7,700 Holiday Gulbi Fish: The Daily Processing Begins

Starting in the morning, the buseo that arrive frozen are thawed, then all scales, guts, and gills are removed. The daily workload is 350 batches, or 7,700 fish.

A worker explained why washing is needed: any remaining plastic film would catch in your throat and make the fish impossible to eat. He said buseo scales are large and must be removed to achieve a tender texture.

The gills are removed because they smell strongly and to keep the fish clean. If the guts are not removed, the fish is hard to trim after drying and smells strongly.

The worker explained that cutting the belly releases a lot of natural oil, which lowers the taste. Keeping the belly closed lets the fish keep its own flavor best, though the oil inside solidifies and the flesh can dry out.

Removing the bloodline is also a focus, since that is where the strongest fishy smell comes from. The work continues standing in one spot from 6 a.m.

Because the fish are processed whole, the worker says salting with the belly removed is ideal, and the fish is salted for 10 hours.

The salt is green not because of green tea but because mulberry leaf powder was added. He compared trials with green tea and sejak tea, saying mulberry leaf powder worked best for removing the fishy smell. After salting, the fish are washed and dried on drying racks to become steamed gulbi, he summarized.

The valley weather, freezing at night and high winds during the day, is ideal for removing about 25% of moisture. About 10,000 fish must be hung on the drying racks.

He says even moving the 20kg fish boxes is not easy. By evening his whole body aches, and he confessed to bruises on his thighs from bearing the load, making it embarrassing to go to the sauna. Even with several layers of gloves, cold rises through his fingertips and they go numb.

The back side, where the most flesh is, dries most intensively during natural drying. He says that after drying about 25% of the moisture naturally, moving on to machine drying brings out the best natural texture.

Standing about 10,000 fish takes about five hours. Natural drying in the cold winter valley wind takes about 3 days. He says he endures the hard work because the results are visible.

Each tray must be hooked together, and one board runs 12–13km. A tray holds 50 fish weighing about 12kg, so pushing them in is no small task, and the last one or two take a lot of effort, he says.

While the batch is in, he says he worries about whether it will turn out as well as expected, not just about the money.

He advises steaming only until the oil starts to bubble up on the surface, which is when it tastes best. Since the plastic film, guts, and gills are already removed, you can eat it after microwaving for 1 minute thawed or 2 minutes frozen.

The fish are first soaked in low-temperature oil, then moved into high-temperature boiling oil to fry. The oil temperature is 200–240°C, and the worker said one must always be careful.

After frying, jocheong syrup must be brushed over every corner, front and back. The jocheong is so soft that it crumbles at the slightest touch, and the puffed rice must be stuck on evenly before the syrup sets.

In the past, puffed rice was scooped into baskets and handled manually. Now machines make it easier, but many people get hurt by colliding with the constantly moving machines.

Because the work is done in pairs, once you start you can hardly leave your spot, and you can't even go to the restroom.

He says it is like a badge of honor that comes with the holiday season. From pressing down hard on the dough, calluses have formed on his palms.

Octopus is a must on the ancestral table and ritual offerings in Andong. There is a saying that when the lunar new year approaches, people become busier than they can keep up with.

The seller believes that when the holiday comes, consumption rises and nearly half of the octopus supply goes to Andong. That means a large share of the volume heads to that area, he said.

When asked whether machines could do it, the worker answered that pounding by hand gives tteok a chestnut-like flavor, and machines do not. Pounding by hand gives that flavor; machines do not, he says.

The tteok mallet weighs about 5kg. Because the ingredients would fly off if placed on the roof and struck with the mallet, a machine is used to mix and clump them once.

He shared the know-how that you must not only strike with force but also rotate the mallet slightly level while striking.

The rice flour is mixed with a purple liquid, made from the water used to rinse heukong (black soybeans). The heukong liquid fades, so the product comes out closer to a purplish color.

White uses white rice, yellow uses pumpkin powder, red uses baekbeonccho powder. Green is made from hydrangea leaves and purple from heukong, making five kinds of tteokguk-tteok in all.

After adding the coloring ingredient, you must break up lumps in the flour by hand. Machines cannot break up the fine clumps, so this is done by hand, sometimes over 100 times a day. Two steamers sit on each burner and are swapped top and bottom every 10 minutes, up to 150 pieces are moved at once, and the worker says he walks 14km a day.