Easy to find everywhere and with a delicious flavor in all its variants, jeon is a traditional Korean cuisine based on meat, fish, seafood or vegetables immersed in a mixture of wheat flour with eggs wash and then fried in a pan.
They usually fry everything:
- It can be found as a pancake based on meat, made with poultry, beef, pork or related offal (intestine, liver, tripe). Sometimes they are like meatballs.
- Excellent also the fish and shellfish jeon, where they fry shrimps, oysters, crabs, anchovies, octopus or white fish in general, like cod.
- Another variant is the jeon of tofu or vegetable, where in the dough they insert aubergines, potatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, lotus roots, shallots … and they couldn’t miss the kimchi jeon (a very famous Korean side-dish made with fermented cabbage ).
- There are jeon made with the petals of seasonal flowers, but so far I haven’t found them to taste! 🙂
Jeon should be eaten by chopping it with chopsticks and dipped in some sauce. Usually they use a spicy one made from soy, rice vinegar, garlic, onion and chilli, but if you prefer you can soak your bite in soy sauce or ketchup.
The jeon is found throughout South Korea and available in markets, street stalls and restaurants. They prepare it to eat immediately or to take away.
It is eaten by drinking a beer as an aperitif, enjoyed as banchan 반찬 (the typical Korean side dishes present at each meal) or devoured as a main course. My Korean friends have always told me that this is a dish that they eat during bad weather, when the noise of the frying goes to mix and resonate with the sound of falling rain like they were dancing together.
