimbap, while in others they eat everything as rice and side dishes.

Another important ceremonial part of the holiday is the first New Year greeting. Traditionally, children and youths bow to their elders and are given advice and an envelope of cash in return. These are much deeper bows than are given in normal situations, involving full prostrations and a formally phrased wish for good luck in the New Year.



For people without family to visit or who chose not to take a long trek outside of Seoul, the capital still offers a wide variety of holiday entertainment. Although many places close their doors for the week, many museums are still open and hold special events. The National Museum and many of the palaces have free admission for people wearing Hanbok and hold special events where people can try various Korean folk games. It's also an unusual opportunity to enjoy peace and quiet within the normally hectic city of Seoul.

This year, many people are taking advantage of the long holiday to take trips overseas, so the airports have been especially crowded. Japan, China, and Southeast Asia are popular destinations, since they're only a few hours from Seoul by plane. Travelers who are heading overseas this holiday should consider arriving at the airport well before their scheduled departure time.


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[Article] Welcome to 2011: Year of the Rabbit.

[Article] Welcome to 2011: Year of the Rabbit.
Cr. - http://blog.korea.net/

One of the biggest holidays in Korea, the lunar New Year or “Seollal,” is coming up on February 3 this year. Many cultures around the world celebrate lunar holidays, which are based on the lunisolar or lunar calendars. It changes every year, since the traditional Korean lunisolar calendar and the Gregorian calendar aren’t quite in synch, but is usually in January or February.

It’s also a time of year when even the most modern Korean families take part in old traditions. The most dedicated fashionistas dig out traditional Korean Hanbok, kids trade in their high-tech gaming consoles for old-fashioned board games, and gourmands who like to sample the most refined flavors from around the world enjoy a bowl of humble homemade soup with rice cakes.



The most important part of the holiday is spending time with your family. While many people have moved from their hometowns to major cities like Seoul for work and education, the Korean lunar New Year brings everybody back to their ancestral homes. During the days before and after the holiday, roads countrywide are clogged with amazing traffic jams that can double or treble the usual length of a trip, as everybody heads to visit their families. Buses, planes, and trains sell out weeks ahead of time.



Because it’s so important to be with family during this holiday, workers and students get a day off before and after the actual New Year to prepare and to travel. Is there anything better than a three day holiday? How about a three-day holiday that happens right before a weekend? The year 2011 gives Koreans a nice, long five day break from hectic work and study schedules, and is a much appreciated chance to relax.

Once people make it home, there’s plenty to occupy people’s time – especially women. Because of the lingering influence of neo-Confucianism and traditional culture, the duty of preparing the elaborate offerings for ancestors and large meals for families falls mainly on married women. It can take hours or even days of preparation, leading many women to hate the holidays with a passion. Other women have taken refuge in services that do all the prep work for you and deliver a perfectly prepared ancestral offering – for a hefty price tag.



The other essential food for the lunar New Year is ddeokguk, a mild rice cake soup. Koreans think that eating ddeokguk on Seollal makes you a year older. Until you’ve dug into a steaming bowl of rice cake soup, you’re still the same age as the year before!

Usually, families hold a few ceremonies and activities together, including cleaning family gravesites and having “charye” ceremonies to honor the family’s ancestors. This involves very elaborate offerings of food and drink, which are then converted into meals for the living. Other families skip these ceremonies because of religious differences, especially people from some of the stricter Protestant churches.

Another important ceremony for many Koreans during Seollal is giving the first bow of the New Year to the older members of the family. While many people take joy in the greeting as a chance to show respect and love for their family, it also comes with a cash bonus – in exchange for the bow, young people usually receive some advice for how to behave in the coming year and an envelope of cash.

The rest of the time, people try to relax and have fun. Yutnoli, a kind of board game with wooden sticks instead of dice, is a particularly popular and old-fashioned way to pass the lazy hours. It’s also a time for people to engage in more modern pastimes, like watching special programs on TV, playing computer games, catching a movie, and hanging out with friends.

For people who don’t leave Seoul, it’s a great chance to enjoy one of the world’s biggest and busiest cities at its quietest. Some people hit the major museums and cultural centers, some of which offer discounts or free admission to people wearing Hanbok. Other people take short vacations overseas. When else are you going to get a few days off to lounge on a Thai beach or ski in Hokkaido?


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[Article] A Farmer's Drink Made Trendy : 'Gosireh makgeolli' Bae Yong Joon product huge popularity in Japan.

[Article] A Farmer's Drink Made Trendy : 'Gosireh makgeolli' Bae Yong Joon product huge popularity in Japan.
Cr. - Quality of Life in Korea : Koreana (Jan 2011)

Once considered old-fashioned, makgeolli is making a comeback -- and not just in Korea. Anyone who's been out in Korea at night knows about soju, the popular Korean distilled liquor, always served with samgyeopsal, strips of pork belly.

But soju isn't the only traditional tippler on the peninsula: There's also makgeolli, fermented rice wine, which was ubiquitous until the 1960s but later lost ground to soju and Western alcoholic beverages such as beer, whiskey and wine. But makgeolli is now back, this time winning fans in an unexpected quarter: among Japanese tourists. This isn't just because of the price difference -- a one-liter bottle of makgeolli sells for 800 yen in Japan but the equivalent of just 150 to 200 yen here -- but also because the wine supposedly tastes better before going through the sterilization process required for export. Perhaps the most important reason, however, is the appeal of the special experience of tasting makgeolli in a minsokjujeom, a traditional Korean drinking house. Accordingly, local tourist agencies are busy coming up with packages offering Japanese visitors trips to jujeom, most located in the Myeong-dong and Jongno areas in downtown Seoul.

Meanwhile, in Japan, makgeolli is no longer an exotic novelty, with the number of bars offering several different types on the rise in trendy Tokyo areas such as Shinjuku, Ginza and Shibuya.



"We have sold 3.4 billion won ($2.74 million) worth of makgeolli in Japan last year, and sales of the liquor have grown 20-25 percent annually over recent years," said Lee Jin-seong, director of E-dong Rice Wine Brewery, the first Korean company to export makgeolli to Japan, through a Japanese affiliate established in 1993.

According to the Korea Customs Service, 4,891 tons of makgeolli were shipped overseas last year, a 25.4 percent increase from 2007, worth $4.02 million, a leap of 53 percent on-year. Bae Yong-joon, the Korea Wave star known in Japan as "Yon-sama" -- "sama" is an honorific suffix in Japanese -- has climbed on the bandwagon, inking a deal with Kook Soon Dang, Korea's leading traditional wine brewer, to produce a special makgeolli named Gosireh, after his restaurant chain in Japan. "Gosireh makgeolli, which was introduced in Japan in April, had sold about 30,000 bottles as of the first week of May, ranking at the top in terms of all kinds of liquor sales in the online market on Yahoo! Japan," said Koh Bong-hwan, marketing team manager at Kook Soon Dang. Even taking into account Yon-sama's huge popularity in Japan, such high sales in such a short period says something. Why are so many Japanese customers attracted to makgeolli?

"Makgeolli is gaining popularity because it is low proof, with an alcohol content of 6 to 7 percent, so that weak drinkers can also enjoy it, and it's also been proved to be healthy, as it contains lots of lactobacilli and fiber, matching up with the ?well-being' trend sweeping the world and Japan," said Shin Woo-chang, deputy director of the research institute of Kook Soon Dang Brewery. The liquor was even found to be effective in suppressing cancer as well as preventing high blood pressure in a report released last year by the research team at the Department of Food and Nutrition at Silla University in Busan.

Makgeolli brewing mainly consists of two processes -- the making of the rice malt, or nuruk, and the fermenting of steamed rice. Nuruk is an essential ingredient to make makgeolli, as it facilitates the fermentation of rice starch into sugars. It is usually made with crushed rice, placed in a wooden box for about a week until it begins to mold. The nuruk is then added to a mix-ture of steamed rice and water to produce an undiluted makgeolli, which will later be mixed with a fixed quantity of water to get an alcohol content of 6 to 7 percent.



Makgeolli dates back to the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392), when it was also called "ehwa wine" -- ehwa is the Korean word for pear blossom. The name came about because nuruk was usually made about the time the pear trees bloom. "Since it was the first wine made by our ancestors thousands of years ago, it is fair to say that makgeolli is the prototypical traditional wine of Korea. Other Korean rice wines, like yakju, actually originated from makgeolli," Shin said. In fact, makgeolli was the most popular alcoholic beverage in Korea until the 1960s, when it accounted for about 70 percent of domestic alcohol consumption.

At that time, Korea was still an agrarian society, with the greater part of the country's population being farmers. Nongju, another popular term for makgeolli, literally means "farmer liquor" in Korean, after its traditional consumers. "Makgeolli was called ?nongju' due to its popularity among farmers, though it was not meant solely for them," said Yu Tae-jong, a food engineering professor at Korea University. However, with the ban on the use of rice to make makgeolli by the government in 1965 due to a chronic food shortage, makgeolli makers started to use other grains instead, affecting the taste and turning the public against it. The ban on rice makgeolli was lifted in 1971, but by then the damage was done. With the introduction of various Western alcoholic beverages like whiskey and wine in the boom years of the 1970s, the percentage of the population consuming makgeolli fell as low as single digits.

But the drink recovered a few years ago and is now back in the limelight, Shin at Kook Soon Dang said, thanks to the "well-being" health craze. Scientific research purporting to show that the fermented rice wine had health benefits, in addition to its low price and relatively low alcoholic content, helped boost the popularity of makgeolli, he said.

"Advances in the quality and taste of makgeolli in recent years apparently contributed to recapturing the old generation, who often feel nostalgia for makgeolli, which they used to drink in their younger days, while makgeolli makers' efforts to popularize the liquor by packaging it in cans and fancy bottles have succeeded in winning the hearts of young and new customers," Shin said. And as evidenced by the introduction on the local market in April of the so-called "cocktail makgeolli," a more versatile and colorful variety mixed with fruit flavors such as strawberry and grape, makgeolli's evolution continues down the path to capturing the hearts of Korean customers and those around the world.


- Originally published in KOREA Magazine, June 2009 : Korean Culture and Information Service.
- The content has been edited for space : By Park Sun-young



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