Gyeongsangbuk-do Food & Traditional Cuisine

Gyeongsang cooking is generally saltier and hotter than the rest of Korea, and this province adds a strong Confucian ritual tradition to it.

Ancestral rites shaped the food: jesa ceremonies require particular dishes arranged in a fixed order, and the leftovers are eaten afterwards as a communal meal — which is where Andong’s famous ritual bibimbap comes from, mixed without chilli paste because the ceremony forbids it.

The east coast supplies squid, snow crab from Yeongdeok, anchovy and the mackerel that Andong made its own.

Inland, the cooking is mountain food: wild greens, mushrooms, beef from Yeongju and Hanwoo cattle, and a lot of soup.

The province also has Korea’s best-known traditional distilled spirit and a strong temple cuisine tradition at the mountain monasteries.

Andong jjimdak is the dish the province exported nationally: chicken braised with glass noodles, potato, carrot and dried chilli in a dark, sweet-salty soy sauce, served in a large shared bowl. It was created in the Andong old market in the 1980s and is now in every Korean city.

Andong gansodeungeo, salted mackerel — a landlocked town’s solution to getting fish from the coast, salted at the pass on the way over and now a delicacy in its own right, grilled and eaten with rice.

Heotjesatbap, the ritual bibimbap: rice with seasoned vegetables and soy sauce rather than chilli paste, with grilled fish and soup alongside.

Yeongdeok snow crab, steamed whole between November and May, and taken very seriously.

Gyeongju bread, a thin red-bean pastry sold hot in the old town since 1939.

Also: ojingeo squid from Ulleungdo, fresh and dried; mountain-vegetable sanchae bibimbap; and Hanwoo beef.

Andong old market has a whole alley of jjimdak restaurants where the dish was invented, and another of salted mackerel stalls; ordering is a matter of picking a shop and a size.

Five-day markets run in the country towns on fixed dates, selling wild greens, dried fish, ginseng and livestock, with food cooked on the spot.

Temple food at the mountain monasteries is vegetarian, cooked without the five pungent vegetables, and available through templestay programmes; it is a serious culinary tradition rather than an ascetic compromise.

Side dishes come free and are refilled; leaving them is normal.

Drinking: pour for others, never yourself, and hold the glass in two hands for someone older.

Crab season at Yeongdeok fills the coast road with restaurants from late autumn.

The province makes no wine, but it produces the most celebrated traditional spirit in Korea.

Andong soju is the real thing: rice fermented with nuruk starter and then distilled, historically at around 45 per cent, producing a clean, grain-sweet spirit with none of the harshness of the mass-market diluted soju sold in green bottles nationwide. It was made in the scholar-gentry households of Andong for ritual and for guests, survived the twentieth-century bans on grain distilling in the hands of a few families, and is now designated intangible cultural heritage. A distillery and museum in the town explains it and sells it, and the difference from ordinary soju is immediately obvious.

Makgeolli, unfiltered rice beer, is the everyday country drink, and several small producers here use local rice and traditional starter.

Bokbunja black raspberry wine and maesilju green plum liqueur are made across the province.

Ritual alcohol: every jesa ceremony involves offering and then drinking rice wine, which is part of why the tradition survived here.