The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cook Korean! Food features fusion of flavors
Sweet, spicy, pungent cuisine drawing interest.
Korean food is having a moment. And it’s not just about kimchi or fried chicken.
You can see it in new cookbooks that celebrate both traditional and contemporary expressions of the cuisine. And in the growing interest among chefs and home cooks, who are loving the sweet, spicy, pungent flavors of Korean gochujang (red chili paste), gochugaru (red chili flakes) and doenjang (soybean paste).
Researching their guidebook-like “Koreatown: A Cookbook” (Potter, $30), chef Deuki Hong of Kang Ho Dong Baekjong in Manhattan and Brooklyn-based food writer Matt Rodbard spent two years eating at Korean-American restaurants across the United States. Along the way, they visited communities from Los Angeles to Minneapolis and New York to Atlanta.
“I hate to use the word trend because that goes against what we write about in ‘Koreatown,’” Rodbard says. “This food has been here since the ’70s. That said, there is more media coverage and new restaurants opening.
“What we’ve seen in the last few years is that Korean-American chefs of various backgrounds have left the fine-dining world and decided to go home. They are cooking the food they grew up eating using their fine-dining chops.”
Among those chefs, Jiyeon Lee and her husband Cody Taylor, the owners of Atlanta’s Heirloom Market BBQ, are a former Korean pop star from Seoul and a barbecue pit master from Texas. The couple met while working at an upscale bistro. Now they make Korean-American barbecue like gochujang-rubbed pork loin.
“My goal is to introduce Korean food to America,” Lee says. “But I want it to be a fusion of flavors, not a confusion. And I think we do that.”
A good example from “Koreatown” is Lee and Taylor’s Korean Sloppy Joe. It’s a recipe that subs pork for beef and adds a marinade of garlic, ginger, gochujang, sesame oil and soy sauce to spice up the iconic American “loosemeat” sandwich, served at Heirloom with okra kimchi.
But Lee sees Americans being attracted to more traditional Korean dishes and dining experiences, too.
When I take friends, especially chefs, to Korean restaurants, they are fascinated by the style of eating,” Lee says. “We don’t eat course by course. It’s everything at once at one table. And it’s all about balance. We have all the banchan side dishes, with different temperatures, textures, and flavors from sweet, spicy, salty and acid.”
On the more obscure side of the exploration, “Koreatown” features a recipe for Sweet Soy-Braised Chicken from Yet Tuh Korean Restaurant in the North Atlanta suburb of Doraville. The roots of the fragrant, multi-ingredient dish, prized as Andong Jjimdak, are said to go back to a city in east-central Korea.
Possibly the most accessible and entertaining take on the current state of Korean food adventures is “Cook Korean!” by Robin Ha (Ten Speed Press, $19.99). Ha moved from Korea to the United States when she was 14. Later, as a cartoonist and illustrator who wanted to learn to cook the dishes her single mom made for her, she started a blog, Banchan in 2 Pages, that became a comic book with recipes.
“Basically, I taught myself how to make this food I grew up with,” Ha says. “So the book is geared toward people like me who absolutely have no idea how to cook anything. And if I can make this food, you can definitely make it.”
At the recent AJC Decatur Book Festival, Ha demonstrated her recipe for Soy Garlic Beef Over Rice (Bulgogi Dupbap) and talked about Korean marinades.
Though most of the recipes in the book are equally basic and traditional, Ha has a chapter on Korean fusion that includes fun recipes for chicken tacos and beef burgers.
“When I moved here in 1995, I thought Korean food would never be popular, because it was so spicy and so pungent,” she says. “But look at it now. You see Korean taco trucks everywhere. Our food has become an ambassador for our culture.”