Preparing Kimbap and wining the K-FOOD competition

DON'T VOTE - MISTAKE

When I saw that the Korean Embassy in Serbia organized competition "K-FOOD E-COOKING CONTEST 2021" for Serbia and Montenegro, as someone who is very interested for Korean culture, I decided to participate without hesitation.

The competition started at August 16 and the task was to prepare traditional Korean dish called Kimbap or Gimbap (Korean Sushi Roll). As someone who is not big fan of cooking and didn't have a habit to cook, this was an interesting challenge. I have never before eating any dishes from Asian cultures.

I was searching the internet looking for different recipes to saw which ingredients I need to buy and can I found all of them in our stores. I couldn't found Nori seaweed, which are the basis of this dish, here in my town so I had to order them from internet. Other ingredients I found without problem.

Also, I bought a Chinese chopsticks and bamboo sushi rolling mat to make everything look more aesthetic.

I prepared everything of ingredients and dishes so I waited my friend to come with her proffesional Cannon camera and take photos and videos of preparing Kimbap. Half of photos were taken by her camera and half were taken by my Xiaomi Redmi 9 mobile.

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Ingredients I used:

- nori seaweed
- rice
- sesame
- carrot
- cucumber
- red bell pepper
- eggs
- ham salami

First I chopped the carrots, peppers and cucumber into strips and ham salami into cubes. After that I boiled rice and mixed it with sesame and a little bit of oil. I fried the eggs and made an omelet, and then I chopped it into strips.

After I finished everything, I start sorting ingredients and first thing I put on leaf of Nori seaweed was rice. Rice must cover 3/4 of leaf. It is the basis of Kimbap.

After rice I put remaining ingredients(carrot, cucumber, pepper, salami and eggs) and started to rolling Kimbap with bamboo mat. As I never did that before, I was failed first time, so I decided to move to another, easier version of Kimbam - folded Kimbap and later return to try roll again.

Folded Kimbap is prepared by cutting the leaf of Nori seaweed on fourequal parts so it can be fold later as its name said. Ingredients were put on three parts and one must stayed empty. That empty part is first which folded and then all the others, so that it is folded 4 times.

This is how it looked when I finished and cut in half my folded Kimbap. It was easy to prepare it so I returned to try again to roll the Kimbap and it has been successfully. The mistake that I made previous time when I rolled is that I put a lot of ingredients on leaf so I couldn't roll it.

After everything is done, both rolled and folded Kimbap, there is how the final products looked like 🤗🍽

I must said that I was so proud of myself and how everything looked. This is my first time and everything had been finished better than I expected but I believe that each next time will be even better.

The end of competition was supposted to be at August 31 but Embassy shared a news that they're gonna extend the deadline to September 5. The first 3 places are gonna win the special prize and all participants are gonna receive gifts (we don't know what the prizes and gifts are, so I will share it with you when I receive it).

They shared post with the winers yesterday, so I saw that I won The Second Place with my Kimbap. I'm soooo happy and even more pride of myself!!! The competition was really great, and I have to say that although I was hoping to win, I didn't really expect it. It was a big success for me because everyone's Kimbap looked fantastic and delicious! Can't wait to participate again next year and to see which challenge we're gonna have next time. BON APETIT TO EVERYONE!