You’d be hard-pressed to find anything that’s quite as fulfilling as digging into a culinary experiment and finding it to be a success. Being able to determine which flavors will go well together is a gift that not everyone is born with, and for many, it takes years of trial and error, of discovering different tastes and combinations, to finally be able to say that they have a solid grasp of even just the basics.
This is especially true for Korean cuisine, with its myriad of strong, intense flavors and subtle, delicate fragrances. Korean food is as rich and complex as the culture it embodies, and to be able to know the many flavors that function in this cuisine is already difficult enough – let alone trying to cook with them. A great game of bingo, however, could help you learn to work with these flavors.
Modifications to the traditional 75-ball bingo card, a 5×5 chart of numbers. Each spot on the chart presents a number, apart from the center square, which is labeled “FREE”, have been used to create bingo cards for different activities and events. Free Bingo Hunter, a website dedicated to online bingo portals, has reported that bingo portals often vary the themes of their games and promotions, with some giving away Flowers for Mother’s Day and then tickets to games during football season. It’s this versatility that helps bingo lend itself to different themes. In fact, bingo has even been used to teach the Korean vocabulary, through an app available on iTunes.
Cooking and learning new Korean dishes can be fun and having to use the Recipe Bingo can double the fun. Playing Recipe Bingo to create your own Korean fusion dishes is easy. As many of you know from following My Korean Kitchen, Korean cuisine combines colored ingredients because of a belief that they make it easier to absorb nutrients into the body. Korean cuisine follows a five-color, five-taste formula, and it is this formula that gives rise to our bingo game.
The five essential tastes are as follows:
• Sweet
• Sour
• Salty
• Hot
• Bitter
A perfect example of a dish that makes use of all of these tastes is bibimbap, but these can also be apparent in other classic Korean dishes. To prepare for your bingo game, list down five ingredients for each of the five essential tastes. Create your bingo card using any of the free bingo card templates available online, with each row being dedicated to one essential taste. Label each of the items on each row a number from 1-5.
Once you’re ready, roll a die. The number you roll corresponds to the ingredient you need to use in your Korean dish. Should you roll a six, you are free to choose among the ingredients, or add your own choice of ingredient even if it isn’t on the card. Allow yourself to experiment with different techniques, and you might be pleasantly surprised by the results of your Recipe Bingo game.
It Started with Hangul 