Busan, South Korea

This entry is by both me and Mark and is cross posted on the Bittman Project. Trigger warning: This piece has loads of live and dead and in between sea-based animals that are intended to be eaten (and some were).

Headed into Busan for a look around today. We went straight to Jagalchi Fish Market – huge, which just about every kind of water-based creature imaginable. Downstairs held stall after stall, usually tended by women wearing colorful aprons, offering sea squirts, eels, abalone, fish of all kinds, the biggest oysters and mussels anyone’s ever seen, seaweed of all kinds, loads of kelp, gigantic shrimp and crabs, and more. The list could go on interminably, and we’ll get back to it. The tanks, by the way, are fed with running water and all the fish and shellfish are alive (though, in truth, some barely).

Later in the day we discovered the streets outside the markets were also packed with stalls – there was some duplication, and some not, but the animals on the street were all dead: skewered skates, huge octopi, some cooked some raw, loads of barracuda, flatfish, beautifully wrapped kelp everywhere, some fresh some dried.

 We marveled at the sheer quantity of it all, and knowing that it happened daily in this city we couldn’t help but wonder what the per capita consumption of things from the sea is: How can there be so much demand?

We wandered around in the rain; it wasn’t that cold a day, probably 50 or so, but not super pleasant. The first food stall that appealed to us was selling skewered fish cakes (turns out Busan is famous for these). A woman already eating at the stall showed us the drill: You choose a skewer, from plain simmering water, or from a base of chile sauce, and just eat it off the skewer, dipping in sesame oil first. (Sesame oil is huge here too.) The best thing, in a way – the fish cake was terrific, that kind of pressed cake, quite sweet – was that you get a small (always red it seems) cup of the cooking liquid, a kind of sweet fishy broth, to wash it down.

Yum!!

We were trying not to eat too much because we had a plan to go back to the seafood market for lunch. So we just kept wandering. The next thing we couldn’t resist was next to a tower of fried baby soft shell crabs; we wanted those but decided they were too much, volume-wise. But there was also a mound of fried chicken skin (and also these very strangely cut and colored potatoes), and that was irresistible – but just as we were about to buy it a man who was helping us figure things out offered some of his. Thank you very much, we said (or kind of sang ) in our really bad Korean and kept going.  

By this time we were in huge covered market with intersecting streets, several of them, and many people but not hugely crowded. There were fried pastries, sweet and savory, deep-fried eggs, bacon being crisped with a torch, vats of beans and soup, many, many fried foods, some fish cakes but some not. There is not enough space or knowledge to describe all of this we don’t want to overwhelm you, but we were overwhelmed ourselves.

On our way back to the fish market, once again in the rain, we stopped at a large bookstore to see whether we could find Animal Vegetable Junk in its Korean translation (it exists). But, no. Depressed (not really, only MB, for a second), we wandered into a Daiso – kind of a Korean version of a 99 cent store – and admired the tupperware and rough washcloths and cute magnets. Then we walked back to the fish market.

 What we neglected to tell you earlier is that on the second floor of the fish market, there are also dozens of stalls, with smaller tanks but with kitchens. They have mostly the same fish as on the first floor – not as many kinds, but a lot – and you can sit and order and eat. (You can also buy fish downstairs and bring it up to be cooked, but that was way too complicated for us and we were wet and hungry.)

So we settled in at stall #40, where a mother (the chef), son, and daughter-in-law took care of us.

There was so much on that table (see the pic): three kinds of raw fish, along with raw oysters, sea cucumber, sea worm (actually MB’s favorite, well, aside from the oyster), sea squirt (very oyster like), and still-writhing octopus; and oh yes an omelet of course. This was followed by steamed scallops, oysters, whelk, and abalone. (We saw more abalone in Busan than most people see in their lives.) Then a lovely little piece of sauteed fish, and finally a fish-bone stew (we cheated and put some leftover raw fish in there, along with a little extra garlic, cooked at the table and mysteriously flavored with medium-hot chile and some damn thing we couldn’t figure out. Super.

This feast, with beers, clocked in at about $60 (total), and if you’re ever in the neighborhood, check it out. We loved Busan and were sorry the weather kept us from exploring more. Off to Japan!