This post may be one of my more polarizing. A brief search on Reddit seems to both confirm and deny my position, rather vehemently. I’ll just go ahead and drop the bomb here at the start…
Korean food may be my least favorite East Asian Cuisine. There, I said it. It’s not bad, not by any means. Individual dishes can be wonderful, but as a cuisine I find it to be one-note and unbalanced. I know people will argue that banchan bring the balance and a Korean meal is really about finding your own balance through the combination of these side dishes, but only once during the week did I have a single dish that I felt like was close to having the balance I crave enough to make on the regular.
Korean meals typically consist of rice, soup, kimchi and an array of banchan. If you are unfamiliar with banchan, it’s similar to the idea of the meze that I wrote about last week. It is common for a meal to have somewhere between 3 and 9 different banchan served with a meal. The variety of dishes is fun, even if many taste similar. With this in mind, I started by making the banchan that I would be serving with each meal through the rest of the week. Almost all of the recipes were from Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking.
One of my favorite banchan is potato and soy. It reminds me a bit of Southern US fried potatoes, just with the flavors of garlic, soy, and sesame. It’s a little sweet and very savory.
To bring some freshness, I made a batch of soy sprouts. Soy sprouts are mildly spiced and bring a crunch. These do help cut through the generally sweet or spicy (or both) flavors you get with most Korean dishes.
Finally, as I generally like eggplant dishes, I make a steamed eggplant side.
It is here, on day one that I started to realize the same-sameness of Korean dishes. There are three main categories that I found. The first is sesame. This is the sweet, oily flavor commonly experienced first through bulgogi. Sesame oil is an ingredient very common in Korean dishes, often being mixed into a dish as a finisher, much like those in the West would add a splash of lemon or fresh herbs. The second flavor is spicy sweet. Gochuchang (red pepper paste) and Gochucharu (red pepper flakes) are ubiquitous throughout Korean dishes. Need a kick, gochucharu; need a kick with a sweet flavor or to make a broth, gochuchang. Often dishes will have both. The final is what I would consider almost unseasoned. Simple mild broths or sides that aren’t really seasoned act as a foil to the more strongly flavored dishes mentioned above.
As kimchi is a staple of every Korean meal, I bought a Napa cabbage kimchi from H-Mart and made a milder, fresh version from scratch.


One of my hobbies/obsessions over the last year or so has been lifting weights, and stereotypically, I do tend to eat a lot of chicken and rice. The first meal we had was a spicy chicken. Normally this would be grilled, but as the weather still hasn’t turned dry and warm enough for outdoor grilling, I used the broiler.


This is a great hack Winter cooking hack. You may have seen this same technique used for the Vietnamese pork noodle bowls. Simply line a sheet tray with aluminum foil and spread the meats out. You can put them directly on the foil, or better yet on a wire rack. Place under the broiler and turn enough so that everything cooks evenly. I like to use both a top rack to get the char and a bottom rack for cooking thicker pieces through. If the meats or veggies are thin enough, you only need the top rack.
Finally for meal one, I wanted to get a taste of a common Korean beer cocktail, called somaek. This is a mix of 30% soju and 70% light beer, normally a lager. I still had a few bottles of Tsingtao, so I used that. This was pretty good. The soju adds a sweetness and beefs up the ABV of the drink.
Much like my love of rice, I also love noodles. I was excited to try a popular black bean noodle dish called Jja Jang Myeon. This is a Chinese Korean dish that was brought to Korea by Chinese workers from Shandong, in the late 19th century. Over time, the dish was adapted more to Korean preferences and the sauce made darker and sweeter. It is loaded with vegetables and has a small amount of protein in the form of diced pork.
As my wife would tell you, I am obsessed with rice and rice dishes, so I was excited to try rice with oysters. This dish is very simple, in a good way. My only real warning would be to say that oysters don’t really reheat well, so make sure you have enough people to eat it all the first day. You sauté the rice in sesame oil, similar to a pilaf technique, and then add the oysters (and other flavors such as garlic), covering and simmering everything together until the rice is cooked through. It’ simple, quick, and filling. To bring a bit more flavor to the dish, you top it with a spicy soy sauce mixture. This was my second favorite dish of the week and one I would consider making again. I don’t see it going in a regular rotation, but interesting if in the mood for oysters.
Finally, my favorite dish of the week was incredibly simple. It was mild and was easily the most balanced single dish. Sautéed zucchini and shrimp. The original calls for a fermented fish paste, but Maangchi mentions that you can exchange that for fish sauce. Much like soy sauce, I always have fish sauce on hand, so I did make that substitution. Frankly, without the fish sauce I think this would be bland, but that extra punch of flavor and acidity really did the trick. This is one that I would absolutely put in the rotation.
Most Korean dishes I experienced this week (and in many experiences over the years) are simple in execution, but also rather direct and simple in flavor. They tend to be a mild oily savoriness or a punch of garlic spicy sweetness. To this end, they can offer something that is a wholly different experience than much of the foods we are used to eating in the west. I think this is what makes it so polarizing. While simple and direct, they are so focused that they are perfect for what they are. If you like it, you probably love it. To quote Bruce Lee:
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
This describes Korean dishes to me. While it may not have variety, what it does, it does well. I can 1000% appreciate it for what it is, even if it isn’t my thing.
Note, I won’t be cooking North Korean cuisine as my research points to it being similar, but with less quality and fewer ingredients. The people of North Korea suffer from a lack of food and just eating every day is more important than developing a deep culture around cuisine. I enjoyed this article from the North Korean News website. As the article mentions, quantity is more important than quality when you are just trying to get enough to eat.