Bap (rice dish)


Bap is a Korean name for cooked rice prepared by boiling rice or other grains, such as black rice, barley, sorghum, various millets, and beans, until the water has cooked away. Special ingredients such as vegetables, seafood, and meat can also be added to create different kinds of bap. In the past, except for the socially wealthy class, people used to eat mixed grain rice together with beans and barley rather than only rice.
In Korea, grain food centered on rice has been the most commonly used since ancient times and has established itself as a staple food in everyday diets.
In Korean, the honorific terms for bap include jinji for an elderly person, sura for a monarch, and me for the deceased.

Preparation

Traditionally, bap was made using gamasot for a large family; however, in modern times, an electronic rice cooker is usually used to cook rice. A regular heavy-bottomed pot or dolsot can also be used. Nowadays, rice cooked in gamasot or dolsot are called sotbap, and are considered delicacies. More nurungji is produced when making gamasot-bap and dolsot-bap.
To make bap, rice is scrubbed in water and rinsed several times. This process produces tteumul. It is then soaked for thirty minutes before boiling, which helps the grains cook evenly. With unpolished brown rice and bigger grains such as yulmu, it is necessary to soak the grains for several hours to overnight to avoid undercooking. The grains are then cooked. In a regular heavy-bottomed pot, rice can be cooked over medium high heat with the lid on for about ten minutes, stirred, and then left to simmer on low heat for additional five to ten minutes.
The scorched rice in the bottom of the pot or cauldron, nurungji, can be eaten as snacks or used to make sungnyung.

Types

Ingredients

Rice

Bap refers to Korean cooked rice. Bap is a popular staple dish in Korea and also signifies the culinary corpus of Koreans. The bap meal offers significant nutrition and energy and is widely considered as medicinal by many Koreans. It has high stickiness and sheen, and is hence easy to digest due to possession of adequate moisture. As a result, the bap meal signifies the Korean cultural concern for medicinal aid from natural products rather than artificial ones. The dish remains one of the most popular in the Korean cuisine due to its distinctiveness from normal cooked rice and added nutritional value. The most basic bap made of rice is called ssalbap, or often just bap. As rice itself occurs in colours other than white, the bap made of all white rice is called huinssal-bap or ssalbap. When black rice is mixed, it is called heungmi-bap.
When cooked with all brown rice or white rice mixed with brown rice, it is called hyeonmi-bap, while bap cooked with all glutinous rice or white rice mixed with glutinous rice is called chapssal-bap. Unpolished glutinous rice can also be used to cook bap, in which case it is called hyeonmi-chapssal-bap.
Bap made of regular non-glutinous white rice can be referred to as baekmi-bap when compared to hyeonmibap, and as mepssal-bap when compared to chalbap/''chapssalbap''.

Rice or other grains

Bap made of rice mixed with various other grains is called japgok-bap. On the day of Daeboreum, the first full moon of the year, Koreans eat ogok-bap made of glutinous rice, proso millet, sorghum, black beans, and red bean, or chalbap made of glutinous rice, red bean, chestnut, jujube, and black beans.
When rice is mixed with one other grain, the bap is named after the mixed ingredient. The examples are:
Some grains can be cooked without rice. Bap made of barley without rice is called kkong-bori-bap, while bap made of both rice and barley is called bori-bap.

Special ingredients

Byeolmi-bap or byeolbap can be made by mixing in special ingredients such as vegetables, seafood, and meat. For example, namul-bap is made of rice mixed with namul vegetables. Some popular byeolmibap varieties include:

Dishes

There are many bap dishes such as bibimbap, bokkeum-bap and gimbap.