The show provides many opportunities to learn about specialized products and markets. I took advantage of two of them, one on appreciating Korean food and one on rare tea.
Decoding Korean Cuisine: A Guided Tasting, first presented an overview of the increasing interest in Korean food in the US, and then led us through a tasting of some of the more commonly used Korean ingredients.
I was familiar with some of them, like seaweed and soju (one of my favorite alcoholic drinks), but many were new to me. There was kimchee in a new form – freeze-dried! Ginseng was presented as a concentrated drink.
We learned that fermentation is key to many Korean foods. Besides kimchee, we sampled gochujang, red chili pepper paste, sweet, hot, and with a wine-like fermented flavor. We followed the directions to take a little gochujang and wrap it in gim – seaweed – and eat it, savoring the sensation of “swimming with your mouth open.”
As we left, we were given a cookbook of Western recipes utilizing gim, a joint effort of the Korean Agro-Fisheries and Food Trade Corporation and the Culinary Institute of America.
The Rare Tea Republic sponsored a tasting of their line of small parcel single estate teas. A boutique division of the Republic of Tea, the RTR is devoted to hand-selecting the very best of the tea harvest from the world’s tea-growing regions.
They personally inspect the growing and processing practices of all the farms they source from. We tasted eight teas, each distinct, and noted their appearance both dry and wet (after steeping) to see the differences of leaf size and level of fermentation.
Their level of detail extends to the hand-written labels. Each package lists the place of origin of the tea, the plucking date, and the recommended teaspoons per cup, water temperature (in degrees Fahrenheit) , and steep time (in minutes).
My favorites were Kangra Wah Handrolled Green, with a lovely smoky tinge due to the traditional pan-fired processing method; and the Kenya Kangaita White Needles 2011, full-bodied and complex. This event broadened my appreciation of tea and the efforts of all those devoted to bringing the very best possible product to the market.
