September 19

The delights of rice

On our way to the Deogyusan National Park we pass several rice paddies in different stages of growth; the colours of the fields vary from green to yellow. The harvest of the famous Korean grain starts half September and we find ourselves in the middle of it. At Paul and Elizabeth's home we experienced some of the main symbol of this harvest: the Chusok festival.

Chusok, which starts on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the moon calendar, is Korea's Harvest Festival. Just like millions of others, Paul took Elizabeth and their children to his ancestral home to commemorate and honour his ancestors by offering rice and fruit of the new harvest at the their tombs. The celebrations start when the brothers and sisters with their families come together and make songphyun, special cakes made from fresh rice, sesame seeds, beans and hazelnuts. Then a commemoration dinner is served, accompanied by several kinds of rice wine.

For centuries Korea's culture has been formed around the growing, harvesting and processing of rice. Important traditions, rituals and festivals evolve around rice, which has been cultivated on the peninsula for over three thousand years. It is the grain connecting heaven and earth. Rice is the staple food of every Korean, from breakfast to dinner, from snack to wine.
Over thirty years ago there were famines and a huge unemployment in the country. Many Koreans didn't have money to buy rice. There was of a lack of seed in the country, the rice harvests were meagre, rice was hard to come by.
Since then Korea has developed into a prosperous country. The prosperity has a flipside though: industrialisation, growing urban areas and decreasing profits cause the arable lands to be restricted more and more. This has resulted in growing imports of grain and soybeans. If this trend goes on, Korea will change from a rice exporting to a rice importing country.

At the present we world cyclists do not perceive a lot of the problems dawning at Korea’s horizon. As far as the eye can see there are rice fields, rice terraces, scythe touting women filling baskets with rice stalks with their bare hands and men, seated on small threshing machines, harvesting metres of rice at a time. The threshing machines pump the golden grains into waiting trucks, after which the harvest is dried in the sun. Every free metre of the narrow country roads is covered with scrim, on which the precious kernels are spread. Every hour elderly men and women turn the rice with wooden rakes.

Some close shorn fields are littered with harvested stalks, in other fields we see small groups of stalks neatly tied in to bushels drying in the sun. Yet another field is covered in bales of rice stalks or plasticised rolls filled with threshed grain stalks. Everything is rice, everywhere is rice, Korea is rice.

Korean rice is not only beautiful to look at as the crop slowly ripens on the fields or delicious to eat boiled as part of a meal or puffed as a snack. Korean rice is also divine as a drink, a fact Koreans are aware of like no other.
Around six hundred recipes to brew wine from rice have been handed down from generation to generation; nowadays some one hundred fifty of those have been commercially developed into mass products.
The two most popular kinds of rice wine are called soju and takju, the latter is better known as makgeolli. Soju is a clear wine with an alcohol percentage of around 20%; makgeolli is a white milky substance with a alcohol percentage of 6%.
In ancient times soju was considered to be a luxurious and high quality drink, mainly because relatively much rice is needed to produce a litre of it. Therefore the end product was often used as medicine. The medicinal effects attributed to the drink were improvement of blood circulation, improvement of appetite and lessening of tiredness. Peter doesn't need any of these reasons to take this inexpensive medicine in a tight and regular regime.
In the past alcohol was not only looked upon as a tasty drink with agreeable side effects, but was also considered to be food, an impulse for many to take as much of it as they could.
A neat philosophy, to which Peter readily adheres.

We are not sure whether soju and makgeolli are easy available in the rest of the world, we haven't been everywhere yet. It wouldn't be very social to withhold these delights from you, the reader, and of course the medicinal effects of the stuff. Because who is not tired? And a good appetite and blood circulation will hurt nobody, will it?

Therefore we present you with the recipes of Korea's two most popular drinks. We wish all of you heaps of delight and at first a lot of patience.

Recipe for soju and makgeolli:

Step 1
Start by making rice malt. For this purpose mix rice flour with water, knead it into a compact ball.

Step 2
Let the ball ferment for six months, until it is covered in mould.

Step 3
Mix the dough with rice or another grain and water, store it in an earthen pot.

Step 4
Let the mixture yeast again, for between 3 until maximum 100 days.

Step 5
When everything went well, the colour of the fluid is bright yellow, on the bottom of the pot a deposit has formed. This is the basis of rice wine, called yakju. It has an alcohol percentage of around 16%.

Step 6
To make makgeolli: mix the deposit with water and filter it through a sieve.

Step 7
To make soju: distil the fluid and Bob's your uncle.

Chukbae!
Cheers!