Nungil Village: An Unsung Hero to Makeoli Drinkers Everywhere

The Happy Bears went to Nungil Village to make Makeoli. We did it for our health, taste, enjoyment, and self-knowledge. 

Makeoli has the alcohol percentage above a standard lager( 6%) with the sweetness of a soft drink and milky texture with an acidic kick. Some even are carbonated to have the fizzyness of soda. We love its taste.

Makeoli is particularly special to me. It's an example of what can be called healthy alcohol. When traditionally made, its taste is amazing and it contains many beneficial bacteria and yeast. Just like how kimchi, and yogurt have symbiotic healthy lactobacilli bacteria for our gastrointestinal track, so does Makeoli. However,  Makeoli also has the added benefit of yeast.

Most commercial Makeoli is pasteurized and artificially sweetened with Aspartame, which is a known neurotoxin. Fortunately, there are people who are bringing back the old style of making alcohol, such as  commercial brewers or individuals and groups who are doing it themselves for themselves or their families. They are heros to us for doing something that costs a little more but is safe and healthy for us.

Nungil Village is one of those heros.

Nungil Makeoli is not a brewer of commercial makeoli, but a school to teach people how to make nutritious and delicious Makeoli, food, and how to grow food. 

So we went to learn.

We were not disapointed.

The Happy Bear drove to the Nungil Restaurant and entered the school.

Our teacher, had already the materials laid out before we arrived. On stepping into the room, there was a container of yeast in liquid, nuruk(누룩), a cake wheat, barley, and rice, which has wild gathered lactobacilli bacteria and yeast from the air that accumulated on the cake. Both rested on a tablecloth spread across a long folding table.

I'm a homebrewer so while my Korean is spotty I'm familiar with the brewing process and I felt comfortable as our translator translated the teachers words to us.

Our teacher brought out the steamed rice.

Our teacher told us what to do and we listened.

"The rice must be steamed in a steamer and not a rice cooker so it does not lose sugar. It must be slightly hard."

We spread the rice out and allowed it too cool. When the rice was the temperature of our hand, we would add the nuruk.

"If too hot, the bacteria will die," the teacher said.

He then showed us the nuruk which sat in a metal bowl shown in the picture on the right.  Nuruk is made traditionally by wrapping a wet cake of wheat, barley, and rice in a husk and putting it in a barn or someplace else to gather the wild yeasts and bacteria.

We mixed the nuruk into the rice. The nuruk will break the rice into simple sugars for the yeast to eat and produce the alcohol. Without the nuruk, the complex sugars cannot be broken down into simpler sugars for the yeast to eat and make alcohol.




Then the teacher showed us the yeast, which was simply Fleichers Bread yeast prepared in warm water with some sugar. The yeast is not necessary as it is airborn, everywhere on Earth, but it shortens the process of Makeoli making from 1 and half weeks to four days.



A texture of yeast.


We added water over the rice to just over the rice and then sealed the pot with a lid with an air gauge attached. We carried the pot to a stone cellar with thick stone walls which keeps the temperature inside cool and keeps the temperature from fluctuating extremely.

The stabilization is important according to our teacher to keep the Makeoli ph balance between base and acid. If too much of one or the other, then the wonderful flavor will be bad.

After four days water, the yeasts outcompete and kill all the unhealthy bacteria and the healthy bacteria remain.

The value of alcohol as a safe source of water was appreciated by European colonists of America. The Pilgrims refused to drink water for fear of diseases remembered from plagues in the past  and drank beer instead because they knew that it would keep them healthy.

After the four days, water is added at a 3:1, water:rice ratio and the Makeoli is aged for a week so the flavors mingle and the taste improves.

The Happy Bears were lucky to get to drink the Makeoli available. Before drinking it our teacher reminded us to not drink commercial makeoli with Aspartame in it.

The Makeoli he served was special because it was made from the extract of Jerusalem Artichoke leaves (돼지 감자 or pig potato). It has many medicinal effects some of which are pain relief, antioxidization, and stomach soothing.

The taste was amazing so we happily drank two or three glasses before we were went on to our next adventure.


Jerusalem Artichoke Roots





Jerusalem Artichoke Makeoli

-Greg

NungGil Makeoli

JinAhn Nungil MaEul(Village)

http://www.nungil.org/

JunBok Jinahn-Goon DongHyang-Myun NunGumL-Lee Nungil MaEul





Raw Trout: A Rare Eat

There's a certain silence that comes with exhaustion. In my day-to-day life, I can never quiet my mind enough to meditate unless its after a intense and focused yoga class. Well, it was a different kind of exhaustion at the end of our very long and active second day on the 1st Korean Traditional Food Tour for Foreign Foodies that had me meditating over our last meal of the day.

Our day had started early. Before noon we had already participated in kettle-cooked tofu making, perilla seed harvesting, chicken slaughtering and butchering, an expansive lunch, and had begun our transit to the market. After the joy and excitement of the market, more long (nauseating) transit, makkeoli-making, banchan-making, even more long (and still nauseating) transit, I felt our tour van finally pull into a parking lot. I looked out the windows: pitch black. We got out of the van: still nearly pitch black. And quiet! Haunted by the faint rush of river water nearby and the dark night sky, it felt almost eerily desolate. I had no idea where we were, but it truly felt like the middle of nowhere to me. An occasional rustle of invisible autumn leaves, cold outdoor toilets, not a single other patron except for our group... we lumbered into a cold, long room whose sleepy under-floor heating system was slowly, slowly waking from its slumber.

I sat the end of our long, low table, still very much in my quiet, meditative state as my body worked overtime to digest the feast we had had at lunch. A long day of action and excitement will do this to you. A long day of travel will do this to you. A long day of intelligent and enthused discussion in great company will do this to you. But it was in this very quiet state that I saw the brilliant food brought to our table with utter clarity.

Most restaurants in Korea specialize in just one thing. This restaurant did raw trout. As the plates arrived, the warm coral orange flesh glimmered with silver remnants of skin. Flanked by raw garlic, hot pepper and a plate full of raw cut vegetables for making "ssam" wraps, I unexpectedly found my appetite again. Sure, we eat with our eyes first and these platters we gorgeous, but this was actually the food my body had been craving. Totally whole, fresh food.

Wasabi and other assertive ingredients compliment slices of raw trout


Its a shame that there's a major grocery chain that shares the same name because real whole foods are far more significant that that and deserve more understanding and appreciation in the mainstream public. Some people extol vegetarianism as a virtual solution to so many important issues today. Some firmly believe that organics are the way to planetary and bodily health. I don't discount either of those but I do believe that switching to whole foods is the single, most powerful dietary choice any person eating a conventional, SAD (Standard American Diet) or otherwise highly-processed diet can make. Whole, unprocessed food makes the body think, makes it work the way it was designed to. Contrasted with processed foods that consist mainly of just corn, wheat, soy and a complementary mix of synthetic preservatives and processing agents, whole food forces seasonal eating, varied eating, enzymatic and nutritionally rich eating that wakens the taste buds, the spirit, and the body. Its easy and it feels good great.
This revival is what happened to me that night and it is one of the most exciting things about Korean traditional food. It may be safe to say that nearly all traditional foods around the world are, by default, usually whole or only marginally processed. And in Korean many of them are often naturally preserved or even raw, which offer additional benefits. The particularly impressive thing about Korean traditional, whole foods, however, is that even though Korea is a rather developed country, they are still TOTALLY a part of every day life. Korean traditional foods are are still what is served at the majority of restaurants in any city, at family dinners at home, even in the lunch trays at school. To be clear, processed junk food has made its place in the contemporary Korean lifestyle as well, but in 12 trips abroad, of all the developed countries I have visited, Korea has certainly made the biggest impression when it comes to the perseverance of whole, traditional cuisine in the face of globalization, marketing, monocrop subsidies and artificial food technology.

Lettuce, carrot, cucumber, cabbage and bean powder await a spot in my trout lettuce wrap.

This brings me back to our meal. And the restaurant. Our dinner was like a mini-retreat for my entire self. Subdued and simple, but delicious and unexpectedly/exactly what I needed. And possibly just what the rest of the team and our crew needed as well. Our meal together in the deep, dark countryside fostered candid discussions, quiet reflection and authentic exchanges with every new plate that graced our table. In addition to the glimmering raw trout, our table also experienced the house's selection of side dishes, their hearty trout-head jjigae, juicy and crisp cut Asian pears, and gorgeous glowing trout roe. Wrapped with rice, wasabi and soy sauce in a fresh lettuce leaf, the little tender, translucent beads burst silky omega-rich fish oil between my teeth in one nourishing, flavorful mouthful. It gave me energy for a night that was not yet finished and it carried me contently past midnight at our pension as we prepared for the events to come.

Who ate all the fish head and all the robust broth from our jjigae stew? ;-)

Trout, roe, kimchi, pepper and a one messy mixing dish make for a bright-colored array.

Our rare adventure into the depths of Jeolla province resulted in a rare treat that turned out to be exactly, precisely what my weary self needed. I am grateful every little treasure Korea shares with me.

~Tanya

Team Happy Bear Makes Old School Tofu

This may not sound very cosmopolitan of me, but all the way into my early-mid twenties, I was pretty scared of tofu. I harbored an apprehension that I still can't elaborate on, one which I can only excuse by incriminating myself further: I was also scared of oranges until I was about eighteen, hash browns and refried beans until twenty, and eggs and tomatoes until twenty-two. If you doubt me, get in touch with my college roommates. I'm sure they'd be happy to confirm.

Living in a foreign land, one learns to get over such childish fears, partially because it'd be a waste of time to be abroad without sampling the local cuisine, and partially because you have to get pretty good at a foreign language before you can really be picky when ordering. Korea is particularly good for expanding culinary horizons, because no matter what you order, you're likely to wind up with a smörgåsbord of vegetable-and-other side dishes you didn't exactly ask for, most of them so unfamiliar that you won't have had the chance to form any prejudices about them. Most days, I thank Korea for having helped me learn to eat outside the box, so to speak.

Back to topic: I eat tofu so frequently now that I can't imagine there was a time when I refused to eat it at all. It's not that I really love the stuff - actually, I have some apprehensions about it, having read that overconsumption can lead to hormone imbalance, that the soybeans are often GMO, and that it's not safe for humans to depend so greatly on a single plant. Nonetheless, it's everywhere and just about unavoidable, and considering that people have been eating it for hundreds if not thousands of years, it's almost certainly safe when eaten in moderation as part of a balanced died. I had it on its own with just a little spicy sauce as a side dish for Makkeoli (rice wine) last night; the previous weekend, I had it sprinkled with sesame seeds and served with roasted laver and stir-fried kimchi as a compliment to some noodles; it's in just about every vegetarian soup that doesn't contain seaweed; and when it comes in my CSA every month, I turn it into croûtons or just lightly sear it at breakfast time.

After all these years of eating tofu without quite knowing what it was , I was happy to get the chance to participate in the process of making it at Joseon Village. After waking up early, having a light breakfast of fruit, and wandering around a bit getting a feel for the place - as I detailed in a different piece, "Applied Food Ethics at Joseon Village," we happened upon a lady sitting in a hot, smoky, not-quite-indoor-not-quite-outdoor kicthen. She was perching over a giant cooking cauldron which had been excellently designed to be fully integrated into the building's heating system so that not a single ounce of wood would be wasted. She was swooshing around a frothy, white liquid, made by grinding soy beans that had been soaked over night and then adding them to water. They need to be boiled to be cooked thoroughly, and need to be stirred lest they burn to the bottom of the pan. Greg offered to jump in and take a turn.

Greg hard at work.

After boiling the beans and stirring them continuously for the better part of an hour, taking breaks whenever our eyes welled up with tears from the smoke, it was time for the next step: separating the ground beans from the liquid that had absorbed much of their taste and nutrients. I took a giant cloth bag perforated with tiny holes and held it open while the woman scooped out the contents of the cauldron. The sediment remained in the bag, while the liquid escaped through the holes and down into our pot. At the end, I lifted up the sediment-filled bag, and we poured the thinner liquid into a giant rubber tub.

We then sat a big wooden press on top of the tub, plopped the bag of sediment on top of it, and squeezed out all the remaining liquid, leaving us with one tub of very dry grit and one bucket of very beany juice.

Another kitchen worker skimmed some of the liquid off of the top, sugared it, and served us all bowls of fresh, warm, sweet soy milk right on the spot.

Our translator, Ziyeon, with the goods.

After we allowed the same stuff in the red bucket to settle for a while, it turned into this:

Sundubu (순두부), a thin kind of tofu often added to soups. More or less like Silken stuff back home, I believe.

Then, to turn it into the stuff we're used to - the the stuff that come in cubes and holds its shape more or less like Jello - we used this little contraption.

Everything is again poured into a bag, which is itself set inside a little wooden box. The box is closed, a weight is set on top, and left for a few hours. All the liquid drains out (it didn't occur to me to ask what they do with this) and the weight and frame mold the tofu into its eventual form.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we didn't have an hour to wait around. We headed right off to visit some perilla plants (separate post here) and some chickens (and here), all of which we ended up eating (parts of).

In case you're wondering what happens to the grit, worry not: on a conscientious farm, none of it goes to waste. There's a soup called 콩비지찌개 (Kongbiji Jjigae / Bean Grit Stew) that combines the grit with fermented soybean paste, chilli peppers, and a few other vegetables. The grit can also be used to make awesome kimchi pancakes, slightly thicker and more filling than ones made with flour. Or, it can be fed to animals or returned to the land as fertilizer.

All beautiful options. Though, of course, you can also just eat it straight:

Tanya enjoys getting fed by I don't know whom!

Mike

Applied Food Ethics at Joseon Village

Vegetarians, myself included, often think they have the market cornered when it comes to eating ethical. Killing is bad, causing suffering is bad, and being selfish is bad, so the less meat you eat, the better, end of story. While I do think that for the most part these premises are correct, and that the world would be a better place if everyone tried to keep such principles in mind while making decisions about food, much of my reading and living over the past two years has complicated my notions about what I ought to be eating. My experience at Joseon Village was no exception.

Joseon is the name of the dynasty that ruled over the Korean peninsula – North and South – between the end of the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. To quote from wikipedia, “The Joseon's rule has left a substantial legacy on the modern face of Korea; much of modern Korean etiquette, cultural norms, societal attitudes towards current issues, and even the modern Korean language and its dialects stem from the traditional thought patterns that originated from this period.” Andy was right on, then, when in his article about the traditional heating systems at Joseon Village he said that he felt we had been sent back in time.

Our bedrooms

We turned in pretty early the first night, having gorged ourselves for most of the day, so I woke up early, determined to explore and get in some good photos before our whirlwind food tour recommenced. As I ambled around, I made an effort to take in all the sights, sounds, and textures of the place. Maybe it's the lack of cars zooming around, or maybe it's the fact that there are no buildings so tall that I couldn't have climbed with my own bare hands; something about Joseon Village feels distinctly human. Things are small and simple: a rabbit hutch with ten inhabitants here, a stable with two cows there, a few chicken coops, some peppers out to dry, pots of fermenting vegetables and sauces. Tall trees, huge rice paddies - everything that's big is also natural, inspiring a sense calm awe and proper proportion. The TV camera guy started following me around, taking footage of me taking pictures of just about everything. He asked me how I felt, and I told him it was nice not to be surrounded by asphalt, concrete, plastic, and glass.

Still full from the previous day's escapades, we snacked lightly on apples, persimmons, and mandarins for breakfast, then got on with the day's work. The first stop was the kitchen, where we observed and helped out a bit with the process of making tofu (details in a separate post). Then we took a stroll and got to do a little hands-on work with perilla, one of my favorite substances on the planet (details also in a separate post). Next came perhaps the most intense experience of the tour, when the five of us told the crew that we wanted to be the ones to kill the chicken that would be prepared for our lunch.

This was the first experiment in food ethics. It's easy to say that we do or don't have the right to kill animals, but it's much harder to do look the issue in the face. Being present at, and being involved in, the moment of slaughter gives you a much truer connection to the feeling and meaning of the act, and furthers your insight into the questions of whether and under what circumstances the taking of innocent life may be justified. Greg, a former vegan and current "there's-no-name-for-this-but-I-try-to-consider-the-effects-of-all-my-food-choices," was the one who snapped the generous bird's neck. His thoughts and impressions can be found here.

After the kill, we dunked the chicken's lifeless body into hot water, swished it around for a minute or two, then pulled it out, plucked it, chopped off the feet and head, removed the organs, and sent it over to the kitchen to be made into Dakdoritang (Greg's post here), chicken soup in a spicy broth loaded with red pepper flakes, potatoes, onions, and other vegetables. We also had Baeksuk (Andy's post here), a milder chicken soup with a few more herbs, and a nice assortment of side dishes.

The highlight for me, though, was that I had the good fortune to sit down across to the owner/philosopher regent of the village, whom I had been thinking all day was just an eccentric who liked to pace around wearing odd hats.

I had had a funny, if tense, conversation with him earlier in the morning. As he walked by the five of us and our translator hanging out and messing around with tofu, we greeted him. Hoping to make a joke at our expense, he said, in Korean "You're in Korea now, you ought to be speaking our language." To which I replied, nonchalantly "OK, not a problem for me." He cracked a big smile, gave me an enthusiastic hand shake, asked me how I had gotten so good, and invited me to come back anytime.

We went our own separate ways for a while - that conversation actually took place before the chicken slaughter - but we started chatting a bit again when he sat down at the table. I asked if they grew all the food nearby, and he said of course, that he and a team of about eight others, including his wife, took care of it all. Then, thinking back to the time when I lived in a similar eco-village in India where we composted all our (human) waste, I asked him about the toilet system in his village. Somehow this really set him off (in a good way): he mentioned how they used to have a traditional composting system, where you just do your business into a big pit, but that city people weren't careful enough, and kept dropping their keys and cell phones in and demanding the staff go get it. They also apparently used to draw their water from a well, but the younger guests often took to dropping stuff in and ruining it for everybody. It also seemed to me that he mentioned something about someone committing suicide, but he was on such a roll that I couldn't stop and ask him for clarification. He continued, complaining that they used to serve real traditional Korean food, with different spices and with kimchi over a foot in length. In the old days, people would have stuffed the whole thing into their mouths; now, though, they want it cut up into bite-size pieces before it's plated. A lot of guests in the village even bring in their own snacks and ramen; if the The Chief (his name is written in Chinese characters on the business card, but I can't read it) sees them, he kicks them out, saying they clearly don't know how to appreciate his village. What a guy!

That was just the beginning. He went on to explain why he thinks that our general lack of appreciation for is a serious problem. Up until recently, most people spent a significant portion of their time working with food, either by sowing, harvesting, hunting, preserving, or preparing. Household relationships were also culinary ones; men, women, and children would each have their separate roles, and would work together towards the common goal of feeding one another. It was the man's responsibility to provide the food, the woman's responsibility to cook it, and the kids' responsibility to do whatever they could. This may sound a little sexist, but The Chief insisted that the system of obligations was mutual, and that different roles didn't mean different statuses. True, women were expected to cook; but, by the same token, men were required to return home to eat. Not eating a meal that had been cooked for you was as great a sin as not preparing a meal for your family in the first place. If a man missed a meal and wound up eating leftovers and complaining that they didn't taste great, shame on him for failing to place appropriate value on his wife's work and on the food itself. If a man was strong and wealthy, and his children in good health, then all credit would go to the woman, who was clearly feeding them well (in addition to all the other work she would have been doing to maintain the household).

This was all very interesting to my modern ears. I do have a few reservations about what he said. In particular, I doubt that men and women really need so many pre-defined expectations and set-in-stone rules in order to cooperate, and I wish that I had had the opportunity to talk to my two female teammates about the guy's speech. Still, every day I think about the ethical and environmental implications of what I eat and where it came from, but I find it harder to keep in mind that there's a whole 'nother dimension to the story, which The Chief got me thinking abotu: that my food choices and eating habits affect my family, my community, and spiraling outwards, my society as a whole.

Now, in our age of instant noodles and microwave pizzas and canned beverages, all of which are pumped full unpronounceable ingredients combined in factories using processes we can't imagine, from plants picked and planted by we don't know who, how is it possible to be authentically, deeply grateful for your food? Who can you look in the eyes and thank? Who can teach you the history and the meaning of what you eat? How much other knowledge is left for parents to pass down to their kids? And what pretext can bring the family together repeatedly, day after day, year after year? We often think that we're saving time, effort, and money when we pay others to do the majority of our food work. We're often right. But we also pay for this convenience with our health, with the health of our relationships, and with the health of our environment. I don't know what the answer is, exactly (edit: there's surely more than one answer), but I'm glad to have been given a chance to continue looking for it.

Mike