Overview
Lockdown has limited many activities in our day-to-day day lives — trips to the pub, dinner parties with friends and weekend brunches, to name a few. But one thing that Sydneysiders' have been working diligently on perfecting is our at-home snack game. Snacking is a real highlight of our homebound lifestyles with heaps of Sydney hospo favourites offering sweet and savoury treats to get us through. Surry Hill's new Korean cafe Soul Deli is the latest to try its hand at a special lockdown delight with the introduction of new Korean baked doughnuts.
The doughnuts come in both sweet and savoury flavours. One savoury option packs in cheese with fried kimchi, while the other features fried veggies in a baked croquette. The sweet choices come either filled with soboro and sweet potato or twisted with a sweet sesame topping. The kimchi used in the savoury doughnuts is house-made and can be ordered separately with jars of traditional, vegan white, vegan red and stir-fried kimchi are all available for purchase.
The doughnuts are available each Wednesday in a doughnut box that features a mix of both sweet and savoury flavours. In order to ensure you get your hands on these tasty treats, head to the Soul Dining website before 9pm the night before to pre-order your boxes. If pre-ordering slips your mind, there will be a limited number of doughnuts available for takeaway each Wednesday until sold out.
"Customers need to be quick, as last week's kimchi cheese croquettes were gone in an hour," Soul's Illa Kim says. The doughnuts are available until the end of August, but if they prove a hit for locals, more flavours may be introduced and Kim has indicated that the baked treats could find their way onto the menu as a permanent fixture.
Soul is even encouraging customers to leave a note on its website with suggestions for flavours or inclusions in its next dosirak, a new range of boxed meals its offering throughout lockdown.
Soul Deli was opened earlier this year by Illa Kim and her husband Daero Lee as an offshoot of their contemporary Korean restaurant Soul Dining. The cafe is open 7am–9pm daily and offers a range of deli staples like kimchi, pickles, sauces and snacks, as well as heartier cafe meals with a Korean twist. Head down for lunch or dinner and nab yourself a Korean fried chicken roll, pulled pork kimchi cheese sandwich, pork schnitzel or soybean stew.
Soul Deli's baked Korean doughnuts are available every Wednesday. Pre-order by 9pm each Tuesday for next-day pick-up, or you can drop by from 2pm each Wednesday when the team will be selling a limited number of takeaway doughnuts, until sold out.