In May, Ven. Hongseung made a two-week trip to Paris to participate in a “Taste of Paris” event where she introduced Korean temple food.

The annual event features pop-up restaurants operated by renowned French chefs and a massive food expo attended by world-class food and beverage industry players.

Ven. Hongseung demonstrated how to cook a new temple food dish every day at the “Taste Korea!” booth operated jointly by the Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism and Korean Culture Center in France.

Visitors crowded the booth to sample temple food prepared by a Buddhist nun. The amount of food prepared daily amounted to about 1,000 portions on average. All dishes were enthusiastically received, including Korean mint jangtteok (gochujang pancakes fried in perilla oil), noodles in soy milk broth— a summer delicacy at temples—and sweet-and-sour stuffed cucumber kimchi.

After the event, Ven. Hongseung held a banquet for distinguished guests and a lecture at Le Cordon Bleu Paris.

About her first foreign travel to promote temple food, she said, “It was physically tiring, but the response of the visitors and the people on site was so great that I was able to forget about my fatigue.”

“I was worried about using gochujang (Korean hot pepper paste) at first because I thought Westerners were not used to spicy foods, but to my surprise, they relished it. They also liked the temple-style kimchi we brought from Korea. In particular, French chefs found it surprising that we seasoned some dishes only with soy sauce and salt. You know, many Western dishes use a lot of spices. They were surprised and asked me, ‘How do you make food taste so good using such simple ingredients and seasonings?’”

[Jangtteok with soybean sprouts]

Replete with vitamin C and aspartic acid, soybean sprouts help detoxify alcohol, and the dietary fiber helps improve intestinal health.

Ordinary households use them in seasoned vegetable dishes or soup, but temples also use them as ingredients in jangtteok. The texture of the soybean sprouts and the spicy seasoning is quite pleasing.

Ingredients

- 1 bag soy bean sprouts

- 1 cup flour

Seasonings

- 2 tbsp gochujang

- 1 cup vegetable stock

- cooking oil

- salt

Directions

1. Trim and wash the soybean sprouts. Blanch them and cut them into 1-centimeter lengths as if to mince them.

2. Add gochujang to the vegetable stock, and make a thick batter by adding flour.

3. Add soy bean sprouts to the batter and mix well. Put a spoonful of batter into a pan and make pancakes.

Provided by Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism

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Temple food is the food of the ascetics. They express gratitude for all forms of life and wish peace for the whole world. The Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism operates the Korean Temple Food Center, where guests can learn and experience temple food. -- Ed.