Restaurant: SGD Tofu House
City: Santa Clara, CA
In addition to the tofu soup, we had the seafood pancake; squid, clam, imitation crab, and grill onions fried in batter. SGD’s seafood pancake is actually quite big and pricey (~$14 USD); it can be too much for 2 people but just right for 3-4 people. It is typically served with a dipping sauce made from soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil.
Our seafood pancake was initally served undercooked (shown below); it looked cooked from the outside, but the inside was half-way cooked. We suspect that the pan’s heat was too high when they cooked it, because when we were served a new one, it was golden-brown to brown on the outside but the inside was perfect (second photo). SGD’s seafood pancake is really good when properly cooked!
This traditional Korean recipe for savory seafood pancake originates from the city of Busan in South Korea. (SBS)
Some info about pajeon and haemul pajeon, from Wikipedia:
Pajeon (파전) is a variety of jeon (전, Korean pancake-like dishes) with green onions as its prominent ingredient, as pa literally means ‘green/spring onion’ in Korean. It is a pancake-like Korean dish made from a batter of eggs, wheat flour, rice flour, green onions, and often other additional ingredients depending on the variety. Beef, pork, kimchi, shellfish, and other seafood are mostly used.
Pajeon is usually recognizable by the highly visible green onions. It is similar to a Chinese green onion pancake in appearance but is less dense in texture and not made from a dough. It is not to be confused with bindaetteok, which is a mung bean pancake.
A seafood pajeon is called haemul pajeon (해물파전). Various seafood are used in the batter and toppings, e.g. oysters, shrimp, squid, clams.
Recipes:
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