Dosirak

This morning on the way to school I was listening to the BBC News Podcast and one of the segments was about lunch boxes in Japan. Unlike Korea, Japan is very serious about making the food look precise and beautiful. In Korea the presentation is very lose at the best of times. At the worst of times everything is just thrown in to the same pot, literally.

As luck would have it I watched an Eat Your Kimchi clip today about making a Korean lunch box. In the clip the mention that the lunchbox is called Dosirak. My experience with Dosirak is a stupid service which I had to use to get a ringtone on my old LG phone on KT. Not a pleasant memory. Turns out I actually have better experiences of this.

My actual real first experience, without knowing that it was called, was when we went to a restaurant and the people who ordered the item that ZenKimchi describes in this post. They also told me it was their school lunches and how they would take their metal tins and put it on the heaters in the class rooms to heat up their food (if they actually managed to not eat it already). I must say I am currently considering making my own dosirak rather than eat school lunches.

I have also had less pleasant but acceptable experience with the kind that you buy in large numbers to feed a group. The kind that FatManSeoul describes here is pretty close to what I learned to associate with Dosirak.

What I would love to have though is the kind shown in the main photo. For more amazing lunch boxes that I am sure would make even the Japanese envious, have a look at the images on this Google search.