kwillets

Signage is normally in Hangul and Romanized. Most coastal towns seem to have their fresh-off-the-boat seafood restaurants, with categories of cooked, raw, and still wriggling. In Sokcho, there are a number of raw-fish restaurants (hwet-jibs) along the beach. In Pusan we once went to a nearby village and had fish stews along the waterfront, and we did the same thing in Cheju as well. The beach areas are very quiet in the winter. These places all have aquaria for the various species, and you can get things like live octopus, raw crab in pepper sauce, and various types of braised or grilled fish. I seem to remember having a lot of this stuff in Seoul. You could cover a lot of ground there, and then pick a few areas for further research. Seoul also has things like North Korean noodles that you can't get anywhere else. Even the rest stops on the highway seem to have some good stuff, mixed with mediocre packaged food that's supposed to be "modern". Out in the parking lots they'll have guys grilling octopus on hot stones, while the tourists go in for their styrofoam ramyon. Temple food is interesting too. There's a place in Insadong that has Buddhist food - no garlic, vegetarian, etc. Temples usually have food available under some circumstances, although I've usually eaten in conjunction with some private event. My wife swears by the grilled-meat-and-soju stalls on the sidewalks. These are often open late. Also, the coffee has gotten a lot better in the last few years. The cafes have Italian Espresso.

That loaf looks over-malted, i.e. there was too much amylase breaking down the starch for too long a period. I've learned to look out for that sheen, and the gummy, moist texture. Regular flour has enough malt to support a 2-4 hour fermentation; much beyond that, the gumminess begins to emerge as the starch chains break into much shorter chains. I've made a number of well-fermented, flavorful, and gummy sourdoughs due to this fact. Organic flour doesn't have malt (an organic product) in it for some reason, so you can mix it 50-50 with regular flour to lengthen the fermentation time, or use all-organic and add small amounts of malt separately (it's easy to make from sprouted grain, but the strength is hard to gauge). I believe rye flour has copious amounts of amylase in it as well, due to a tendency to sprout on the stalk. Whole wheat (of any type) flour also lacks malt, presumably because it wouldn't be wholly wheat if it did. In any case, try flour with less malt in it; you have a number of choices.

Rice cookers mostly heat from the bottom, using a shaped aluminum disk which mates with the aluminum rice pan. They're also insulated, so the heat is fairly even all around. The center of the disk is a thermostat which turns off at just over the boiling point of water, when the rice is beginning to toast slightly on the bottom. The toasted part is traditionally made into tea, but it's minimal in a rice cooker. Zojirushi seems to have a feature where the pan is hemispherical, and the disk comes up a small amount around the sides, but it seems like a marketing feature to me.

That was on an 18k btu gas burner, not electric. And, it was actually four minutes, in a kettle which has a copper coil welded to the bottom to act as a heat absorber. A shiny pasta pot takes around 6 minutes, for one quart of water! I'm not saying that pots should look like CPU coolers, but a few blackened, raised ridges would probably add a great deal to the average pasta pot. It would certainly beat having to buy a commercial stove to get the same heating performance. While I agree that heating efficiency is not the only factor, it's one more thing to be aware of, and I seldom see it mentioned. I suppose it changes one's opinion of heat conduction and so forth when one realizes that the bulk of the heat goes right by the pan.

All the talk about aluminum vs. copper is good, but it's surprising to me how much heat is wasted by poor pot design. I did a quick calculation of how long it should take to boil a quart of water, using an 18000 btu burner: just over 60 seconds, assuming the water is at 60F to start (that's (212-60F)*2 lbs *3600sec / 18000 btu/hr). Even with a "quick boil" kettle, I've never gotten below three minutes, meaning a good 2/3 of the burner's heat output is going up the vent hood. Some of the problem is surface area, and another factor is the exterior finish - a black pan is going to absorb a lot more radiation than a shiny one. Surface area can be increased by adding fins, as is done in a heat sink, or, if size doesn't matter, widening the base, as is done with some kettles. The issue isn't just energy conservation, but things like quick heating, and maximum cooking capacity.