Baking in Korea

When I first came to Korea, I was a little bit scared that I'd never really be able to bake. In the beginning, I went to rather desperate lengths to assuage that fear. Then my new arrival came, and I thought that I'd be in baking heaven from there on out. There was just one small problem. Ingredients.

I thought surely I could find the basics like flour, brown sugar, and salt with no problem at all. And I can. It just takes a lot of hunting. There are a wide variety of flours here, none of which seem to really be the same as "all purpose flour". You can get light and dark brown sugar, but they are much more extreme than brown sugar in America. I often end up mixing the two together to get something that has the right flavor and texture. Salt comes in a wide variety of colors, flavors and textures. It is conveniently located next to the packages of MSG. However, it has been difficult to find normal table salt.

At this point in my stay in Korea, I've managed to figure out how to work around almost all of these sorts of things. There is just one thing that continues to plague me -- butter. Butter can be quite expensive here. About $8 per pound. And it isn't even true butter. It's a strange mix of butter and margarine. Margarine only comes in tiny tubs of 200 grams, which isn't really any sort of convenient measurement. I was looking at the rather pitiful examples of butter for sale in my local grocery store when I noticed that there was a new contender to be considered. It was margarine, and it came in a 1 pound block, and it was only $1. I was a little leery because of the price, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give it a try.

It looks perfectly normal, right? This was a relief. Sometimes when I buy what I think is butter, and what is labeled as butter, is really some sort of semi-translucent shortening thing. It's pretty nasty. 

The package says "pound margarine" which seems fairly innocuous. I was making banana bread, so I decided to soften the butter a bit to help with the mixing. That was when I knew I had problems. 

This is what the softened margarine looked like. It doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary. Except this is after being in the microwave for over three minutes. When I took it out, the solid part was still the exact same texture it was when I put it in the microwave. It also had a distinctly plastic smell. Oh, the horror! 

Needless to say, the $1 "pound margarine" was a decided fail. Oh, well. I went and bought some actual butter, and my banana bread turned out quite well!