This is my absolute, absolute, FAVOURITE herb!! Its pungent and strong in flavour, and it goes SO WELL with barbequed meat!!
-swoon-
Well, actually basil is my all-time favourite herb, but perilla is my new mistress of the week 
I first discovered this while eating Korean barbeque in Hong Kong with some Korean exchange students (hey Mokeun, Rob~~). When I went to Seoul, I was very much obsessed with finding the leaf and eating as much of it as I could, thinking I would never be able to find it again, evAR.
Anyway, much googling today has revealed much interesting information.
Interesting info #1: Fresh perilla/sesame leaves are sold in SA!!! I even signed up to this gardening forum so I could email the guy from SA who said he was growing it!
#2: Actually, perilla frutescens is not related to sesame plant. It’s more closely related to the Japanese shiso (some sources sometimes use the terms interchangeably) and the mint family. Well, I thought kaenyip (Korean name for it) was shiso at first but they said it wasn’t the same, and anyway shiso doesn’t look the same as well. Shiso looks more like this normally:
See how the edges are normally longer and more tattered-looking?
Oh well. As long as I have that flavour I’m happy.
I’m having Korean barbeque at home tomorrow ^_^. I’ll try to re-create it as authentically as I can - I’ll have the dwaenjang fermented soybean bulgogi sauce, sesame oil sauce and spring onion red pepper salad. I’ll also have some coral lettuce to wrap the barbequed beef in, mushrooms, cabbage kimchi, fresh chillis and fresh sliced garlic to barbeque…
Ah…and the meat is some nice beef steaks. Don’t know what cut I’ll be getting, but my dad assures me he’ll get the best possible.
Can’t wait for dinner tomorrow ^_______^
Oh, and I had Korean barbeque 3 times during the 1 week we were in Seoul…this photo was taken on the third time we had barbeque ^_^.
Comments (2)
haha.
I hope you’ll get great Korean babeque dinner. =>
& you have to tell me ’bout that later!
hey mokeun~~!
yup, it was a pretty good dinner! but there are some improvements to be made still~ my dwaenjang sauce….came out black O.o
i think i used the wrong type of soy sauce -.-
i didn’t find fresh kaenyip, but i did find kaenyip kimchi!! but i will continue to search for fresh kaenyip ;). the kaenyip kimchi was pretty nice though~
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[...] Anyway, turns out that they order the kaenyip from Sydney everyday 2 weeks or so. They also said that if I wanted any, I could put in an order with them O_O!! So nice! [...]