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Hey, it's Francis Lam, and you're listening to The Splendid Table's special podcast series, Road Tripping.
This week, we're off to Korea with Dookie Hong and Matt Robbard on how Korean cuisine has taken the world by storm.
So all cuisines are filled with mixtures of the old and the new.
But there's really something about that interplay when you're talking about the food and culture of Korea.
So about 10 years ago, I edited a terrific cookbook called Koreatown by Dookie Hong and Matt Rodbart.
And it has all your favorite recipes from all your favorite restaurants in your nearest Koreatown.
That is, it's the food of the Korean-American diaspora as it's found in its restaurants.
And one thing I learned in that book is that all those galbis and bibimbap that Americans love are actually pretty specific to the way Korean food was cooked in the 70s and 80s as these restaurateurs were leaving Korea to come here.
Boy, has food in Korea evolved since then.
And that's what Korea World, the new book by Dookie and Matt, is all about.
Rather than documenting recipes from LA, New York, and Korean communities in between, they went to Korea itself and found super modern dishes, not fancy ones, but just, you know, contemporary dishes that are as destined for global stardom as a K-pop band.
And also a new emphasis on super traditional ingredients, like the soybean-based mother sauces of Korean food called jajangmyeon.
Hey Dookie, hey Matt, it's great to see y'all.
Francis, great to be in the studio with you.
FL in the house.
Or we're in his house.
I'm not in your house.
I'm not in your house.
All right.
So without all the pleasantries, when we all first worked together, I want to bring it back in the past a little bit.
When we all first worked together more than 10 years ago now.
You back then were writing a book called Korea Town, which was all about Korean food as it is here in the US, right?
And now Korea World is all about Korean food as it is in Korea and its influence around the world.
So...
When you're thinking of the two books, not just the time between them, but what you were seeing and where you were going, what strikes you about how different those things are, Korean food in the US and Korean food in Korea?
All Star Francis is Matt here.
You know, right now, as we speak in America, Korean food is having the biggest moment of its time.
I mean, it's it's truly in all the headlines.
You know, guys like Pete Wells and your Times are reviewing Korean restaurants.
As if they were French or Italian restaurants.
It's truly that common.
So in America, it's taking on the restaurant world by storm.
But if you go to Korea, where we spend a lot of time in the book, it's where all the innovation is happening, be it from barbecue techniques with smoked hay,
A robust coffee culture.
We're seeing a new type of food culture crystallized.
Yeah, Dookie here.
And to totally not answer your question, I'm going to end that.
He mentioned a lot of differences and there are stark differences, obviously 10 years have passed, but I'm going to mention some similarities.
And I think there were so many
The excitement around Korean food is the same as it was, or maybe even more.
The people element of it is exciting just the same as it was 10 years ago.
The food is more exciting than ever.
It was really a learning experience growing up in New York, not really venturing out much as a young cook.
It was an educational experience for me back 10 years ago.
It was also an educational experience for me these last two and a half years exploring Korea.
So, Jiki, you were born in Korea, but you, you know, you came up and especially as a cook, as a professional cook here in the U.S., how would you describe your own evolution as a Korean cook?
Yes.
I guess the popular chef story is like, oh, I was cooking next to my grandma and my mom.
I have none of that.
My professional cooking experience is my only cooking experience.
I did start really young, though, and never worked in Korean kitchens until I was running the Korean barbecue restaurant.
I would say the closest Korean quote unquote kitchen was Momofuku.
But when I was younger, there wasn't and we say this a lot.
There wasn't.
Korean cooks in culinary school.
I went to the Culinary Institute of America way too long ago.
And there was a lot of Koreans, a lot of Koreans from Korea, a lot of Koreans from America.
But mostly learning Western cooking.
Exactly.
French, European, which is the foundation of a lot of cooking, rightfully so.
But when we were graduating, we weren't like, hey, guys, let's go cook at that Korean restaurant or let's go back to Korea and open our own restaurant.
The sentiment was really to be in these Michelin star kitchens that had nothing to do with Korean food.
The biggest difference now is that it's a legitimate conversation of like, hey, I'm going to go back.
School was great.
America is great.
But I'm going to go cook.
I'm going to open a Korean restaurant in Korea.
I'm going to open a Korean restaurant in Japan and in Europe.
Or I'm going to run a Michelin star restaurant in New York, a Korean restaurant.
So people embracing their culture and representing it through food is probably more prevalent than ever.
And when you say like when you're in Korea now researching this book or when you're visiting now, because I know you go back and forth a lot when you're talking about modern Korean food outside of the high end restaurants where people are like cooking with tweezers or whatever.
How would like what are some dishes that really say to you, hey, this is Korean food that exists now and did not exist five years ago, 10 years ago?
Yes.
And Maddy really coined the term kind of soul barbecue in modern Korea.
I just think it's Korean food and we are capturing it at a very unique time.
One place that I go to as a young chef, young cook that I was, Maddie went first with Alex Lau, our photographer, was Mongtan.
And it's not one of these freezer places, which there's nothing wrong with that.
And Korea does a beautiful job of that.
It feels very young Korean Peter Lugary.
Old school, exposed bricks, smoke, dark room.
And you're getting one thing and one thing only, which is like this king smoked, lightly marinated king rib.
Well, first, Francis, I was pretty hungry because we'd waited four hours to get into this restaurant.
So we waited four hours.
So we're sitting down.
We walk into the restaurant first.
There's a box there that they're smoking these Colby ribs, these giant ribs.
In hay.
So there's lots of smoke.
So they're smoking it.
And then they bring it to the table and they finish it off on the grill.
And we come to find out, Dookie and I, we were kind of amazed that the marinade was extremely light.
It still is like, you know, Asian pear, very classic call me marinade, but it's very faint.
And the overpowering feeling we had was that we are in Lockhart, Texas.
We've just had basically like hill country style beef barbecue in Korea, but in this way that is slightly marinated and they carve it off the bone and sear it and serve us.
And we were like, let's book it.
This is.
Going in the book.
Sounds incredible.
So good.
And I think in the past five years, Korean chefs have kind of honored the regional cuisines of Korea in the restaurants in Seoul.
So you weren't seeing that as much a decade ago.
You know, we're seeing guanisari, we're seeing pastry at the highest level.
We're seeing a coffee culture, as I mentioned.
We're seeing also the Jeju is a brand in Seoul and Jeju black pork is being served in Seoul in a unique way.
So Jeju being an island and a region in Korea that's known for its pork?
Yeah, black pork, tangerines.
There's citrus, yeah.
Lots of different dishes.
And I feel we're seeing the regional cuisine crystallized in Korean culture, and that's very cool.
So meaning like, oh, there are cooks in Seoul, for instance, who are being like, hey, let's shine a light on these other regions, these particular regions, and really diving into like the specificity of Korean cuisine.
Oh, correct.
Like Gangwon-do in far northeast part of Korea, and that's where...
The Olympics were held a few years back.
Buckwheat is made there, is produced there.
So you'll see in Korea, in Seoul, in like the metropolitan center, the commercial center, you'll see products with Gangwon-do listed on it and really prized and really marketed.
And I think one thing to note is like Americans are going and Westerners are going and seeing this regional Korean cuisine now, as you write in the cookbook.
What are some dishes from that region
Uh the citrus salad
Um they're doing more salads which i don't say korean food is very salad-y but interesting it makes sense
They're using their local uh beautiful ingredients
Um we had the smacked rockfish which we really love which i think even for koreans they go
They're like well that's like really cool
Which is a smashed whole fried fish.
And they just smash it right on the table with you over this really beautiful sauce.
More with Dookie Hong and Matt Rodbard, authors of Career World, in just a minute.
Stick around.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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Thank you.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking with Dookie Hong and Matt Rodbard, authors of the new cookbook, Korea World, about the incredible food of Korea today.
Let's get back to it with them.
Well, okay, so a citrus salad and a smashed fish.
Yeah, let's go there.
Tell us about this citrus salad and what's in it.
Citrus salad, I'll say, we were in Jeju and we kept seeing these stands of citrus.
And it was right at the end of citrus season we were visiting.
And we realized that these citrus salads, they're a little more savory, actually.
You know, shallots and gochugaru and a little bit of rice vinegar.
And so to us and fish sauce.
Correct.
And it felt like this was its own version of a brunchy salad.
Right.
And really, it's another example.
I think Duki will talk about the smash fish, which we found while we're researching the food in Korea.
Yeah.
And we went to a restaurant.
We were taken around, which was great.
And no signs.
It's like the quintessential places you want to eat.
Husband and wife team.
They're speaking in Korean.
I think they were like fighting in Korean.
They're like arguing and bickering, but also like pushing orders.
And it's one of those dishes like every table you see has this dish.
And it's this whole fried rockfish, you know, any local fish there.
I asked and they're like, we predominantly do with this rockfish because it's like it's so abundant in Jeju.
And then beautifully fried, really, really crispy.
And they have this, I would say, soy, semi-sweet.
A lot of sesame seeds sauce that they just pour right over almost like a sweet and sour like tangsuyuk sauce that we see like maybe a little bit of a Chinese influence.
And then they break it apart with gloves in hand.
The wife did it for us this time around and she comes in.
Hey, here it is.
She's kind of like a little bit annoyed because she was just in a fight with her.
Husband
And then she smashes the head the tail removes the fillet beautifully removes all the bones that the main bone spine and she's like great eat it enjoy it
What is smashing the fish do aside from the drama
It's the texture.
Like the pin bones, like soft bones and all, you're eating all of it.
And you can because maybe this even particular rockfish, you can eat the fins.
Like they don't clean any of that.
They're just like –
Eat it
We were eating chewing on some of the head and it crunched
It's like this beautiful crunch
You pull out the spine too and you're done with the spine
You've got this this kind of like all the lump uh fish meat with the sauce with the sauce which is a lot of gochujang in there too
And i'll just say we were just on tour we were in miami in a restaurant
It was like mostly like Spanish folks, Hispanic folks and and white people.
And Dookie is doing like 27 orders of this smashed fish to all these folks who've never had this fish and smashing it table side.
Like he was just like with your hand, just crushing.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And everyone loved this dish.
Hmm.
Hmm.
What was like traveling in Korea?
Did you have guides?
Did you just kind of go around?
Like, how did you actually go about your travels?
It's a great question.
It's a great, great question, Francis.
We were there during COVID and at the end of COVID, so it was difficult to move around.
And we have to mention now is Alex Lau, our photographer and really vibrant photography.
We had no studio photo shoots in this book, very unique.
And we have guides sometimes.
We have friends.
We had a local fixer in Seoul for one time.
We had our friend Nadia Cho, who's taken us around many times.
But really, a lot of it's just our discovery.
Dookie speaks fluent Korean and slides into conversations very easily.
And really, that's part of this kind of special sauce.
We have Alex there.
Taking photos
We have dookie with the recipes and i'm kind of they're just the writer guy recording it and it really makes a special a special project
Well you know one thing that uh obviously as you as we've talked about like a big focus on the book is the modern food of korea like literally food you would find if you go there today and like a dish that i think about a lot
Because I've never tasted it and I really want to and I should just make it – is the rose tteokbokki.
So tteokbokki are those super delicious chewy rice cakes.
Most often you see them here anyway in like a red spicy sauce made with this paste called gochujang.
And you're – like I think one of the first recipes in the book –
It's made with that, but it's called rose because it's pink with heavy cream.
And that's not like some like chefy interpretation of it.
Like you literally find that as street food.
But then the other thing that is sort of funny and ironic or at least sort of counterintuitive is so much of the modern food of Korea is really about food.
Digging back deeper into the past and into how like super traditional things are made
And you write about how um things are you know literally in every korean cook's kitchen like the tenjang which is like a fermented soybean paste or the gochujang which is like that plus the chilies um
There's a renaissance of those pastes made in an artisanal way and, frankly, a more expensive way.
How have you seen that sort of artisanal spirit really be romanticized or valorized right now?
So many different ways.
And right now we have so many artisanal jangs.
I know Maddie in studio brought some artisanal jangs, doenjang and gochujang for you to try.
Yeah.
Korea is a modern society.
It is the size of Indiana, 50 million people, but it's one of the most modern cultures in the world.
It has great influence.
So these products are being made in the rural regions of Korea, but then they're being brought back to Seoul and they're being exported and they're being packaged and imported.
It's a part of this kind of transition of energy from old to new.
And the products we're going to taste have a little bit of story like that.
Yeah, let's taste some of these.
So let's start with the tenjong, maybe?
Yeah, yeah, right.
Okay, so tenjong.
Okay, I know you're not supposed to call it miso, but it is not an equivalent, but the closest analog that is maybe slightly more famous, but it's a fermented soybean paste.
Yeah, fermented soybean paste.
Salty and used to give like depth and flavor to dishes.
Yeah, we call it the mother sauce, one of the mother sauces of Korea.
And doenjang is the base to a lot of that.
Yeah.
And this is like readily available, certainly in any Korean store, most Asian grocery stores.
And it's usually like a big tub for like five bucks.
Yeah.
Five, eight dollars.
It's the brown tub.
There's three tubs that are iconic.
There's a brown tanjun.
It's the red that's gochujang.
And then there's the green, which is samjang, which is more of a dip, combines both gochujang and tanjun.
This is the brown.
Okay
So when I taste this normally when I you know at home the one I bought from just like the regular old Asian market it's salty it's got umami it's and it's got some depth and complexity but this is a highly artisanal version
Oh my gosh
This is special to our project.
This is the Tenjin.
If you buy our book, on the back cover, there's a really wonderful woman.
She's a nun chef.
She works at a temple kitchen.
A nun.
Like a monastic woman.
Monastic.
Yeah, that's better.
Thank you for clarifying.
And she's our back cover star.
And she cooked for us at four in the morning in the temple down in Jododo.
And she gave us an exit and we were packing up to leave.
And she presents us with like a small Tupperware container of the tenjun she makes.
At her, at her temple.
Okay.
And so to us, this, this is really, I mean, what's, what do you think about the bouquet?
Like smell it.
Like to me, it has, it's, what do you think Francis?
Well, it's funny.
Cause I think of the, the Tanjung or the, the miso that I have at home and it's,
It's so different.
This smells much more like...
This is a weird word.
It smells like a cave.
It's very earthy.
It's very minerally when you smell it, but in a nice way, in a way that you feel like you're going...
Somewhere deep and dark
It's like a cave aged cheese in some ways
I think you're getting a lot of that
Oh wow um and and and you know dookie's in his office in san francisco
So apologize dookie you don't get to taste the tendon but you've had it
Oh i'm just watching this to me this this i get
Savory yeah please savory is what i get with this stuff
You know what it tastes like
It tastes like um
Like you mentioned KV's cheese.
It tastes like really good aged ham, cured ham.
It's not meaty in that same way, but it has that kind of...
Yeah, I keep wanting to say gross words, but I don't mean it to be gross.
You know, like that sort of like dark, musty flavor that sort of like works its way into a really beautifully aged…
General term but you're getting that net
Those glutamates are going to work here and you know she makes plant-based cooking and she used this um in a recipe in our book
We have a cold broccoli salad
Uh that's that's quickly like shocked um
So it's so crunchy and we're using tenjun the tenjun from a temple with a vegan mayonnaise and sesame oil with sesame seeds
Oh that would be so good
It's dope.
I mean, we've cooked from it.
I serve it a lot at home.
A lot of folks who have bought our book have made it and showed us on Instagram this dish.
And to us, for a plant-based recipe, it's really great.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Thank you for sharing with us.
Yeah, thanks, buddy.
That's really special.
Okay, so now you have this artisanal gooch dung.
And gochujang is
You know that's become very popular on American menus like you just see like gochujang glazed chicken or gochujang this gochujang that all the time because it is a delicious flavor
I think it's
Maybe sometimes a little overused.
People put it on meat directly, and that's kind of the problem.
They're not making it into a marinade.
And it's burning.
Sometimes dookies, we've seen that before, and that's kind of a rough hang.
But this is, again, not the standard tub you find in the...
In the Asian market, this is an artisanal gochujang you bought at a high-end department store in Korea.
Right on, yeah.
It's from the brand Kisundu, which is an artisanal brand.
I believe it's around Pohang is where their farm is.
Yeah, I was in a very, like, probably one of the, I was in the Hyundai department store in Gangnam, and really, I was down in the market, and they're selling these gochujang packets, and they're, like, 230 grams, and they're about $20, $25.
Wow.
And this brand is actually used by American chefs like Hoonie Kim from New York and Beverly Kim from Chicago.
Oh, they're both amazing.
And they're both amazing chefs and really –
This product is what they use in their restaurants.
You can get it on Amazon, so listeners, you can go check it out.
K-I-S-O-O-N-D-O.
No payment for that plug, but really, it's a beautiful product.
And really I love cooking with it because, I mean, the dookie can add – it really adds, I think, a lot to like meat marinades.
You can cook it with vegetables a lot of ways.
Okay.
Let's taste this guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Oh, wow, wow, wow.
This is so incredible.
Okay.
It almost tastes like a whiskey.
It has a sort of barrel-aged flavor.
Yeah, right on.
It has that kind of...
Fermented grain flavor like it does say
It doesn't taste boozy but it's like all those like mature notes of whiskey
But then you also get this very fruity chili like a very floral aromatic fruity chili
It's like spicy but not at all overly spicy
Gochugaru like presents fruit
It's a very sweet pepper so that's the name of the chili is gochugaru
Yeah, and I love what you're saying because at the end of the day, if you boil it all down, like should we get nerdy about it?
Okay, we'll get nerdy about it.
It's all soybeans, right?
So right now, doenjang is the base of it.
So if you ferment soybeans, dry it, maejoo, ferment it for months, you get doenjang what you just tasted before.
And then you add gochugaru to that, which is like a dried chili powder, Korean chili powder.
Then you get gochujang to that.
And then if you mix gochujang, what you just tasted, and then the first sauce, doenjang, then you get ssamjang, the green tub, like Maddie mentioned.
And the byproduct of all of this, the liquid, you're going to see a lot of liquid when you make doenjang, is ganjang, which is soy sauce.
So those four really rotate and we call it the mother sauces, but it's starkly different.
But at the end of the day, it all boils down to, yeah, it starts with one soybean.
That's amazing.
So one last question, Matt, you mentioned that some of these artisanal Korean cheongs are actually available here.
If you were like a home cook and you want to play with it, which one would you pony up for?
I know there are like a trio that like, you know, shouldn't be divided.
But if you had to start with one.
For me, it's, I mean, for me, it's doenjang.
I'm always starting with doenjang.
That's like the base.
It's like the mother.
It's doenjang jjigae, my favorite Korean dish.
Doenjang jjigae with really beefy short rib and galbi.
That's the one.
Okay.
And Duke?
I would say, you know, just for familiarity's sake, doenjang might be not so familiar, which is great.
Expand your palate, expand your pantry.
But I say ganjang, which is maybe the forgotten jang because it's not in that textural, pasty.
It's soy sauce.
You guys probably use it already.
But Korean soy sauce, there's different, you know, one for marinades that are a little bit more intense, one for soups and stuff.
And stews
That is a little bit less intense
So i would say play around with it
You guys are probably playing around with it before you uh even if you know it or not
So yeah i would just say expand your pantry this
There's no better time to do it than now
It's great
Thanks so much for coming in
What an honor, Francis.
And let's do it again in 10 years.
Bye, Francis.
Appreciate you having us on.
Ducky Hong and Matt Rodbard are the authors of Korea World.
You can find their recipe for sauteed rice cakes with gochujang and cream at splendidtable.org.
And that is our show for this week.
Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next week.
Support for this show comes from Odoo.
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