
February 2025 : Top 6 Exhibitions to Visit in Seoul
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Korea gets REALLY HOT in summer. Some places even go up to, at their highest, 40 degrees Celsius. You can literally cook eggs on the ground outside!
Korean ancestors, back in the days, wisely figured out how to overcome this madness when there was no AC : Eating hot food in summer. Well, it sounds counterintuitive, right?
삼복 (Sambok; the three dog days of summer) is three hottest days of summer in Korea, traditionally. The days are between June and July in Lunar calendar at intervals of around 10-20 days. On these very hot days, Koreans eat steaming, boiling hot, nutritious, and high-protein food to recover from the heatwave.
Sirius, also called the Dog Star, rises like the sun on three days of 삼복 (sambok). The ancestors thought this bright Sirius caused the heatwave, so they named it after Sirius.
The most representative food that Koreans eat on the three dog days of summer is 삼계탕 (pronounced sam-gye-tang), a soup made with young chicken, ginseng, glutinous rice, jujube, chestnut, garlic, and more. It’s full of protein, nutritious, energy-boosting, and, most importantly, delicious!