Korean Table

Jin Ramen (진라면) is the Ottogi packet you'll see at H Mart and most Korean grocers, and if you've ever wondered why Korean friends get oddly loyal about it, this week is a good time to explain. On September 11, Ottogi held a memorial in Anyang for its founder, Ham Tae-ho (함태호), ten years after his death. The Korean coverage landed on Monday morning, September 14 KST. I haven't seen it in English yet, which is a shame, because the story behind the packet is the reason a whole country nicknamed the company 갓뚜기, "God-ttugi." This is a pantry post, not a recipe post. The cooking verdict is near the end. The memorial, and what the Korean papers said According to Asia Economy's report (Korean, published 09:04 KST on September 14), the memorial took place on the 11th at Hamtaeho Hall (함태호홀) in Anyang, and was meant to revisit the founder's "quality first" principle and his giving. Aju Economy's version , out an hour later, has more detail: the h...

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. ...

Ask what Koreans eat on Chuseok (추석) and most people say songpyeon first — the half-moon rice cake stuffed with sesame, chestnut, or sweetened black beans, steamed over a bed of pine needles so it comes out faintly perfumed. That's not wrong. It's just one dish out of a full table. Chuseok 2026 falls on Friday, September 25. The official holiday runs Thursday the 24th through Saturday the 26th, and since the 26th butts right up against Sunday the 27th, most of the country ends up with four days off without touching a single vacation day. Songpyeon, and the Superstition That Comes With It Everyone in the family gets pulled into making songpyeon the night before Chuseok — it's one of the few Korean dishes that's genuinely a group project, not one cook's job. Roll the dough into a ball, press a thumb-sized well into the center, pack in the filling, pinch it shut into a half-moon. Repeat for an hour, usually with the TV on in the background. The half-moon shape i...

Walk into H Mart planning a Korean BBQ night and the meat case alone can end the trip before it starts. Galbi, samgyeopsal, three cuts of moksal, pre-marinated bulgogi in four different sauces, and a wall of tabletop grills you don't need yet. If you've searched what to buy for Korean BBQ at home and come back with more questions than you started with, that's normal — the case is built to sell you everything in it. Here's what matters, cut by cut, with real H Mart prices so you're not guessing at checkout. The Three Cuts Worth Buying (and the One to Skip) Galbi first. Ask for LA-style, flanken-cut short rib, sliced thin across the bone, so it grills in under two minutes a side. H Mart sells it already marinated, and for once the pre-marinated version is worth it: the soy-pear base is close to what most restaurants use, and getting that ratio right from scratch takes real trial and error. Samgyeopsal is pork belly, and this is the one I buy plain. The pre-marina...

Your kimchi isn't fermenting, or so it looks. No hiss, no bubbles, nothing, three days after you packed the jar. A silent lid is almost never the actual problem. It's usually just the wrong thing to be watching. Three things genuinely control whether a batch ferments: how much salt is in it, how warm the room is, and how you're reading the jar. Get those three right and the fizz shows up on its own schedule, not yours. No Bubbles Doesn't Mean Nothing's Happening A plain screw-top jar and a fermentation crock with an airlock don't behave the same way, and that difference alone explains most of the panic. Brine & Bubble puts it plainly: "In a sealed jar like a mason jar with a standard lid, gas builds up between the lid and the brine and simply seeps out without any visible activity at the surface." An airlock forces that same gas through water, so you see it. A regular lid just lets it go quietly. Early fermentation is also weaker than people ...

Yangbaechu kimchi (양배추김치) is what Korean cooks abroad started calling kimchi made with ordinary round cabbage instead of napa — not a hack, a real dish with its own name, born from grocery runs that came back without napa on the shelf. If your nearest H Mart or Asian grocery stocks napa, buy it. This isn't an upgrade, it's what you reach for when the store genuinely doesn't carry it, or you want a jar that's edible by dinner instead of next week. Regular green cabbage sits in every Western supermarket's produce aisle, no special trip required, and that's the whole case for it. Why the Two Cabbages Aren't Interchangeable Napa grows as a loose, oblong head with ruffled leaves that fan upward from the stem, thin enough to fold easily and mild enough that a short brine softens it clean through. Regular round cabbage packs its leaves into a dense, tight head that stays firm raw and tastes more peppery before it mellows, according to Hitchcock Farms , a produc...

Got an almost-empty kimchi jar with an inch of red liquid pooled in the bottom? Here's what to do with kimchi juice before it goes down the drain: cook with it, pickle with it, drink it, or just hang onto it a while longer. That liquid isn't an afterthought. It's the same salt, garlic, chili flakes, and usually a spoonful of fish sauce or salted shrimp that seasoned the cabbage in the first place, now fully fermented and sitting untouched in your fridge door. Most kimchi sold outside Korea comes two ways: a screw-top jar with plenty of brine pooled around the cabbage, or a vacuum-sealed pouch with barely any liquid at all. Buying the pouch kind on an Asian grocery run? Transfer it to a lidded jar as soon as you open it. The juice you're trying to save has nowhere to collect in a flat pouch. And none of this applies to the never-fermented "kimchi-flavored" slaw some supermarkets sell as a shortcut — that's not kimchi, and there's no real brine to save...

Short version: gochujang and gochugaru are not the same red jar with two names, and a recipe that says "gochujang (or gochugaru, whatever you've got)" is giving you bad advice. One is a fermented paste. The other is a dried spice. Swap them and the dish changes texture, salt, and sweetness before it changes heat. Why this post exists: gochujang vs gochugaru is one of the most-searched mix-ups in Korean cooking, and it's an honest one to make. Both are ground from the same red chili family, both sit in the same aisle at H Mart, and both show up in half the recipes on this blog. They're related. They're not interchangeable. What's In Each Jar Gochugaru is just dried chili, full stop. Pepperscale's breakdown describes it as chili peppers that are deseeded and ground to a texture "halfway between coarse crushed red pepper flakes and fine cayenne powder." Nothing is added and nothing is cooked. It's a spice, in the same category as paprik...