By Myrel Joeanne Agarano

You take a piece of gim, that thin and delicate seaweed sheet. Lay it down gingerly onto the bamboo mat, thinly spread a layer of pristine white rice (bap) fragrant with the essence of vinegar and sesame, dab a spoonful of mayonnaise to act as glue to the pile of colors and flavors you’ve chosen for your core, and then roll. Roll until you’ve gathered everything into a tower, a log of simple yet solid deliciousness.

That is the lyrical, glossy description of making gimbap. It would seem that it takes only a few minutes to make one because it’s easy and fuss-free. But of course, like everything in the world, there are always hidden steps and secret maneuvering that are never revealed easily. You know, those tedious, energy-draining and boring parts, the small yet necessary stuff one needs to do to make things work, such as those to be learned only from a gimbap master.

I have developed a gimbap addiction in my more than a year’s stay in Korea, but I have never attempted to make one. I didn’t want to tread the road without a guide, someone knowledgeable and patient. So I jumped when out of the blue my officemate and friend volunteered, “I’ll teach you how to make gimbap this weekend.”

So one Saturday afternoon there I am at the door of her downtown Seoul apartment. Thirty minutes late.

The smile she greets me with erases the worry lines on my face caused by my tardiness. In normal situations, tardiness is a sin in Korea. It is a flaw, a mistake that is not looked upon lightly. But she has a hangover from her department’s soju [a favorite party liquor made from rice] party the previous night so I am forgiven. Another Korean friend/workmate is here to provide support and added manpower.

I join in with the prep work, which is made up of the boring yet essential steps I mentioned before. Korean short grain rice is soaked in water for half an hour before cooking. The master panfries scrambled eggs and fish cakes in peanut oil while us two assistants are given knives to cut carrots, imitation kani rolls, bulgogi ham, and a leeklike vegetable into long strips. The eggs and fish cakes are also cut into strips. We prepare the gim glaze by combining sesame oil with a bit of salt, sugar, and sweet cider vinegar. The canned tuna is drained.

We have some girl talk while waiting for the bap [rice] to cook. Which is a lesson we learn all the time, no—the art of waiting. I could turn philosophical here and insert how we live a big part of our lives waiting—for the future, for our hopes and fears, for beginnings and endings. How we wait and alternate between sadness and joy, between chances and dooms. Or I could segue about the individual, hope-filled wait for that one person who’d see everything—the light and the dark and still be an anchor. But of course, such talk would stretch this article too far. This is about gimbap making, where waiting is an essential part, like everything else in life, and we are really just three girls passing time.

After it’s cooked, the gimbap master fluffs out the rice with a metal spatula to cool it and adds sesame oil, salt, and cedar vinegar to taste. And then the beautiful, TV-worthy part is laid before us: The table vibrant and bursting with colors—forest-green gim, red strips of crabmeat, yellow tamago [fried scrambled eggs] rolls, pink ham strips, copper-hued fish cakes glistening in their coating of peanut oil, the beige tuna flakes accompanied by small ceramic bowls filled with toasted sesame seeds, gim glaze, and mayonnaise. The vegetables—beautifully vibrant carrot sticks, the leeklike vegetable, and shredded Korean oregano leaves. And of course the bap. We take our places at the table, one bamboo gimbap rolling mat laid out for each of us.

To deconstruct the method: First, the gim (or nori in Japanese). Lay it shiny side down. Place a thin layer of rice on the gim, about three tablespoons, a dab of mayo, and then it becomes your masterpiece. The master orders me to choose what would make me happy. Place whatever suits you. I fill my first gimbap with all the ingredients—kani, fish cakes, tamago, ham, tuna, oregano, leeks, and carrots. Which is typically me. How in the face of new things, I take all I can, jump headfirst with whatever comes my way, and then, only after, do I decide what fits my dreams.

After filling comes the rolling, which takes some skill and more than a little practice. There is an art to it, the master tells me. You push the gimbap in with even pressure as you roll the mat out, then you push bit by bit with a heavy hand. She tries valiantly to teach my fingers how to roll the bamboo mat all around the gimbap and to press hard to get that beautiful, tight circle. I laugh at my own clumsiness and make a face when I see my first attempt. It is definitely not a circle. It’s an . . . hmmm, oblong and lopsided gimbap. The master shows me how to brush the rolled gimbap with gim glaze to make the gim shiny, and as a finishing touch, to add a sprinkling of sesame seed for presentation. I must have looked positively crestfallen at my first attempt at gimbap rolling because they laughingly console me that it was not bad for the first try and that we still have quite a number of gimbap to make.

On my third gimbap, I finally beam. Now that’s perfect, my native friends tell me. I’m just gimbap happy! Knows how to make gimbap? Check. They tease me how perhaps I’d be making these rice rolls all the time now at home. Hmmmm, maybe, I say. And then I add, without blinking, Maybe I can even make a sort of Filipino gimbap—with Filipino fillings instead of the usual stuff and turn it into a small business back home? Like a sort of a fusion gimbap. Say ado-bap or asado-bap? They, of course, laugh at my crazy ideas. It’s just gimbap, they say. It may be for them, who have lived with gimbap all their lives. I guess it’s like how adobo is to us Filipinos. Something we take for granted for its seemingly ordinariness and availability. It’s something innate about us humans, no? How we take things that are readily available for granted and go out in search of more exotic stuffs, things that are unfamiliar, thus more exciting. I think that eventually though, we come back to them, the simple and familiar—the reliable foods we grew up with, the parents we sometimes wish we didn’t have, old friends. Because in between our search for adventures, or dreams, when we are in the pits of fear and uncertainties, we realize that it is the familiar that nourishes us back to hope. It’s a detour, yes—I just have to type that down, a nonfood light-bulb moment while thinking about gimbap.

So this, in closing, is the art of making gimbap: To take everyday stuff—rice, carrots, canned tuna, and eggs. To allot a little time preparing for the good stuff in life, of trying to be better and finding which choice of ingredients—carrots, fish cakes, ham, marriage, a clean slate, or just rice—which of these pleases us. To risk failure and disappointments—ugly gimbap and all—and persevere in making something beautiful, something nourishing out of our every attempt.

Joeanne was based in Korea for 14 months, where she was a process engineer for a mobile phone company. She blogs at “A Hundred a Day.”