46 signature dishes from across South Korea — the stories, the flavours and where to eat them.
Rice cooked in beef broth, served in a brass bowl with more than thirty ingredients.
Coarsely minced beef pressed into patties and grilled over charcoal — Ulsan's own style of bulgogi.
Chewy rice cake sticks in a sweet-hot chilli sauce — Korea's national street food.
A deep-fried red bean bun and a crisp cream pastry — the reason people get off the train at Daejeon.
A bubbling pot of sour kimchi with pork and tofu — the most familiar home meal in Korea.
Milky pork bone broth over rice, seasoned at the table with salted shrimp and chives — a refugee's dish.
Glutinous rice steamed inside a fresh bamboo tube with chestnut and jujube.
Chicken braised in soy sauce with glass noodles, potato and dried chilli — one big pan for the table.
A young chicken stuffed with glutinous rice, ginseng and jujube, simmered in a stone pot — food for the hottest days.
Double-fried chicken with a thin, crackling crust, eaten with beer — Korea's Friday-night ritual.
Chicken stir-fried in chilli paste on a great iron pan with cabbage, sweet potato and rice cake — finished with fried rice.
Native black pork grilled over charcoal, dipped in warm anchovy sauce.
Plain rice rolls served with spicy squid and radish kimchi on the side.
Grilled beef intestine dipped in soybean paste — the definitive Daegu drinking food.
A table covered with twenty or thirty small dishes — the speciality of Korea's best-eating region.
Noodles in black chunjang sauce with pork and onion — a Chinese dish born in Incheon's Chinatown.
Large-cut beef ribs, lightly seasoned and charcoal-grilled so the meat speaks for itself.
Duck simmered with herbs and thickened with rice flour — the dish Gwangju is proudest of.
The Jinju version, with raw beef, seasonal greens and a small clam soup on the side.
Small walnut-shaped cakes filled with red bean and a piece of walnut — the classic travel snack.
A syrup-filled fried pancake, split open and packed with sunflower, pumpkin seeds and peanuts.
Paper-thin dumplings with almost no filling, pan-fried and dressed in a spicy sauce.
Octopus caught by hand on the mudflats — eaten raw, grilled, or in a spicy soup.
Chewy potato-starch dumplings in a vegetable broth — filling food from the Gangwon mountains.
Hot bean sprout soup poured over rice with a poached egg — Jeonju's morning hangover cure.
A daily stew of fermented soybean paste with tofu and courgette, made from paste aged a whole year.
Freshwater snail soup with soybean paste and greens — the hangover cure of landlocked Chungbuk.
Rice porridge cooked with abalone and its liver, which gives it a distinctive green tint.
Golden, silky pumpkin porridge dotted with small rice cake balls.
Fish cake on skewers dipped in hot broth — a winter snack nationwide, originally from Busan.
Silver cutlassfish braised with radish and courgette in chilli — the classic Jeju fish dish.
Mackerel salted on the road from the sea into the mountains — a preservation method that became a delicacy.
Fermented skate eaten with boiled pork and kimchi — the most divisive dish on a Korean table.
Rice cooked with oysters from the Seosan tidal flats, mixed with soy and spring onion before eating.
Seaweed rice rolls with egg, carrot and pickled radish — every family's packed lunch.
Slivers of raw fish in an ice-cold sweet-sour broth, drunk like soup on a hot day.
Oysters farmed in a sheltered bay — eaten raw, grilled, or cooked into stone-pot rice.
Cloudy rice wine drunk from a bowl — order one kettle and a table of food arrives with it.
Hand-cut noodles in anchovy or seafood broth — Daejeon has a whole street of them.
Buckwheat noodles tossed cold with kimchi and cucumber in chilled broth — Gangwon's summer dish.
Busan's take on cold noodles: softer wheat strands, a sweeter broth, shaved ice on top.
Garlic grown on limestone soil — roasted, fried in batter or stewed with chicken.
Fresh squid stuffed with vegetables and glass noodles, steamed and sliced — a Sokcho fish-market speciality.
Beef ribs braised with a fistful of garlic and coarse chilli — searing, and impossible to stop eating.
Sliced boiled pork belly wrapped in cabbage leaves with radish kimchi and salted shrimp.
Tea from Korea's largest plantation — brewed hot, churned into ice cream, even mixed into rice.