Happy Monday, food lovers! Today I’m going to take a different approach to this semi-easy vegan recipe.
So, as you know we’ve been playing around with world cuisines in our house for the past couple of weeks, starting with Morocco and then Japan, but I added in a few days of Korean food because I bought some tteokbokki and figured I’d slide it into the menu for a few days.
I know what you’re thinking, why didn’t I start with the tteokbokki? The easy answer is, I don’t know! No, but for real, I had something else planned using rice but I started too late because time means nothing when you’re lost in the writing cave, so I dug up this recipe from my “want to try” list of recipes.
What is Jumeok-bap?
Well, the internet says the literal translation is “fist rice” because that’s how you make this particular recipe. It is a ball of rice, often mixed with kimchi or bulgogi, or pretty much anything else you want to mix into it.
There are a few that always go inside: salt, sesame oil, rice and seaweed.
Armed with that info, I took of it with this vegan version of Jumeokbap.
Vegan Jumeok-bap
I had two Naturli burger patties that were in the freezer for far too long, but since some of the recipes I looked at called for mince, I decided to chop & crumble those and mix with shallots, scallions, ginger and carrots. I cooked everything on the stove without oil while I let the rice cool.
Note on oil-free: Sesame oil is part of the sauce that gets drizzled into the rice before you form balls, so I didn’t want to add any extra oil. If you want to saute your veggies in oil, go right ahead.
Making Jumeok-bap
Honestly this recipe looks more intimidating than it actually is. I was worried about the texture of the rice, which I didn’t need to because it came out perfectly.
The key here is that sauce. The mixture of soy sauce, mirin, sesame oil and brown sugar really does a lot of the heavy lifting. This sauce goes in after your veggies have cooked, along with the rice. Mix it in until everything is combined and then grab a handful to see if you can form a ball. If you can? You’re ready to start making the balls.
And it’s just that simple. A seemingly complicated vegan recipe was actually pretty easy.
Okay, well it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Getting the seaweed to stick to the outside of the Korean rice balls was slightly maddening. They stuck, sure, but most of them stuck to my gloved hand instead.
So I started to mix some inside the ball, which worked better but still…
Maybe it wasn’t toasted properly, but that was the only drawback.
How was it?
Delicious. The sesame oil really helps the rice shine, and the pop of sweetness from the cooked carrots blends so well with the soy sauce and mirin flavors that it felt like a lot more than a simple vegan rice ball.
I definitely recommend this recipe for any vegans who want to explore Korean cuisine because you can add whatever you want to the balls, you can experiment with different types of rice. It’s a pretty versatile dish that looks like you worked a lot harder than you did.
Note: I used recipe inspiration from My Korean Kitchen, which is not a vegan food blog, but the creator provides a really good guide to getting the balls right.
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Tell me what you think about this!