I'm talkin' 'bout this:
The Korean word hwadeok means "oven," so hwadeok mandu are essentially oven-baked dumplings, in which the oven, bizarrely enough, is a tandoor, and the dumplings are cooked naan-style, stuck to the inner walls of the tandoor. I saw a hwadeok manu-jip this past Chuseok, when I was in Incheon's Chinatown with my buddy Tom, Tom's wife, and Tom's buddy Angelo. We ended up eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant that served typically Korean-style Chinese fare, which was a bit disappointing, but I vowed that I'd go back to Chinatown to try out those hwadeok mandu, which looked amazing.
These luscious, meat-filled dumplings look as though they have more in common with a Cornish pasty than they do with their smaller East Asian cousins, i.e., standard Korean mandu, Japanese gyoza, or Chinese mantou/jiaozi. The restaurant that I saw in Chinatown sells these babies for W2,000 per single mandu; each mandu is huge. Since I had paid about W8,000 for my rather bland lunch of white jjajang-myeon last time, I know I can spend W8,000 on four big, fat oven dumplings and enjoy an even more rib-sticking meal.
So that's the plan for Friday: head out to Incheon's Chinatown in the morning, eat an enormous mandu lunch, then head back to the Dongguk office to do a good bit of paper-grading. No one's keeping me from my fulfilling my culinary destiny.
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Yo dawg, I heard you like hwadeok, so we put some jokbal in your hwadeok so you can have jokbal with your mandu!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, do you like 족발? If yes, have you ever had 화덕 족발? If no, sometime you gotta drop by 낙성대 and I will take you to this place with awesome 화덕 족발. It is like the king of 족발.
(This comment would have been a lot easier if I had posted a flowchart, I think.)