Cooking Class for Dwoengjang Jjigae and Jaeyuk Bokkum

 This weekend, my free Saturday Korean class had a field trip to a cooking school to learn to make 된장찌개 and 제육볶음. The price of the class was only 15,000 won for everything so, considering the fact that I would pay 10,000 to eat this in a restaurant, it was quite inexpensive. The class was in Korean, but my friend Haemin translated for us all.

 We were set up in groups of four, and each group had the ingredients and utensils needed to make the two dishes.

First we listened to a lecture about the ingredients needed. Some things were already prepared for us, but he explained how to make them at home and we were given the recipes, translated into English, so we could try at home from scratch. The nice thing about this cooking school was that they wanted everyone to make their sauces from scratch rather than just buying premade things which tend to have lots of MSG or lots of salt.

Then he prepared each dish in front of us, so we could watch how to cut the vegetables or how long to let something boil. They had a mirror set up above too so that people in the back could see the workspace in the mirror and have a perfect view of everything.

Then we were set to work. Here we are mixing the pork with the sauce. He told us if we didn't want it spicy, to only put in half. We put in the whole amount and found it not spicy at all. Yet again, Koreans worry too much about us not being able to handle their spicy foods...

While the pork marinated, it was time to make some 주먹밥 (literally fist rice) or rice balls. I tried to copy my friend Asami here, I think the Japanese have the art of rice ball making to a science. All of hers were perfect heart shapes. Mine.... were not so perfect... but I'd give myself an A for effort at least..

After letting the pork marinate while making the rice balls, it was time to fry it up.  This wasn't exactly rocket science. The only problem was the fact that looking at and smelling all this food cooking was making me incredibly hungry!

The other half of our group was in charge of the jjigae. They did a good job, but they didn't add any hot pepper powder, so it was a bit to mild for my taste. But, still delicious! 

Here was our final produce. Me and my partner made some interesting shapes with the rice and we made lots and lots of jaeyuk bokkum. 

Ready to eat!