Monday, January 26, 2015

Sulbing

Last weekend my boyfriend and I decided to have some yummy Korean dessert - Sulbing. Sulbing is a rather new dessert, I'd say. When I was studying in Seoul in summer of 2009, there was no Sulbing yet. There was, however, a popular Korean dessert called Patbingsu.

Patbingsu is a name for a very famous Korean dessert. 'pat' means red bean paste and 'bingsu' is shaved ice. So when you order a patbingsu you get a bowl of shaved ice with read beans, and sometime Korean rice cake (tteok) and other fruits are added too. It might sound strange, but red bean paste is really sweet and is therefor used in many desserts and pastries. It's very refreshing and perfect for hot and humid summers in Korea.

There are also many different variations where red bean paste is replaced by another ingredient. The most popular are probably green tea, coffee, yogurt, strawberries etc... Since there's no red bean paste (pat) in these desserts, they are just called 'bingsu'.


Sulbing is also a very similar thing, but a rather newer version of it. The first Sulbing store opened in Busan and sometime between 2013 and 2014 it became really popular. The branches started spreading across Korea and today there are pretty much everywhere.

The main difference between sulbing and other types of bingsu is that sulbing doesn't contain shaved ice, but tiny flakes of frozen milk, which gives it a much sweeter and creamer taste. Pieces of frozen milk really look like snowflakes, thus the name sulbing, which means snow ice. The dessert is usually translated as snowflake sherbet.

The first branch in Daegu opened about a year ago or so. I can't remember exactly, but one opened right near our university. I heard it was very popular so I went there with my friend and another friend of his. We ate 2 different sulbings together - a strawberry one and 'injeolmi', which is a type of Korean rice cake. Both were really yummy. However, injeolmi has a lot of... kind of rice cake powder I guess? It can be just a bit hard to eat if it's not mixed well and you have to drink a lot of water with it.

 

Sulbing and bingsu, as well as many other Korean dishes (not only desserts) are usually shared among two or more people. It's just a part of Korean culture that people share food, meaning that several people eat from the same bowl or plate. Some people are uncomfortable with that. I even know some Koreans that don't late to share food like this. But most Koreans do. I have no problems with it, luckily. Sulbing is quite big and probably too much for one person. Also, I think you'd look a bit sad eating a huge sulbing by yourself. (Even though, in my opinion, there should be absolutely nothing wrong with eating it by yoursefl!).

There are several subilng flavors to choose from. Here are some other sulbings that I have tried so far: cheesecake, blueberry cheesecake, mango cheesecake (yes, I love cheesecake), berry yogurt etc. You can get blueberry and mango sulbing without cheesecake too. And there are also caramel-coffee, sweet potato etc., but I don't drink coffee and I don't like sweet potato that much.



Blueberry, strawberry and mango sulbings are not available throughout the year. Mango is only availabe in sumer, bluberry in fall and strawberry in winter. Last time, my boyfriend and I wanted to try the new premium fresh cream strawberry sulbing and it was DELICIOUS! :)


Korea has a lot of desserts like this to offer and most of them taste really good! Especially in summer, when the weather is really hot and humid here. I definitely recommend you try some of it when you visit Korea :)

Monday, January 19, 2015

Home sweet home

It's been a week since I got back to Korea from my annual Slovenian trip and I am finally able to sleep again normally. I had a bit of a jet lag when I got back and I kept waking up every day at 5am - annoying. But it's all good now. 

Our Slovenian trip was great, it just went by so fast. I didn't even get to meet all my friends. But I was really happy to spend time with my family again and my boyfriend was excited because it was his first time in Europe.

On our way to Slovenia we stopped by in Amsterdam, because we had to wait 9 hours for our connecting flight. I love Amsterdam and I wanted to show it to my boyfriend, but... unfortunately the weather was terrible. First of all, it stays dark there really long. We wanted to wait at the airport until it gets light outside, but it was already 9:30am and it was still dark. And it was also raining... a lot. I checked my iphone weather forecast and it said it would stop raining so we decided not to buy an umbrella, but then it started to rain even more. My boyfriend was worried about his new (really expensive) leather jacket so we didn't have the best time there.

Freezing in cold and windy Amsterdam
 But Slovenia was great. My family and my boyfriend got along really well! He was worried that they'd have problems communicating since he doesn't really use English often, but there were no problems at all. At first I helped a lot by translating and later, my mom and my boyfriend spent a lot of time chatting together with no problems at all :)

I often said that Jeonju reminds me a bit of Ljubljana (capital of Slovenia - my hometown). It's not really the same, but I lived in Daegu before for almost 3 years and it is completely different from any place in Slovenia. It's so much more... Korean? But Jeonju for some reason seems a lot more familiar to me. And when my boyfriend and I went for a walk around our neighborhood the first evening he said it doesn't feel strange at all, that it's so much like Jeonju :)

My boyfriend was able to spend only about 10 days in Slovenia because he had to go back for work. But in those 10 days I tried to show him as many places in Slovenia as possible. And I think he liked Bled the most. Our lake Bled is one of the most popular places to visit and it really is beautiful. We also tried the famous Bled cream cake - yummy! ^^



Other than Bled we also visited a huge cave in Postojna, the Predjama castle, Slovenian coast, snowy Kranjska Gora and the famous Planica ski jumping hill. Oh, and our capital city too, of course.

LJUBLJANA

PLANICA AND KRANJSKA GORA

SLOVENIAN COAST - PIRAN

 PREDJAMA CASTLE AND POSTOJNA CAVE

My boyfriend was amazed at the number of castles in Slovenia. There are no castles like this in Korea so it was quite interesting for him to see. Although, after a while, he said, let's not visit any more castles... :) They are beautiful, but maybe we saw a bit too many of them :)

He loved our Slovenian food. Especially my mom's cooking. He made it clear that my mom is a way better cook than I am... :) And I think that especially, he loved Calamari - Mediterranean squid dish. Korea has a lot of seafood to offer, including squid. But he said he'd never seen small squid like calamari. Apparently squid in Korea is a lot bigger... but I'm not really a squid lover so I don't know. But anyway, he loved calamari :)


He was also surprised when he saw our city buses. I never noticed that before but ya, I guess it's true, I don't think you can find such long buses in Korea.


One thing we didn't like in Slovenia were the toilets. The public ones I think. They used to be free, but now you have to pay for a lot of them. Especially at touristic places like lake Bled. It costs 50cent per person and I thought I could pay 1eur for both of us. Unfortunately it wasn't 1eur, I paid 2eur by mistake and I was the only person to get in. Later we went to buy some chewing gum for 50cents to get another 50cent coin so that my boyfriend was able to go to the bathroom too. So we ended up paying almost 3eur (almost 4000krw) for the toilet!... The ones in Ljubljana were free but so dirty. Also, in Korea you can use the toilet at a cafe without buying anything there. In Slovenia you can't really do that.


After my boyfriend went back to Korea I spent most of the time at home with my family, enjoying my mom's delicious food and some of the things I really miss in Korea, such as our fresh Slovenian bread and our plain yogurt. It is so hard to find bread in Korea, it's all just toast and that's totally different. European bread is the best... so soft... and not sweet like this toast here. And yogurt... ah... impossible to find in Korea. Well fruit yogurt is not a problem, but plain yogurt. Plain yogurt in Korea (and in many other countries too) is sweet - yuck! :S No way... our Slovenian plain yogurt has no sugar at all and it's not all liquid either. It's impossible to describe the taste, you'd just have to try it. But anyway, I miss yogurt and bread the most and my mom can't really send it to me :(

And now we're back in Korea. In our cozy small home in Jeonju :) And Korea also has a lot of things that I'd miss if I moved back to Slovenia. For example norebang - karaoke :) So our first weekend back in Korea, we went to see a movie at Megabox (Taken 3), we went to norebang for 2 hours and we had some really really yummy dessert calles Sulbing. But that's something I want to write about in my next post. :)

Thank for reading my blog and feel free to post any comments and/or questions. ^^