Peanut allergy in Korea
Why peanut traces are hard to spot in Korea
Peanut is rarely the headline of a Korean dish. It turns up as a garnish scattered over the top, as a powder stirred into a sauce, or as a paste in sweets and snacks, and in each of those forms it stops being visible long before the plate reaches you. A menu that lists a dish by its main protein and its cooking method has no reason to mention a spoonful of ground peanut in the dressing, so the absence of the word on a menu tells you very little.
English menu translations make this harder rather than easier. They tend to shorten a Korean dish name into something generic, so a sauce that has a specific name in Korean arrives in English as a sauce, and the ingredients that gave it that name disappear in the translation. The safest reading of an English menu is that it describes roughly what the dish is, not what is in it.
Vocabulary is worth a moment as well. The Korean word for peanut is ttangkong, and it is a separate word from the ones used for tree nuts such as walnut or almond. Asking about peanut by name is therefore more reliable than asking whether a dish contains nuts, because a kitchen may answer the general question about tree nuts and not think of peanut at all, or the other way round.
Dishes and sauces where peanuts turn up
Cold dishes and dressings are one place to look. Chilled noodle dishes, salads, and vegetable sides are sometimes finished with a nut based dressing or a sprinkle of crushed peanut for texture, and dipping sauces served alongside fried food or rice rolls can be thickened the same way. Because these are added at the end rather than cooked in, they are easy for staff to leave out if you ask before the dish is assembled.
Street food and sweets are the other common place. Fillings for sweet pancakes often contain crushed nuts and seeds, brittle and crunchy coated snacks are frequently made with peanut, and rice cakes and traditional confectionery may be rolled in a nut powder. Snacks served with drinks in a bar are another example, since roasted peanut is a standard bar snack and can share a bowl or a scoop with something else.
Peanut can also appear in the free side dishes that arrive with a meal. Small braised or seasoned side dishes sometimes include whole peanuts or a nut powder, and because these are prepared in advance and refilled from a larger batch, they are not made to order and cannot be adjusted for you. If side dishes are a risk for you, it is better to say so when you sit down than to move them aside when they arrive.
What to ask before you order
Ask about a specific dish rather than about the menu as a whole. A question such as whether this particular dish contains peanut, in its sauce and in anything sprinkled on top, is one that a cook can actually answer. A general question about which dishes are safe asks the restaurant to take responsibility for your allergy, and the honest answer to it is usually that they do not know.
Ask before you order rather than after the food is being made. Once a dish is plated, removing a garnish does not remove what was mixed into the sauce, and a kitchen that would gladly have left something out at the start may have no way to change it at the end. Giving staff the question early also gives them time to check with the person who actually cooks.
Treat an uncertain answer as a real answer. If staff say that they are not sure what is in a sauce that arrives ready made, that is useful information and not a failure of the conversation. Ask which dishes on the menu are made without it, agree on one of those, and confirm again when the food arrives that this is the dish you agreed on.
Shared oil, grinders, and side dishes
A dish can be made without peanut and still carry traces of it. Frying oil in Korea is usually soybean, corn, or canola rather than peanut, so what matters at a fryer is not the oil itself but what else has been through it. Fryers are often shared across a menu, so something battered and fried may go into the same oil as a snack coated in nut. Grinders, blenders, and mixing bowls used for sauces are another route, because a paste made earlier in the day leaves residue that the next batch picks up. If you react to traces rather than to portions, these are the questions that matter more than the ingredient list.
Shared serving is the other half of the problem. Side dishes are refilled from a common batch, tongs and spoons move between plates on a busy table, and communal dishes are eaten from directly. None of that is unusual or careless in a Korean dining room, but it does mean that a dish which started out free of peanut may not stay that way on the table.
Be prepared for a restaurant to say that it cannot promise a peanut free preparation. A small kitchen with one fryer and one work surface may be answering you honestly. That answer is worth more than a reassuring one given quickly, and it is a good reason to choose a different dish or a different place rather than to press for a stronger promise.
Packaged snacks and convenience stores
Packaged food sold in Korea generally carries an allergen statement near the ingredient list, and peanut is one of the ingredients that Korean labelling rules require a food business to declare. That makes a convenience store or a supermarket easier to navigate than a restaurant, because the information is printed rather than remembered. The statement is normally in Korean, so it helps to know the written form of the words you are looking for, or to use a phone camera to read the panel.
Labels also carry advisory wording about a product being made in a facility that handles other ingredients. That wording is not the same as an ingredient list and its meaning varies between manufacturers, so if traces matter to you it is worth contacting the manufacturer rather than reading the phrase as a guarantee in either direction.
Bakery counters, ice cream displays, and food sold loose from a case are the exception, since none of them come with a printed panel. Ask staff at the counter, and keep in mind that a bakery which uses nuts in some of its products handles them in the same room as everything else.
Using your order card for a peanut allergy
On the home page of this site you can pick Peanut from the allergy list and add anything else you avoid, including items that are not on the list, through the free text field. The card that appears below your selections is written in Korean and names each ingredient for the person cooking, so you can hand it over instead of explaining in a language you do not share.
Show the card when you sit down or when you order, not after the food arrives, and give staff time to read it to the end. If the room is dim or the counter is wide, the larger view makes the Korean text easier to read at a distance. Saving the card as an image before you go out means you still have it when the restaurant has no usable network.
The card says what you avoid; it does not inspect the kitchen. Use it to open the conversation described above rather than to end it, and keep asking about sauces, garnishes, and shared oil. For a severe peanut allergy, the plan you make with your own doctor matters more than any card, and this page is general information rather than medical advice.