www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2005-03-02/food.html
Hot Dog Where waiters and diners tell tales It's easy to spend an hour in Koreana Plaza's deli section peering at the cooler shelves. They're a cabinet of curiosities, filled with rows of c lear plastic tubs containing a colorful, peculiar assortment of snacks - - danger-sign red kimchi, translucent jade seaweed, black stewed sesame leaves. Tight lids and terse English labels ("boiled beans," "Japan cucu mber") give no hint of the smells sealed inside. The quality of the food you get in supermarket delis runs from haute to b arely edible. But if you're looking for inexpensive, sometimes healthful , and always wildly flavorful fast food, wander through the East Bay's K orean and Thai markets. For the price of a burger and fries you can pick up pickled daikon, coconut-scallion pancakes, or fish mousse. I first discovered Korean market food almost a decade ago, when a friend pointed out the sushi and marinated cuttlefish being sold at a market ne ar the restaurant where I cooked, on the edge of San Francisco's Korean neighborhood. Once one of our waiters discovered that the markets also s old raw, marinated bulgogi and spicy chicken, staff barbecues went fusio n Those San Francisco markets had nothing on the Koreana Plaza -- formerly Pusan Plaza -- which sells everything you need to cook Korean meals, fro m wok to garnish. The deli counter starts to your left when you enter, a nd stretches around into a bakery and butcher shop. Three bucks will get you a couple of six-inch rolls of this Korean sushi, enough for a hefty lunch. Instead of rolling nori and rice around small strips of raw fish, Koreana's kimbap makers craft thick, futomaki-like rolls filled with a jewelbox of lemon-yellow pickled daikon, julienned carrot, spinach leaves, and (cooked) beef, so flavorful you can dispense with the soy sauce. Next to the kimbap are St yrofoam trays of fritters and pancakes. As Koreana's selection shows, Ko reans will dip just about everything in mung-bean or egg batters -- zucc hini slices, small coins of whitefish fillet, fake crab -- and drop them onto the griddle in tangerine-sized rounds. Other meal-sized bites are the deep-fried chicken wing "drummettes," fished from the oil and tossed in a sweet glaze, or p lastic-wrapped trays of peppery, soy-seasoned jap chae, a stir-fry of sp ringy yam noodles, beef, and vegetables, made recently enough that the n oodles haven't had a chance to stiffen up. An octopus salad dressed in a flashy sesame oil and rice-wine vinaigrette disappeared fast. Many of Koreana Plaza's pint-sized plastic containers are stocked with pa nchan, the infinite variety of pickled, gelled, and fried side dishes th at crowd the tables at Korean restaurants. Half of the market's selectio n will be familiar to anyone who has eaten up and down Telegraph Avenue, such as the halogen-white radish threads pickled in sweetened rice vine gar or the pan-Asian seaweed salad, a mess of clear, crunchy green and w hite tendrils tossed in sesame oil. Japanese pickles t he size of my middle finger were brined in so much salt that my tongue c urled away from them, a primordial instinct. So were the fragrant sesame leaves, whose soapy flavor I've grown to like, but not when it's masked by a red-miso salt rub. Not to my taste, but for a couple of bucks a tub, hey, it's all worth a try . Saturday mornings, Lisa Sarakul, owner of Sairoong Thai, clears off some counter space in this tiny market in the Pacific East Mall. Her shop is packed tightly with imported handicrafts, Thai videos and karaoke disks, and condiments and snacks, but on weekends she makes room for a few row s of freshly made snacks, entres, and desserts, many of them made by ne arby restaurants Krung Thep and Phuping Thai. On any given weekend day, you can find twenty or so different little dish es at Sairoong Thai, all packed up neatly in clear plastic tubs. Though I've eaten at both Krung Thep and Phuping, I didn't see most of these di shes on their menus. And you won't, Sarakul confirmed, because these are Thai snacks for Thai snackers. Several friends and I loaded up with $45 worth of containers -- more than enough food for five. The strangest of them all was a cup full of soft, slippery green rice-fl our dumplings the size of stretched-out mini marshmallows. We poured a s weet coconut-sugar syrup into the cup and spooned the wriggly, squishy n oodles into our mouths. I loved the texture, but the grassy flavor of pa ndan juice (the source of the green color) stopped me after a few bites. Another dessert, diamonds of translucent yuca-root paste dipped in enou gh shaved coconut to make them look like flokati rug samples, didn't hav e much going for them other than their jelly-like texture and sugary tas te. Some of the dishes at Sairoong were clearly meant to be eaten fresher and hotter. The hormok, a fish mousse steamed in banana-leaf bowls, looked like fish cupcakes frosted in coconut-cream and red pepper slices. A spe ll in the microwave definitely improved the mousse, but it lacked some o f the vibrancy of other versions I've tried. Though it tasted great, cat fish fried in a chile-flavored oil had been fried so hard that it was di fficult to pluck the tough meat away from the tiny bones that radiated t hroughout the cross-slices of fish. And a grilled, marinated chicken leg with sticky rice dried out on the shelf. Still, the chicken came with a puckery, bright-orange dip of chiles, vine gar, and scallions that was nothing like the supersweet syrup that I've been served with grilled meats at other Thai restaurants. And even the m ost familiar dish of all, pork belly with green beans, was coated in a t hick spice paste that was more potently perfumed with lemongrass then mo st versions I've eaten. As I duck-walked to the counter balancing teetering stacks of plastic con tainers, one of the regulars followed me, carrying one small tub of tapi oca dumplings. We wrapped the balls of pressed tapioca pearls in the cilantro sp rigs that covered them, flushing our mouths with the herb's clean scent before it gave way to a sweet, meaty filling of ground pork, peanuts, an d preserved radish. My friends and I preferred the custardy, sweet-salty appeal of little pancakes made with coconut milk, flour, and green onio ns. And I couldn't stop popping jerky-like strips of deep-fried beef gla zed in garlic and fish sauce into my mouth. The find of the day was a coconut-milk stew of ground pork, lemon leaves, and pickled pea-sized eggplants. The creamy, chile-laced sauce simultan eously brightened and softened the herbaceous taste of the leaves, which gave off only the faintest scent of citrus, and the eggplants burst in the mouth with a sour pop. Like so many of the other foods Sairoong Thai sells on weekends, the dish may have been made to console homesick Thai s But one person's snack is another person's adventure.
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