The ancestral memorial service is the central event of Chuseok, Korea’s most important holiday. It’s a complex affair, and many Koreans are unsure about the principles for setting out the Chuseok ritual table or the procedure for the service and just follow what others do. Here, the Chosun Ilbo explains the correct procedure in easy-to-follow steps.

◆ How to set out the Chuseok ritual table

Make five rows on the table. In the first row from the folding screen, place songpyon, goblets, spoons and chopsticks. In the second row, place grilled and seasoned meat or fish (jeok) and pan-fried dishes (jeon). In the third row, put soup, in the fourth row, slices of dried meat or fish and seasoned vegetables and in the fifth row, fruit in odd numbers. The principles may vary from region to region or from family to family, but the following seven principles are common. Remember, however, the most important thing is sincerity in preparing the dishes.

Assuming that the ancestral tablet is the north: △ Red fruit should be put in the east and white fruit in the west. △ Place jujube, chestnuts, pears and persimmons in that order from the left. You can change the order of pears and persimmons. △ Put beef jerky on the left, and shikhye (an authentic Korean drink made from fermented rice) on the right. △ Place kimchi in the east and seasoned and steamed greens in the west. △ Place meat in the west and fish in the east. △ Let the fish face east with its tail in the west. △ Put rice in the west and soup in the east.

◆ Some baffling traditions explained

Cut off the top and the bottom of fruit. An official from the liturgical committee at the SungKyunkwan University explains, “The basic principle is to peel the fruit, but after peeling the fruits, the colors change, so it is recommended to cut off only some parts.” Cutting off the top and bottom also makes it easier to pile them up. Soy sauce should be served on the table in case the ancestors feel dishes are insufficiently seasoned.

No kalchi (hairtail), samchi (a kind of mackerel) or kongchi (saury) should be served on the table. In Korea, fish, whose names end with “chi” are considered negative, and they can also smell bad. Nor should peaches appear on the table, since Korean spirits don’t like peach trees. Spicy seasonings such as powdered red pepper, garlic and green onions should not be included in the dishes for the Chuseok ritual table. But an official from the National Folk Museum of Korea adds, “The ancestral memorial service aims to honor our ancestors, so it is permissible to put dishes that they enjoyed in their life on the table.”

◆ The ceremony

1. Place the paper ancestral tablet on the altar and fumigate the altar with incense. The head of the family, who leads the service, pours liquor into the goblet three times, and bows twice. 2. Everyone bows twice. 3. Pour liquor for each ancestor and put chopsticks over the songpyon. 4. All should leave the room for a while or lie on their faces after shielding the table by setting up a folding screen in order for the souls of ancestors to eat the food. 5. Remove chopsticks. After everyone bows again, the service is over. 6. Burn the ancestral tablet. Then everyone may eat and praise the ancestors’ virtues.

(englishnews@chosun.com )

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NYT
October 7, 2009

Fried Chicken: A Migratory Bird

CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH. Clockwise from top left: a platter of Old Bay seasoned and Korean style chicken at Momofuku Noodle Bar; Tebaya; Tebaya’s karaage chicken; Momofuku; Tebaya’s sesame wings; Koji Okamoto of Tebaya. More Photos >

THE religion of Southern fried chicken is spreading fast in New York City, with pilgrims making stops at the Redhead in the East Village, Locanda Verde in TriBeCa and Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

But while adherents may argue about buttermilk or brine, batter or dredge and shallow fry or deep fry, dissenters say there’s a more fundamental question — is Southern fried chicken ever that inspiring?

“Without seasoning it, without chopping it, fried chicken has no flavor at all,” said Eddie Yee, the manager of the Congee Village restaurant in Chinatown, where the hacked crispy garlic chicken is suffused with spice, crunch and sweetness.

At the two Fatty Crab restaurants, Corwin Kave’s fried chicken with Thai chilies, an occasional special, is a thin-crusted, spice-rubbed project that takes five days, begins in a steam oven and ends in a wok, and is flavored with turmeric, fennel seed, ginger, fish sauce and smoked simple syrup. Of the thick-crusted genre, Mr. Kave, the restaurants’ chef, said, “That’s just junk food.”

Southern fried chicken is usually seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper. Once that fabulous crust is gone, it’s hard to ignore that the big hunks of breast are often as dry and woolly as fiberglass insulation, and the moister parts have a caul of flabby skin under the crust.

But around the city, from Creole kitchens to Japanese wing joints to carbon copies of Korean fast food, there’s far more to taste in fried chicken than just crust. (Warning: MSG ahead.)

At Congee Village, Mr. Yee and the chef Yong Quan Yang have spent years developing their recipe, which now involves rubbing a whole chicken with white vinegar and malt syrup; seasoning the inside of the bird — this, Mr. Yee says, is essential — with five-spice powder, poultry seasoning, ginger and garlic; then hanging it in front of a fan to dry the skin (as is done for Peking duck), for about five hours. Then it’s deep-fried whole, while a glaze of sugar, Thai fish sauce, sesame oil, white pepper and soy sauce is combined with slices of deep-fried garlic. The whole bird is hacked into pieces and the garlic glaze poured on top, where it slides off the crisp skin and saturates the meat.

That Congee Village chicken is one of the birds that inspired the chef David Chang to pose a challenge to all the cooks in his empire last summer: come up with a fried chicken dinner worthy of the Momofuku name.

“It was a long, arduous month,” said Kevin Pemoulie, chef at Momofuku Noodle Bar, whose dark-meat double-fried pieces, brushed with a spicy Korean-influenced glaze, was one of two winners. “It gave me new insight into the deep fryer.”

Mr. Pemoulie said the chefs tried various types of flour, multiple fryings, turning the batter into foam, and adding vodka to it (that idea stuck). Sean Gray of Ssam Bar tried to even out the cooking time between light meat and dark by resting a whole bird, legs down, in a pot half-filled with bubbling oil (“Jacuzzi style,” Mr. Pemoulie said).

The final meal — available by reservation only, a few times daily, at Noodle Bar — is a vast feed that includes Mr. Pemoulie’s chicken and one by Peter Serpico, chef at Momofuku Ko, a relatively traditional American fried chicken with a bit of rice flour in the batter and a big salty shot of Old Bay seasoning. (Celery seed and paprika dominate the flavors.) The mountain of chicken is accompanied to the table by four sauces; house-made Chinese-style mu shu pancakes for wrapping; and a bowl of raw vegetables like baby carrots, radishes and fushimi peppers, plus leaves of shiso, basil and mint.

Others have taken a more direct route to packing flavor into fried chicken.

“Fried chicken is completely traditional to our generation,” said Koji Okamoto, the 39-year-old chef and owner of Tebaya, a Japanese chicken-wing specialist in Chelsea. Although Japan’s culinary lexicon did not include deep frying until the Portuguese introduced it in the 16th century, the country now has at least three distinct fried chicken styles: katsu, with super-crisp panko or bread crumbs, is used for pounded breasts; karaage, ginger-and-garlic-marinated thighs in a light, puffy crust of sweet-potato starch; and Nagoya-style tebasaki, or wings.

That’s Mr. Okamoto’s specialty. His are tossed in a bath of soy sauce, mirin (sweet rice wine), black pepper and sesame seeds, after not one but two trips to the deep fryer. “The first frying seals the flavors in,” Mr. Okamoto said. “And the second one makes it crisp outside.”

Mr. Okamoto is from Nagoya, but his family is Korean, and his super-peppered wings recipe bears a distinct resemblance to the spicy Korean fried chicken that has become popular in New York since it was introduced around 2006.

Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, the author of “Quick and Easy Korean Cooking,” said fried chicken became popular in Korea when fast-food places opened there after the war. “It fit into the family of Korean food called anju — specifically, something you eat with alcohol,” she said Monday in an interview from Seoul.

The original American formula has been altered to good effect, with less breading and the addition of spicy and sweet glazes that season the crisp skin. There are countless chicken chains and neighborhood places in Seoul, she said, each with fans that support the extra garlic here, the chili heat there, and extra sesame seeds across town. In New York, a great place to try it is Kyochon, in Flushing, where the skin is potato-chip-crisp and the sauces not too sweet.

American fried chicken has also been reworked in the Philippines, and exported back to New York. King Phojanakong, the chef at Kuma Inn and the new Umi Nom, in Brooklyn, serves fried wings tossed with roasted salt and lots of black pepper, sprinkled with fish sauce and thin slices of fresh green chili.

Mr. Phojanakong, a native New Yorker, has been spending summers with family in the Philippines since he was a child. He says that the region around Silay City is known for its birds, which are all, by default, free range and organic. The traditional marinade for them includes garlic, fermented fish sauce, lemon grass and palm vinegar, and the Umi Nom wings recall that balance of funky, salty and sweet.

“My favorite place is called Manukan Country, or Chicken Country,” he said. “No one finds it strange that there are 30 chicken vendors under one roof.” The dish is so popular that it has its own slang — “PAL” is the word for chicken wings, because it’s the acronym for Philippine Airlines; “Adidas” is used for chicken feet, a popular street snack.

The global question when it comes to fried chicken is: how to deal with the skin? Chicken skin is full of collagen and fat, both of which hug moisture that keeps it from getting, and staying, crisp.

“The skin should be absolutely dry and taut to the flesh before you fry it,” Mr. Kave said. “The best way to keep chicken skin crisp is to not put anything on it at all,” said Harold McGee, the food scientist. “But that wouldn’t fit many people’s idea of good fried chicken.”

Batters add moisture; sweet potato, cornstarch and rice flour look similar but create different effects in the fryer.

“The most important variable we found wasn’t ingredients but temperature,” said Mr. Pemoulie: a few degrees each way in the fryer substantially changed the result. In other words, fried chicken is a highly complex amalgamation of muscle and bone, fat and flour. It’s no wonder that chefs like Andrew Carmellini and Jean-Georges Vongerichten are stooping to conquer it.

But restaurants that plume themselves on pristine, freshly fried chicken are missing the point: the stuff tastes best at least an hour out of the fryer. Find a place where the chicken is fried in batches but there’s plenty of turnover, like Mambí, a 24-hour Dominican cafe near the Broadway stanchions of the George Washington Bridge.

(Mambí is the kind of place where the toilet paper dispenser is padlocked, but the counter ladies nonetheless call everyone “amor.”)

One of the cooks, Carina Mejía, marinates chicken pieces — none bigger than a handball — in garlic, lime juice, black pepper and sazón Goya, the all-purpose Latin-Caribbean mix of MSG, cumin, coriander seed and annatto. Savory and crunchy, with a warm brown-and-burnt-orange crust, it could give rise to its own religion — with a cult of lime wedges and pink pickled onion rings on the side.

Finding Crunch Beyond Kentucky

Some of New York’s best (non-Southern) fried chicken dishes:

CONGEE VILLAGE 100 Allen Street (Delancey Street), (212) 941-1818, congeevillagerestaurants.com. House special crispy garlic chicken: whole, $18; half, $9.

FATTY CRAB UPPER WEST SIDE 2170 Broadway (76th and 77th Street), (212) 496-2722, fattycrab.com. Fried chicken with Thai chilies and smoked palm sugar is an occasional special, $22 to $25, depending on the kind of chicken.

KYOCHON 156-50 Northern Boulevard (157th Street), Flushing, Queens, (718) 939-9292. Original and spicy versions; $19.59 for a whole chicken.

MAMBí 4181 Broadway (177th Street), Washington Heights, (212) 928-9796. Pollo frito, served with rice and beans; $9.35.

MOMOFUKU NOODLE BAR 171 First Avenue (10th Street), East Village, (212) 777-7773, momofuku.com. Fried chicken dinner, by online reservation; two chickens and unlimited sides, $100.

TEBAYA 144 West 19th Street (Seventh Avenue), Chelsea, (212) 924-3335. Fried wings in black-pepper soy sauce; $5.75 for eight.

UMI NOM 433 DeKalb Avenue (Classon Avenue), Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, (718) 789-8806, uminom.com. Salt-and-pepper wings with Anaheim chilies; $10.

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Preservation Plan Slated for Royal Tombs

The Cultural Heritage Administration announced Wednesday a W490 billion project to preserve and manage 40 Chosun-era royal tombs which were collectively registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site in June (US$1=W1,179). During the registration process UNESCO recommended that Korea draw up measures to preserve the tomb areas in their original states and to protect the buffer zones.

Starting next year some damaged tombs will be restored and facilities installed to prevent fire and robbery. Management guidelines will be worked out with provincial governments to maintain the buffer zones surrounding the tombs, which are facing relentless development pressure.

Yureung, the royal tomb of the Chosun Dynasty’s 27th monarch King Sunjong and his queens, in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province /Courtesy of Cultural Heritage Administration

Visitor information centers and souvenir shops will be built at 16 of the royal tomb sites to attract tourists. Routes for theme-based tours linking the royal tombs with neighboring tourist attractions will also be developed, and guide books will be distributed to help visitors enjoy more informed tours.

An exhibition hall dedicated to the Chosun royal tombs will open in December near the Taegangneung area in Seoul, providing visitors a better understanding of Chosun-era state funeral rites and the architecture and construction of the tombs.

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