Grinding in South Korea (and Some Great Photos)
I owe both the photos and the explanations (very lightly edited to make a narrative, see all comments here if you want) to Susan Ji-Young Park but these were all just too good to leave in the comment section. What a treat to have someone who can google in Korean and pull up these photos. My interpolations have an (RL) after them in brackets.
1. An edge roller grindstone (RL)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gls1106/1306118629/in/set-72157601828096307/
2. Small hand rotary grindstone (RL)
http://alembyc.blogspot.com/2007/04/market-day-at-shijang-with-judy.html
The second Korean grindstone is a photo taken at an existing open air market. People don’t use these in homes or villages anymore, since most homes don’t have the space (or the domestic or peasant labor) and at least in South Korea village life is a thing of the past.
I asked about grinding wet mung beans for pancakes. The type of grindstone used is configured like this hand rotary one.
I just noticed that in the photo the bowl is made from hard plastic, they used to be made from the same stone as the grinding stones.
I don’t know how the design might vary to resolve the problem of gumming up.
(I’d said that in my experience wet grinding could gum up rotary grindstones. It may be the degree of moistness that matters. Mexican masa which I know is close to a paste. RL)
3. A modern Korean food processor/ wet grinder.
http://img.ddm.com/goods/ddm/ddm_03054070825E_s.jpg
(Comments anyone on how these compare with Indian models? RL)
4. Korean site about domestic life for women on Cheju-do island before industrialization. You don’t have to be able to read Korean the photos tell the story of how hard the life was, especially for women. There’s a photo of two women grinding flour on a hand cranked mill.
http://blog.ohmynews.com/rufdml/124524
(What an evocative set of photos. Very nice clear picture of the hole for feeding the grain. Would I be right in guessing that they are pounding rice, cooked or uncooked, in that big mortar? Or perhaps barley? And the swimmers. They are collecting kelp or other sea weed, right?).
5. Grinding stone for herbal medicine
http://forseason.tistory.com/entry/%EC%95%BD-%EB%A7%B7%EB%8F%8C
6. Back to the good old days field trip with contemporary South Korean children wet grinding what looks like mung beans.
http://omifarm.com/vishome/VIS_bbs/board.php?bo_table=s4_1&wr_id=16&page=
(This looks pretty dry to me, but maybe I am missing something? RL)
7. Photo of very old mortar and pestle and grindstones. The Korean fonts are scramble on my computer so I can’t read a thing to tell you about the time period they were made
http://kid.knrda.go.kr/html/cyber/yumul/banga-2.htm
Grindstones are also used for extracting oil from nuts, seeds, and apricot kernels.
So just a couple of questions, Ji-Young. First, the basic grindstone appears to be a hand rotary grindstone. Do you have any idea what the big edge runner was for? Those oilseeds you mention? Or not food at all?
Second, if this sample is representative, it looks like the simple grindstone (saddle quern, metate) hasn’t been used in this century at least. Right?
Many many thanks Ji-Young.
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Nice idea to compile Ji Young’s comments into a separate post.
Here is what we used in India to do wet grinding
http://aavaas.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/stone_grinder.jpg
The thingy is called “Attukal” in Tamil.
Wet grinding was needed to make dosa (rice/urad pancake) batter and idli (rice/urad dumpling) batter in the past.
Nowadays we use a machine to do the same and it looks like this
http://aavaas.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/ultrastand1.jpg
Hope that helps. Not sure what is the cosistency of mung paste looks like. But in India if you want to wetgrind something to the consistency of a chutney, you will use a metate type thingy which we call “Ammi” in Tamil.
Hope that helps.
Mung bean paste for pancakes is about the same consistency as a thick corn bread batter, it’s loose enough to be spooned into a pan and spread out into a disk, but thick enough to hold some height.
Much looser than masa for tortillas. Thicker than any dosa batter I’ve ever seen. Korean mung bean pancakes are not thin like crepes. They are about 1-1 1/2 cm thick when cooked.
More later…
Thanks Ji Young. From what you are saying it looks like something we make called “Adai” – loosely translated to Thick Pancake. It also uses a wet grinding process similar to dosa/idli using the same “attukal”. But because the batter is thick somewhat coarse grained, in the modern day we simply use a blender to do the wet grinding.
I don’t remember what the big edge roller is for, I tried looking for an explanation but couldn’t find one at the moment. I’ll find out, but for now I’m guessing that it’s probably a mill for a merchant and it’s for some kind of food product.
The female divers gather seaweed, kelp and pearls. In the link it says that “rubber wear” (scuba clothes) were introduced via Japan around 1970.
The rotary grindstones were a very common piece of kitchen equipment before the blender. That, and what is basically an oversized mortar and pestle, the size of a vat and the women using large bat like sticks standing over the vat to pound and process food crops into submission. http://blog.ohmynews.com/rufdml/124524
These two pieces of equipment were essential to the Korean kitchen.
Come to think of it, the rotary grindstones were used for grinding lots of things that I had forgotten about.
Soybeans are also wet ground to make tofu and soy milk, the ground beans are also used in casseroles for extra protein. Soybeans and derivative products were (and still are) staples. So wet grinding was a pretty common kitchen chore.
Besides oils, nuts and seeds were ground for nut and seed milks. Rice, barley, wheat, etc… were ground into flour.
So there was a lot of hand grinding and pounding.
Thanks Ji Young. In India also we had the vat+sticks thingy we call “Ural” used for pounding stuff. You are right, the rotary grinder, wet grinder and the vat+sticks were part of most kitchens.
I’m fascinated by the idea of creating an archive of grinding photos as hand grinding vanishes. So Rajagopal, I’ll be posting some of your photos soon. Can you though be a bit more specific about which part of India they come from. It’s such a huge place that I am sure there are regional variations and would rather not just say “India.”
To both of you, until recently in Korea and India most kitchens (country? urban?) had
a rotary grinder
a different wet grinder????
a serious big pestle and mortar
Right?
The mystery of the large edge roller hasn’t been solved yet. My father did notice the furnace though, but didn’t know what to make of it.
Rotary grinders and the big mortar and pestle were common household items until fairly recently (1970s). Both urban and country kitchens, with urban areas experiencing a faster transition into an industrialized food chain. It really wasn’t until the 1980s that electric blenders and food processors (small and big) supplanted manual labor.
As a side note, while having lunch with my parents this afternoon we all had a good laugh about how quickly nostalgia was marketed even as South Korea was just getting it’s feet wet in industrialization. “Grandmother’s secret recipe”, “A taste of the good old days”, etc..
More details next week about different kinds of grinders…
Thanks for all that further information, Ji-Young. I’m mulling it all over.