We love Korean food, and it is readily apparent that you share our delight in foraging for Italian ingredients in unlikely venues.

If you Google “Korean” + “scungilli,” you’ll find a surprising number of references to “scungilli” in an Asian food context. Most Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are far more omnivorous than Americans, and many items in their marine harvest have no equivalent names in English. We think it’s amusing to see the word “scungilli” on Asian menus in Flushing and Queens… What would Nonna think?

While it’s possible that a Washington, DC, Korean market MIGHT offer channeled whelks, the cold-water species, Busycotypus canaliculatus, you may well be contemplating steamed octopus, which Koreans relish and use in many different preparations. (Thick slices of octopus tentacle look a lot like a pared piece of channeled whelk.) This isn’t an attempt at deception; it just points out the failures of language when in comes to pan-global gastronomy!

The scungilli recipes we offer in this post would be equally good with bite-sized chunks of any cephalopod (those big Pacific squid, cuttlefish, or octopus), as well as any firm, chewy mollusk, like conch.

In other words, you don’t have to settle for something out of a can, whose texture will never measure up to a freshly prepared “fruit of the sea.”

And please keep in mind that some conch species are endangered.(In the Caribbean, they have been over-harvested for both food and their beautiful pink-lipped shells.)

–Holly