Sonja Swanson writes about food, travel, and culture from the American Southwest with annual trips to Korea. She was 2019 recipient of the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship at UC Berkeley and is currently an audio producer for Gastropod.
The Korean diaspora is vast: 6.5 million of us scattered around the globe, from Uzbekistan to Brazil. Just as we carry a range of food memories from different eras and regions, different communities of diasporic Koreans incorporate local ingredients in different ways, and everyone’s grandmother is going to have her own take on the best everyday kimchi: Which vegetables to use, how spicy or fishy it should be, and how long it should ferment. (There are even—yes—Koreans who don’t like kimchi.)
That being said, there are some dishes that serve as culinary touchstones, ones that most Koreans would recognize as being, well, Korean. Korean families might quibble with the inclusion of a dish here and there, but if you’re looking to become more familiar or reacquainted with Korean cuisine, the list of dishes described below is a good place to begin. Think of it as a starter pack.
Korean Food 101: Essential Recipes To Know And Love
Most Korean meals are served communally, with shared dishes in the center of table and (often) individual servings of rice and soup placed in front of each diner. As a result, serving sizes in recipes can vary: A recipe for a batch of radish greens kimchi could yield enough to last you a month, a banchan recipe might produce enough for three or four meals, but a pot of rice or porridge might only suffice for dinner and the next day’s breakfast. Further, heartier banchan can be served in smaller portions, and the amount served can be adjusted depending on the number of people dining.
Most of these dishes can be made with ingredients from a well-stocked grocery store. Emily Kim (better known as the YouTube sensation Maangchi) told me that most basic Korean dishes can be made with the ingredients you’d find at any chain grocery store in the US. If you're building a Korean pantry from scratch, start out with some basics, depending on what you want to make—soy sauce, doenjang, and sesame oil, for example, if you want to make some basic vegetable banchan—and progress from there.
Deciding how to organize this list was difficult: Some dishes cross categories (for example, juk is a rice porridge, and typically takes the place of both rice and soup on the Korean table). And there isn’t really a concept of a main dish in Korean cuisine, which several of the cooks I interviewed pointed out. But, hopefully, grouping dishes under broad categories will give you a sense of how to get started.
K Food Online Festival
The question, “Have you eaten?” is a common greeting in Korea—and the word for “meal” is interchangeable with the word for cooked rice, or “bap.” For generations, a meal without rice was inconceivable. “Rice is the very foundation of the Korean table. We eat everything with rice, ” says Hyosun Ro, the recipe developer behind the popular blog Korean Bapsang. “It doesn’t matter how delicious everything else is, if you don’t have rice, you’re missing something.”
That being said, Koreans eat smaller portions of rice than they used to, and often mix rice with beans, roots, and other kinds of grains, like millet and barley.
Juk (pronounced “jook”) is Korean rice porridge. It’s often served to the young and infirm, but it’s also enjoyed by anyone looking for a warm and comforting meal. Beombeok is a heartier, more rustic version of juk that incorporates other starches like flour, buckwheat, potato or pumpkin. Sweeter porridges, like some red bean and pumpkin porridges, tend to be eaten more as snacks than as complete meals.
Back To School Korean Recipes
Of course, rice is also the star of one of Korea’s most famous culinary exports, bibimbap: a one-bowl meal of carefully cut and seasoned vegetables, sometimes meat, and sometimes egg set on top of a bed of rice. While I like a crackling-hot dolsot (stone bowl) bibimbap, with the crisp, golden bed of rice that forms along the bottom, summertime has me longing for a simple metal bowl of barley bibimbap topped with young radish greens kimchi.
Most traditional Korean meals that include rice will also include some kind of soup or stew, and, when it’s served individually, soup is always placed to the right of the rice bowl. Though you’ll find plenty of crossovers, you can roughly divide this brothy category into soups (guk), thicker stews (jjigae), and hot pot (jeongol). You may have also heard the word “tang”—this is the Sino-Korean linguistic counterpart to the native Korean word “guk.” Sometimes the two words are used interchangeably and sometimes guk is regarded as a separate category of soups, which tend to be slightly heartier (though not as full as a jjigae) and are often seasoned at the table.
A good soup to know is miyeok-guk, a soup brimming with tender pieces of seaweed (miyeok is often translated to “wakame” in English) in a clear seafood- or beef-based broth, fortified with aromatics like onion, and garlic, scattered with bits of tender but toothsome beef. Seafood-based versions might include briny mussels or clams, but can just as often be served with seaweed alone. Since miyeok is rich in calcium and iodine, it’s given to new mothers; it’s also become a soup you eat on your birthday, as a reminder of just what your mother went through.
Cook Korean Food At Home (without Smoke/fire/kimchi Everywhere)
Cold soups are also part of the Korean soup repertoire, one of the more popular being oi naeng-guk, an extraordinarily simple dish of slivered cucumber in an icy soy sauce brine—it’s cold, crisp, and perfect for hot days, particularly since the addition of brown rice vinegar offers a bracing backdrop of acidity.
The jjigae is a classic Korean stew, with more filling than broth. The most basic, must-know jjigae is doenjang jjigae, a recipe with as many variations as there are home cooks. Think of it as your do-it-all stew: almost anything can be added to it, depending on what you have available and what you feel like eating, since the dried anchovy and dasima broth, seasoned with doenjang (Korean fermented bean paste), makes almost anything taste wonderful, whether we’re talking about root vegetables or plump littleneck clams. Other kinds of jjigae include kimchi jjigae, sundubu (soft tofu) jjigae, and budae (army base) jjigae, a Spam- and sausage-laden stew that was created after the Korean War using surplus ingredients from US military bases in South Korea.
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“That’s not the intent; that’s not what it is, ” says Ro. “You eat [banchan] with your rice.” A well-set Korean table will have a set of banchan that includes a variety of ingredients for both nutritional and aesthetic reasons. “On a daily basis, I think more about balancing, ” Ro explains, noting that if she already has some spicy banchan, she’ll try to have some mild ones as well. And if all she has are vegetables, she might add an egg dish. “Going back to the traditional table, [you need] textural balance, and color balance. I wouldn’t do dishes that are all yellow.”
Easy Korean Dishes To Make At Home
When it comes to banchan, the most important kind to know is “namul, ” which typically refers to vegetables and often specifically to wild greens. “Historically, namul was a life-sustaining source, ” says Seoyoung Jung, a chef and co-founder of the Korean food blog Bburi Kitchen and frequent Serious Eats contributor. “In the olden days, there wasn’t as much to eat, so people foraged for wild greens, ” she explains. Because of this, Jung says, namul are fundamental to what Koreans eat.
One of her favorite namul banchan is sigeumchi-namul, or blanched and seasoned spinach. While sigeumchi-namul can be seasoned with an array of ingredients, like plum syrup for mellow sweetness, vinegar for brightness, doenjang or soy sauce for fermented, savory funk, and toasted sesame seeds for added texture and nutty, roasted flavor, it’s common to prepare many namul banchan by simply blanching a green vegetable and dressing it with some common seasonings, like minced garlic, sesame oil, and soy sauce.
Another important word to know when talking about banchan is “muchim, ” which comes from a verb that roughly translates to “mix and season.” You can have all kinds of muchim as banchan, from cucumbers tossed with a deceptively simple dressing made with fruity gochugaru (chile flakes), sugar, soy sauce, mildly tart rice vinegar, and earthy toasted sesame seeds and oil, to dried squid dressed in a garlicky gochujang mixture.
Korean Recipes That Will Make You Excited To Get In The Kitchen
Likewise, “bokkeum” means to sauté, and you’ll find bokkeum banchan made from everything from anchovies coated in a sweet-spicy caramelized sugar glaze spiked with gochugaru, fish sauce, and soy sauce to eggplant sautéed and seasoned simply with garlic, soy sauce, and scallions.
If there’s one food that has come to represent Korean culinary prowess in the eyes of the rest of the world, it’s kimchi. Although it’s known to be a flavor powerhouse and probiotic wonder, its origins are humble, a staple food that was born out of necessity: salt, capsaicin, and lactic acid fermentation were used as preservatives to
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