I Ate Blowfish and Survived!

If prepared incorrectly blowfish (or swell fish as it's often referred to) can be deadly. I had mentioned to my friend Younyoung that I was interested in trying some new Korean food since Kwang and I have gotten into a food routine lately. She went to college with a girl whose family owns a blowfish restaurant so she took me there. Blowfish like the ones above, were swimming around in tanks in the restaurant. If they are scared or irritated they puff up very quickly though unfortunately we did not see this transformation during our lunch.

We ate four different blowfish dishes. The first was a salad made with blowfish skin. The skin was really tender and the salad came with a great spicy dressing. The dish above was called blowfish bulgogi. Bulgogi is typically beef sauteed with a sweet, spicy sauce, however in this case blowfish was substituted for the beef. It was really delicious especially when everything cooked for awhile and the sauce began to caramelize. There were lots of wood ear mushrooms that soaked up the flavor of the sauce.

Next came tempura style blowfish. Really you can't go wrong with anything that been tempura-ed. Yes, that's a new word and I was lucky to have some pumpkin slices (my favorite) mixed in with the blowfish.

The last dish was a simple, yet delicious blowfish soup. There were large chunks of the fish along with bean sprouts and green onions. After all of the spiciness and tempura this style of blowfish was cleansing and pure. A large table of business men sat next to us and each ordered this soup. Thank you Younyoung for taking me here!