I sometimes get very experimental with cooking. Maybe too experimental for my own good.
When I visited my mom in January, I had discussed with her a dilemma I sometimes have had: I love cooking her recipe of chiles rellenos, but the egg-dense batter in which the chiles are coated is hard to substitute with something that would please my vegan friends.
I’m not vegan, myself, but I have in the past worked hard to come up with ways to make much of my cooking vegan, for three reasons: 1) I feel it makes it very healthy, 2) because I have a some friends who are vegan, and 3) just for the challenge of it.
Well, my mom had a brainstorm: beer batter. And I thought about this, and thought it was a wonderfully good idea. And so I filed it away in my brain. But I also had had a strange idea, at the time, about my life in Korea, and the various substitutions that happen in attempting non-Korean cooking in Korea. Now… it must be said, beer is not hard to to find in Korea. It’s hardly the sort of thing that requires a substitution. That’s not an issue. But I nevertheless had a thought – could I make an even more “native” beer-type batter, in Korea? Specfically, I speculated on whether Korean makgeolli could be substituted for western-style beer.
Makgeolli is beery, in character. It’s often called Korean rice wine, but it’s more like beer (or maybe Mexican pulque) than it is like what I think of as rice wine, such as Japanese sake. It’s cloudy, and it has a slight carbonation to it. This is the property that made me think it might be substituted for beer in beer batter.
Tonight, I went to the grocery store. And I was staring at a refrigerator case, having just grabbed a bag of cheap packaged kimchi. There was a bottle of makgeolli. I remembered my idea, and, feeling inspired, or bored, or something, I bought it.
I came home. I got out some wheat flour, and mixed in some black pepper, nutmeg and salt and a tablespoon of my mexican masa flour for some corny flavoring. And then I dumped in some makgeolli, and stirred it up. Voila. Korean makgeolli batter. Hmm…. it seemed a lot like beer batter, sure enough.
Now, for something to fry. I saw my onions. Hah. Onion rings.
I made onion rings in makgeolli batter. Has this ever been done before? I don’t know.
I won’t say they were perfectly delicious. But this was a first draft. The oil I fried them in should have been a lighter variety of oil – maybe canola oil. And the batter needed more salt. But for a first draft, they were hardly horrible. I felt pleased with my experiment. Here is my plate of home-made makgeolli-batter-fried onion rings.
Note that the squarish item on the part of the plate closest to the camera is a block of colby cheese (imported from America, which I bought at Emart in Gwangju yesterday) that I’d used because I had a tiny bit of batter left over. That was, in fact, pretty tasty, too.
