Korean Table

A 2021 study in the journal Foods tested whether tomato could stand in for the fish sauce Korean cooks use in kimchi. The tomato came out ahead. A hot-water tomato extract measured 33,328 mg/kg of glutamic acid, the compound behind savory umami taste. Commercial anchovy fish sauce measured 21,032 mg/kg in the same test, roughly a third less. The tomato version also carried less salt, 1.13% versus 1.87%. It had far fewer of the volatile compounds that give fish sauce its funk, too. You can read the study yourself here . That's the short answer to whether kimchi without fish sauce can taste like kimchi. It can. You're not chasing a lesser copy of the real thing here. You're replacing two jobs at once: the savory backbone fish sauce gives the paste, and the head start it hands the fermentation. Why Most Kimchi Isn't Vegan to Begin With If you assumed kimchi was just cabbage, chili, and garlic, you're not alone. You're also not right. Traditional recipes, and ...

Ran out of gochujang halfway through a batch of tteokbokki, or cooking for someone who can't do spicy at all? The rice cakes don't care which sauce coats them. What needs replacing is three separate jobs gochujang does at once, and most "gochujang-free" recipes floating around online only cover one of them. What Gochujang Is Doing in the Pot Gochujang isn't one flavor. It's chili heat from the gochugaru stirred into the paste, sweetness and body from fermented glutinous rice, and a deep, funky umami from fermented soybean that plain sugar and chili flakes can't fake by themselves. Leave it out without a plan for all three and the sauce tastes thin, no matter how much gochugaru you dump in to compensate. That's why the internet's gochujang substitutes split into two completely different problems: getting spicy tteokbokki without the specific paste, and skipping the heat altogether. Pick the wrong one for what you're trying to do and you'...

Grabbed the reddish-brown tub sitting right next to your gochujang and assumed it was a milder cousin? At H Mart or your local Korean aisle, ssamjang and gochujang sit close enough in color, packaging, and shelf placement that mixing them up is easy to do. They don't do the same job, and using one where a recipe wants the other changes more about the dish than you'd think. What's in Each One Gochujang is a fermented red chili paste — red pepper powder, glutinous rice, fermented soybean powder, and salt, aged until it turns sweet-hot and sticky. Ssamjang starts somewhere else. Per Wikipedia , ssam means "wrapped" and jang means "paste," and the sauce itself is built on doenjang — fermented soybean paste — with gochujang stirred in for heat, plus sesame oil, garlic, onion, and usually sugar. CJ Bibigo's own product page describes its version as built from "a cultured soybean base called Doenjang with the addition of chilli paste, fresh garlic,...

Just One Cookbook's bulgogi recipe calls for half an Asian pear, grated, against a pound and a half of thin-sliced ribeye. That's about a tablespoon of pulp for every six ounces of beef. Skip the pear because the fruit bowl's empty, and the marinade still comes together. Soy sauce, garlic, and sesame oil carry the flavor either way. What actually changes is texture, and that's worth sorting out before the beef is already sitting in a bowl. What the Pear Is Actually Doing Grated Asian pear (배, bae) does two jobs. Its juice keeps thin-sliced beef from drying out over high heat, and an enzyme in the flesh breaks down some of the muscle fiber before the beef ever hits the pan. A lot of recipe sites, including Tasting Table , name that enzyme calpain. That's wrong. Calpain is produced inside muscle cells after an animal is slaughtered. It's not something a piece of fruit contributes. A peer-reviewed study of Korean pear flesh identified the actual compound as a...

In August 2025, Health Canada pulled a batch of Daesang-brand gochujang off shelves in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. The problem wasn't spice level or an expired lot. It was wheat, sitting in a red chili paste, undeclared on the label, with one reported reaction on file. If you've ever squeezed gochujang straight from the tub without checking the ingredient panel, that's the exact question this post is answering: does gochujang have gluten, and which jars actually don't? Why most gochujang isn't gluten-free Gochujang (고추장) is Korea's fermented red chili paste, and the traditional recipe leans on barley malt powder to drive the fermentation that gives it that deep, almost caramelized sweetness. Barley malt has gluten in it, full stop, and that one ingredient is what trips up most commercial jars. Gluten Free Supper puts it plainly: "Traditional gochujang usually has barley malt powder, which isn't gluten-free." Sunchang, the county pictured ...

Grab the tongs at a Korean BBQ table before anyone hands them to you, and there's a decent chance someone quietly takes them back. Nobody says why. You just notice the shift in the room. That's the part first-timers miss: Korean BBQ has real rules about who runs the grill, how often you flip, and how you eat what comes off it — none of it posted on the menu, all of it assumed. Whether you're hosting a tabletop grill at home or sitting down at an actual Korean BBQ restaurant for the first time, these are the ones that matter. Who Runs the Grill Nobody grabs the tongs by default. At a business dinner or with elders present, the youngest person at the table does the grilling . It's treated as a junior's job, the same way a junior clears plates. One writer at Koreapeek describes learning this the hard way in 1990, reaching for the tongs himself and immediately disrespecting the senior person at the table who'd expected to do it — or expected someone younger to. ...