Fire burn and cauldron bubble

If you order a soup as your main dish at a Korean restaurant, it is likely to come to the table quite literally at a boil.

This is sundubu jjigae 순두부 찌개, soft tofu stew. It is served with a raw egg, which you crack into the boiling soup. You end up with a nice poached egg that you can search for later when you eat.

These pots are incredibly good insulators. The upside: soup stays really hot through your meal. The downside: soup stays too hot to eat for too long. It can be quite frustrating waiting for 5, 10 minutes before you can get any soup into you. One solution: you can ask for a small bowl into which you can ladle small amounts of soup at a time to cool down.

This particular bowl of soup is from a popular restaurant called Maetdol Sundubu 맷돌순두부 'Millstone Soft Tofu', near the Bomun Lake resort area in Gyeongju.