Thursday, April 29, 2010

Garlic-Fed Duck


The garlic-fed duck restaurant about one block from Deungchon Station. I was invited to a lunch meeting of the Student Volunteering Committee, chaired by Mr Hwang--sure, it meant hanging around school for an extra hour and a half on an exam day, but it's well worth it!

We got the 오리념구이, spicy grilled duck. The heavy cast iron pot is heated up at the table, then the seasoned duck meat, together with sliced potato, string mushrooms, ddeok and onions, is dumped in to fry:


When it's nearly ready, greens are added and cooked down:


You eat all that up until you're down to the scrapings at the bottom of the pot:


The ajumma comes along and puts in some chopped lettuce, carrots, potatoes and rice, and stirs the goodness up from the pot:


Then some dried, shredded seaweed is sprinkled on top, and it's given a few minutes to cook up:


Delicious.

The finish is a soup with vegetables and pieces of white meat in it, kind of bland to cool the tongue after the spicy main course:

2 comments:

조안나 said...

So, can you actually taste the garlic flavor in the duck? I feel like Koreans really like to feed animals various diets to get different effects... but I'm skeptical as to what difference it makes. Have you tried the green tea fed chicken eggs? They... taste like eggs to me... but quite a bit more expencive.

Tuttle said...

I couldn't say if I tasted a garlic flavor from the ducks being fed garlic, or whether it was garlic added to the seasonings. I can say it is really flavorful and delicious.

I also don't know about the egg thing, but I do know that fat acquires flavor from the animal's diet, and that it is mainly the fat that makes pork taste porky or beef taste beefy.

The French only use a certain kind of corn to stuff the geese for foie gras; according to this, they also feed herbs to the chickens: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/ load/farmlife/ msg0311160523769.html