Kimbap – Korean seaweed rice

I bet everyone who knows something about Korea has heard of this very traditional dish: "kimbap" or seaweed rice. By appearance, it looks quite similar with maki – a kind of Japanese sushi rice rolled in a sheet of seaweed. However, there is a great difference in the taste between these two. Not only the rice tastes differently due to difference seasoning, the stuffed ingredients also vary. Instead of using vinegar and sugar, and sometime a little sake, in making dressing for sushi rice, the rice of kimbap is enriched by a little salt and sesame oil.

I have never had a chance to try a real piece of kimbap in Korea. However, I got my first chance to practise making kimbap in my Korean language class. My Korean teacher taught us to make kimbap in a most simple way. Kimbap is a healthy dish because normally, the amount of vegetables used to be wrapped with the rice accounts for 70 per cent of a whole roll of kimbap. This time making kimbap at home, I used the same ingredients that my teacher advised during our kimbap making session.

For the ingredients, you may need to prepare some kinds of vegetable. Typical vegetables are carrot, cucumber and spinach. For some protein, you may use sausage and pan-fried egg. To make the rice, just add to the newly cooked short grain rice some salt and sesame oil, then mix well. You can adjust the quantity of rice according to how many you want to make.

What I had this time is sausage, fried egg, cucumber and carrot. All these ingredients have to be cut into long strips of the same length as the seaweed sheet. Cucumber and carrot strips need to be blanched in hot salted water for up to 1 minute. All ingredients are ready now.

Then it is simple to make a kimbap roll.

Stretch a thin layer of the prepared rice over a sheet of fried seaweed up to 3/4 of its surface. Then arrange the above ingredients on the rice layer and start rolling and pressing gently and carefully. It is easy and doesn’t take much time to finish one roll.

A roll of kimbap is often cut into pieces which are often about 1.5 centimetre high. Now all you have to do is: ENJOY !