1. Ingredients for Samgyetang
- Primary ingredients: Chicken
- Secondary ingredients: Seasoning (salt) and medicinal herbs (ginseng, jujube, chestnut and garlic)
2. Taste evaluation
-Spicy: ☆☆☆☆☆
-Salty: ★★☆☆☆
-Sweet: ☆☆☆☆☆
-Sour: ☆☆☆☆☆
-Mild: ★★★★☆
3. Introduction Samgyetang
Samgyetang is a classic summertime dish that is made of one chicken stuffed with various medicinal herbs.
Koreans eat Samgyetang at least once in summer. There’s a valid reason why they love this hot Samgyetang, not ice water, on hot summer days.
Samgyetang became one of Korean health foods in the 1960s. Koreans used to eat meat soup when they’re exhausted from the heat and sunlight on the summer days from a long time ago. Since beef was too expensive and unavailable at the time, people started to cook cheap and easy-to-get chicken with ginseng powder and call it Samgyetang.
Korean people eat this Samgyetang on the three hottest days in summer, Chobok, Jungbok and Malbok(three dog days).
It’s kind of weird to eat this hot Samgyetang on the hottest days of the year, isn’t it?
It is to make us sweat, lower the body temperature, make the blood flow and make our body to lose the heat. So after you eat Samgyetang while getting sweaty, you’ll feel that your body gets light and fresh after all.
Samgyetang is not just a hot bowl of food but also a health food boiled with healthy ingredients like ginseng, jujube, chestnut and garlic.
Chicken has a small portion of fat but a large portion of protein that makes it easy to digest and ginseng and jujube are Korean medicinal herbs representing nutrition and health.
The way it’s cooked and used ingredients all indicate this cuisine is good enough to be one of Korean health foods.
If you try it, you’ll notice the deep flavor of chicken soup at first. Chicken soup is used in many cuisines in the West as well as in the East but you will taste different flavor coming from ginseng and jujube.
Plus, young chickens are steamed at high temperatures so that the texture is very soft.
And the taste is mild so I’m sure even tourists who are trying their first Korean food will find it easy to enjoy.
Summer is coming soon in Korea. I hope you have a bowl of Samgyetang and get strength to enjoy the rest of your trip in Korea.
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4. Kinds of Samgyetang
Samgyetang has a short history that it hasn’t had any variation but mostly eaten as a soup of a chicken stuffed with ginseng, jujube, chestnut and garlic.
Ginseng is not so good for those who have high body temperature but they could choose to eat Dak-baeksuk, which uses milk vetch root instead of ginseng.
Dak-baeksuk does not smell or taste ginseng and you can enjoy the original taste of chicken. 
5. How to enjoy Samgyetang even more
Samgyetang uses medicinal herbs like ginseng and jujube but sweet rice could be added according to your preferences. You can think of it as rice stuffed in a chicken.
But sweet rice is different from white rice you’ll easily find in Korea.
It tastes so good especially when it’s put in Samgyetang soup.
But when you can’t find it in the soup, you might as well order a bowl of rice.
It tastes so good when you put rice in the leftover soup of Samgyetang so there’s even a recipe called Dakjuk, which means chicken rice porridge.
Enjoy chicken meat, put a bowl of rice in this nutritious and tasty soup and finish this classic Korean summertime dish. 
