This week's episode had me pretty excited because they tackled two of my favorite cuisines which isn't featured on TV very often: Vietnamese and Korean!
Since I'm Korean, I have quite a bit to say about Team Korea's dishes. Each team was supposed to do one hot dish and one cold dish. The hot dish was fine, Korean BBQ with kimchi and rice, but deciding to do a dessert for their cold dish was just baffling to me. I know that Marisa is a pastry chef and she wanted to put her skills to use, but that dish was as far from being Korean as I could imagine. Koreans do enjoy desserts, but they've imported most of that from the Western world, and a custard is definitely not traditional. Their ingredients, jasmine tea, tapioca, and lychee, weren't Korean either. Besides which, the hallmark of Korean cuisine is banchan, those side dishes that come with every meal, most of which are cold. Make some banchan, people!
I guess I don't really blame the chefs for not having intimate knowledge of Korean cuisine, and I get that they were supposed to put their own twist on it, but they were instructed to make Korean food (and not just Asian-inspired), so I was surprised that the judges didn't call out the dessert for being completely off the mark. Although I guess it didn't matter because the dish was a disaster anyway.
I also found it funny that they were trying to make their own kimchi. Not too many people do that anymore, they buy it from the store. But there are many varieties of kimchi that people do make at home because they're "fresh" and don't need to be fermented. And what was up with the rice? Did they not have a rice cooker in their Kenmore kitchen?
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