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Korean Table covers Korean home cooking, with the research behind it. It is written and edited by one person based in South Korea.

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Kimchi Without Fish Sauce: What Replaces the Umami

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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. You can read the study yourself here . A hot-water tomato extract measured 33,328 mg/kg of glutamic acid, the compound behind savory umami taste, against 21,032 mg/kg for commercial anchovy fish sauce in the same test, roughly a third less. The tomato version also carried less salt, 1.13% versus 1.87%, and far fewer of the volatile compounds that give fish sauce its funk. It can. You're not chasing a lesser copy of the real thing here. Skipping fish sauce means replacing what it does in two ways. It builds a savory backbone into the paste, and it jumpstarts 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 most jars on a grocery shelf, lean on jeotgal — salted seafood, usually myeolchi-aekj...
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Mochi vs Tteok: Why Korean Rice Cake Hardens and Mochi Doesn't

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Mochi vs tteok is a fridge question as much as a menu one. You bought a bag of tteok on Saturday, put it in the fridge the way you would treat any other fresh food, and by Monday the pieces clack against the bowl like plastic. A box of mochi sitting on the same shelf is still soft. Both are rice cakes in English, so the reasonable assumption is that they should behave the same way, and they don't. The question people type is whether tteok and mochi are the same thing. They start from different rice, and one of those rices carries roughly 18 to 21% amylose while the other has almost none. Two rices, one English word Korean kitchens divide rice into 멥쌀 (mepssal), ordinary non-waxy short-grain rice, and 찹쌀 (chapssal), the glutinous kind. Garaetteok, the cylinders you cut for tteokbokki and slice on the diagonal for tteokguk, is mepssal. A 2023 paper in Foods by Lee and colleagues describes it in one line: "Garaetteok is a long cylindrical rice cake, which is prepared by gel...
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Kimchi Probiotic Counts by Fermentation Stage

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Whether store-bought kimchi is still alive, and whether a jar fermented in the fridge ends up with fewer lactic acid bacteria than one left on the counter, are two questions with published counts behind them. Four papers are collected below, each one with its temperature, its duration and its sample attached. None of these studies measures "probiotics" in any regulated sense, and none of them follows the bacteria past the plate. The unit throughout is the colony-forming unit, one cell alive enough at sampling to grow into a visible colony. From under-ripe to properly sour The World Institute of Kimchi keeps a public explainer page on kimchi lactic acid bacteria , posted 17 May 2024. It puts the early, under-ripe stage at about 100,000 lactic acid bacteria per gram of kimchi, with acidity below 0.3%, and 적숙기 (jeoksukgi), the properly ripened stage, at more than 100 million per gram, with acidity running 0.3–0.8%. A thousandfold difference separates the two stages, and the ...
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