Korean Table

A video of someone fermenting kimchi in a fully sealed glass jar has picked up more than 5.3 million views since late August, and the comment section isn't complimenting the technique. It's warning the poster to get that jar into something else before it turns into what one commenter called a "kimchi grenade." The person behind the clip captioned it as "the appearance and sound of successfully made kimchi after 2.5 days," pointing out that store-bought kimchi doesn't fizz like that. They're right about the fizz. That's real, active fermentation happening. What the caption skipped over is that it was fizzing inside a jar with a tightly screwed metal lid and nowhere for the gas to go. Korean outlets have now covered versions of this clip twice in about a week ( Asiatoday on August 27, then Asiae on September 4, as the view count kept climbing), and both times the top replies say some version of the same thing: move it to a plastic container, or...

A packet of Shin Ramyun already works fine on its own, but an add-in can wreck a bowl of ramyeon just as easily as it can improve it. Cheese, egg, and frozen mandu are the three add-ins everyone reaches for first. Only one of them is close to foolproof. This is a rundown of what each ingredient actually does under heat, not a ranking of whichever combination photographs best. It also skips how to boil the noodles themselves. If you're here, you already have that part handled. The Cheese Question Cheese is the add-in most likely to go wrong, and the reason is chemistry, not taste. American cheese and other processed cheese slices — Kraft Singles, Land O'Lakes deli slices, the orange squares sold at nearly every supermarket outside Korea too — contain sodium citrate or a similar melting salt. That salt keeps milk proteins from clumping as they heat, so the cheese turns into a smooth, pourable film instead of separating into grease and rubber. Natural cheese doesn't get t...