A Toast to Korea
Yangnyeom sauce finds the spotlight.
Korean food is spectacular. If you don’t know this then you must go find some now. Layers of spicy funk drape over your palette and play notes you never knew existed. It’s salty, earthy, sweet, and hot. If Korean cuisine were a drummer it would be Carter Beauford – it elicits perfect joy but you have no idea how it did it.
Lawson is celebrating Korean cuisine with a number of new items from chicken to onigiri to chicken.
This L-Chiki is draped in yangnyeom sauce. According to Wikipedia, “yangnyeom” means “seasoned”, so “yangnyeom chicken” means “seasoned chicken”. But such a simple term belies the complexity of this sauce. I mean, just look at this pile of bone-in fried seasoned chicken from Korean fried chicken chain Pelicana. Just slather that all over my body and embalm me. Eternal happiness achieved!
I’m new to the yangnyeom game but it seems like the cook is able to riff. So long as you slap in some gochujang and pair it with sweet (e.g. strawberry jam) and salty (e.g. soy sauce) you’re on the right track.
Here’s a recipe from an awesome Korean homecooking food blog called Korean Bapsang. Warning, NSFW photos appear!
Back to the L-Chiki. Will this live up to the promise of this great sauce? I doubt it. Will it be good? Probably. But I think the best thing for us all to do is to make the real deal sauce at home, then dip a plain L-Chiki into the sauce.
Now I’m just getting aroused. It’s time to move on.
My arousal has brought me to hot dogs! Or has it?
Here we have yangnyeom chicken blanketed in melted cheese and stuffed inside a hot dog bun. While this looks delightful, Lawson should have gone full-on hot dog. This is because all Korean sauces should be poured on everything. There are no limits. The riffing should never stop. Why stick with chicken when using a hot dog bun? This sauce would make a hot dog sparkle! Relish and onion? Forget it. Mustard? No way. We’re in a new era – the Korean yangnyeom hot dog era.
Bibimbap is the ultimate rice bowl. Here in America, bowls are all the rage. I’m not sure why because they all kinda suck. Most are full of avocado and kale while lightly sauced and costing $15. Meanwhile, Bibimbap is a trip to flavortown with pickles, spicy sauce, sliced beef, egg, and all sorts of other magical things.
Lawson has stuffed that magic into a rice ball. This is genius. Who wouldn’t want to eat bibimpap on the go? In fact, this should be a standard onigiri available all the time everywhere. It would immediately join the umeboshi and tuna mayo onigiri at the top of the riceball hierarchy. But I doubt this will happen because of how many ingredients go into it, which would place understandable challenges on production.
But one can dream!
Conbini Art
FamilyMart has unleashed a pudding parfait for the ages. Starting from the bottom we have custard pudding, caramel jelly, pudding mousse, sponge cake, whipped cream, and a custard pudding.
Dear lord.
Amazingly, this is not the first time this pudding parfait has appeared. Life Magazine featured it in an ad from an issue dated to 1900.
From the Dumpster
While the smart people at Lawson were playing with Korean food, the dumb people were playing with ramen. Fourth-grade engineers that management restricts to Easy-Bake Ovens dreamt up a “burger” where the buns are globby ramen noodles. Chashu pork, bamboo shoots, and soft-boiled eggs are stuffed between. And they halted the celebration of Korean cooking by brushing these noodle buns in gochujang-garlic sauce. It’s like sitting Carter Beauford behind a kit at a middle school punk band’s second jam session.
What a disgrace.
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