Day 261, December 2, 2020

 Sprouts

Today's soundtrack: The Imagine Project, Montreal Jazz Festival 2010 featuring Herbie Hancock, Vinnie Colaiuta, Tal Wilkenfeld, Lionel Loueke, Greg Phillinganes, Kristina Train (This concert is phenomenal! I need to watch it again!)

For a typical traditional thanksgiving, at my parents' house, there is usually a large spread of Korean food (japchae, haepari-naengchae, bindaettok, kimchee, dotorimuk, and more) along with a salad, turkey, roast beef, cranberry sauce, and gravy. This year, since we were all apart, we had thanksgiving on our own and my thought was to make bindaettok as my contribution to the meal and bringing a bit of my culture and tradition to the table.

I don't know if it is because my mung beans are too old, or maybe the kimchee I used was too old, or because I used bacon instead of pork, if I got something else wrong, but my bindaettok were mere facsimiles, more like mimeographs of the real thing.

One of the ingredients in bindaettok can be kongnamul (soybean) sprouts. Kongamul sprouts from the Asian grocery can be very temperamental. It is hard to tell how old the sprouts are, and more often than not, the sprouts go bad before you have a chance to use them. In my inspiration to be a real-Korean, I decided to try and grow my own kongnamul sprouts for the bindaettok. Sadly, I didn't time it right so they didn't make it into the recipe. But it is just as well because, it turns out that, no matter how easy it seems on cooking YouTube videos, it is harder than it seems to grow a lush field of soybeans. Using nothing more than a strainer some of the YouTube cooks can grow something that looks as lush as a Chia Pet, but with yellow sprouts.

The trick, it seems, is to wet the seeds every three hours in the sink, rinse out the old water, pick through all the broken or rotting seeds, and care for them like little babies that can't see sunlight (so you cover them with towels). It is a labor intensive process, clearly, and one that takes close precision with fingers and small objects.

I think my first error was that I started by germinating too many seeds, then I had a whole tray full of kongnamul that were packed tightly together and it was hard to find all the broken ones, the ones that were misshapen or off color, and it took too long to pick out the ones that were going bad so that I let in too much light and lost some of the bright yellow that is the hallmark of kongnamul. 

My first field of soybeans were somewhat sparsely picked from the tray from among a largely forlorn crop of duds that were in various stages of softening and dissolving into mush. I ended up with a small banchan sized bowl that I made into kongnamul muchim, and even that wasn't quite right. Maybe I didn't cook the kongnamul long enough?

So I'm trying again. I started with fewer seeds, and instead of following the videos, I'm following the vague instructions that came with my seed sprouting tray. It is a little more passive, but you do keep a pool of water in the bottom of the tray. So far it seems to be going a little better and on day two I already have some little tails, and there have only been a couple of spills on the kitchen counter. I figure, by the end of the pandemic, I will be a passable kongnamul farmer. There are worse things to aspire, I suppose. 

I heard some sad news tonight about a friend. So I'm sending out love to you all and recognize how hard things are for people right now.

Take care and be well,

Leo

Second Try