Chef Jeong dishes out kimchi pasta at Katsu
How the kimchi pasta at Mesa food court is made
For a little while there, it looked like we were done with Asian fusion. ❚ Asian fusion, apparently, wasn’t done with us. ❚ One of the hottest culinary trends of the 1990s was knocked to the mat by a thunderous (and well-deserved) backlash against a mountain of clumsy, overwrought “Asian” dishes, conceived in no small part by non-Asian chefs with little knowledge of the cuisines they were peddling.
Thing is, Asian fusion never quite went away.
Suddenly, the genre is booming again (even if we try not to call it that), due in no small part to a wave of young chefs getting creative with the flavors and techniques they’ve known their whole lives. Add a little California influence, the rise of Asian pop culture and a dash of YouTube, and suddenly you’ve got a second wave of trendy Asian fusion cuisine — smarter, better-informed and more subtly refined than the first. Generally speaking, that is. “Subtle” and “refined” aren’t exactly the best words to describe Danny Jeong’s kimchi pasta from Katsu at Asiana Market in Mesa. But his wild, playful version of an emerging neo-classic is pretty stinking good.
What is kimchi pasta?
Internet recipes for kimchi pasta started showing up about a decade ago and really took off around 2015 when American chefs suddenly decided they wanted kimchi in everything. With increasing interest in popular Korean fare over the last decade, it seems to have experienced a bit of a boom. But as a concept, it’s been around a lot longer than that, particularly in Japan and California. In fact, though it certainly hadn’t cracked the mainstream at the time, the LA Times gave kimchi spaghetti a nod as far back as 2001.
Who is chef Danny Jeong?
Jeong is from Seoul, South Korea, where he received his culinary training before moving to Los Angeles. After a couple of decades in California, he was looking for new opportunities, so he moved to Arizona. Since arriving, he’s launched Katsu and B-Bob, and he also manages Paik’s Noodle and Asiana Kitchen. Together, those four counters form the food court at Asiana Market, the Korean supermarket in Mesa.
What kind of food does Jeong cook?
At three of the four counters, he cooks Korean food, but not at Katsu. Well, not exactly.
At culinary school in Korea, Jeong actually majored in French and Italian cuisine, and when he first moved to Los Angeles, he worked in Italian restaurants. After a decade, though, he found himself wanting to return to the flavors he grew up with. So he started working at restaurants in Koreatown, where Korean food is routinely married to all kinds of international cuisines in sometimes wild and crazy ways, and that’s certainly influenced what he cooks.
So, what’s on the menu at Katsu?
At Katsu he serves a mix of popular contemporary fusion dishes, with an especially heavy dose of Korean and Japanese. There are the namesake katsu, fried cutlets with a variety of sauces, and omurice, Japanese-style omelets served over fried rice. You’ll find Korean snack food favorites like fried chicken wings doused with gochujang and bulgogi-stuffed tacos, as well as huge platters of tteokbokki — thick, chewy Korean rice cakes in a variety of sauces.
But one of the most popular sections of the menu is his fusion pastas, and the most popular among them is his kimchi spaghetti.
How does he make kimchi spaghetti?
Katsu is a quick service food court stall, so Jeong has designed a menu that he can fire up quickly. He starts by sauteeing a handful of sliced bacon and a few shrimp in olive oil, before adding a lot of onions and mushrooms. Once those have softened a bit, that’s when he adds the kimchi.
Kimchi is spicy cabbage, right?
In this case, yes, but not necessarily. There are hundreds of kinds of kimchi. The spicy, fermented napa cabbage that most Americans refer to simply as “kimchi” is more specifically called baechu kimchi. It’s the most common, but that’s just one kind. Kimchi doesn’t have to be cabbage and it doesn’t even have to be spicy. Kimchi-making goes back at least a couple of millennia — long before traders brought chile peppers from the Americas to Korea.
Broadly speaking, kimchi just means Korean-style salted and fermented vegetables and herbs. Name a vegetable, and somebody has probably made kimchi out of it. Like most things that are pickled, salted or fermented, it’s an old preservation technique — vegetables were salted and stored in buried, earthenware pots to preserve them for the winter. Anaerobic bacteria in the kimchi eat up sugars in the vegetables and seasonings and release lactic acid, creating that effervescent, sour zing.
Is kimchi pasta a Korean dish?
Sort of ? Not really. Can we call it kind of Korean? Jeong says it isn’t very popular with most of his Korean customers, but his non-Korean customers love it. The Korean kimchi sits at the heart of the dish, but it’s a little bit Italian, a little bit Japanese, a little bit Chinese ... there’s a lot going on in there.
What else goes into the kimchi spaghetti?
Once the kimchi is in the pan, Jeong adds a healthy squirt of sake and lets that cook down for a moment. Then he adds par-cooked spaghetti, a healthy dollop of oyster sauce, a squirt of Huy Fong Sriracha (yes, that Sriracha), and a whole lot of fresh cream. That sits and bubbles away for a minute or two until the pasta finishes cooking, the cream has gotten thick and silky and the kimchi flavor has completely permeated the sauce.
Then, to finish the dish, he garnishes the rim of a large bowl with a little dried parsley, carefully twirls and plates the spaghetti, adds a sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese and some chopped scallions, and sticks a couple of crispy deep-fried strands of spaghetti in the top, mostly for show.
What does it taste like?
There is absolutely nothing subtle about Jeong’s kimchi pasta. Don’t tell Italy just how saucy it is, or we’ll have an international incident on our hands. But anybody who salivates at the thought of slurpy, American-style carbonara with Asian flavors and a whole lot of fiery spice is going to love it.
This is one crazy, over-the-top, hedonistic cream bomb of a dish.
On one hand, you’ve got the sharp punch of Sriracha and kimchi, but that’s mellowed and rounded by sweet simmered onions, oyster sauce and oodles of cream. Meanwhile, the bacon’s fat has rendered and meandered its way into the sauce, giving it an hefty, lush texture that’s thick with a smoky scent. But while those flavors may strike first, the more you get into it, the more the kimchi comes to the fore, and every bite of pasta is saturated with the deep, gently fermented sourness that keeps this brash, international dish in touch with its Korean inspiration.
It’s fun. It’s just a little goofy. And it’s awfully delicious.