KOREATOWN

I have a serious cookbook addiction that I must have inherited from my grandmother, who read cookbooks the way some women read romance novels. Mine started when I was just a year or two out of high school, with a subscription to the Time-Life Foods of the World series; I still have all of them, the hardbacks full of wonderful narrative, history, culture, and gorgeous pictures (rather faded now) and the spiral-bound paperbacks containing all the recipes, a couple of which (Scandinavian Cooking and The Cooking of India) have their covers secured now with clear packing tape.

 

Korean food is a fairly new and delicious discovery for me; Joe and I were introduced to it by a few of our students. Tucson has a few Korean restaurants of varying quality - Takamatsu, Seoul Kitchen, Korea House, Kimchi Time - and apparently some of the Japanese restaurants, like Takamatsu, also serve Korean food. I've heard good things about Kampai Sushi, but haven't tried it yet. Interesting trivia note: according to one of my Korean students, most of the sushi chefs in Tucson are actually Korean (that included her husband after he graduated from the university, until he was able to get a job in his own field).

So as you can imagine, I was delighted to receive a review copy of Koreatown: A Cookbook from Blogging for Books http://www.bloggingforbooks.com. Just the cover makes me hungry, and I love the clever design, with the name broken up so the word EAT occupies the center of the image! And the rest of the book is just as gorgeous, full of great, tantalizing photos, recipes, interviews with other Korean chefs and fans of Korean and Korean-American food. Grandma would have loved it.

After an entertaining and informative introduction, each of the co-authors introduces himself with a two-page essay. Deuki Hong grew up in Manhattan's Koreatown and has been cooking professionally since he was fifteen; most of the recipes are those he grew up on. Food writer Matt Rodbard titles his essay "How a White Jew Boy from Kalamazoo Fell Hard for Korean Food." The two make a great team; the writing throughout the book is breezy, entertaining, and deeply appreciative of Korean food and culture.

But the food is the core of the enterprise. I'm a fairly adventurous cook but somehow I've felt intimidated by Korean cuisine, probably because of a Korean friend's remark that cooking for a dinner party was going to be so much work and that Korean food was complicated. But it's really not any more so, I don't think, than any other national cuisine. My friend just doesn't like to cook.

The book arrived during Lent, and because Joe and I have been on-and-off vegetarians, we decided those 40 days would be a good time to go meatless. So I didn't cook any of the meat recipes during that time, although there are many in the book, since Korean food today can be quite meat-centric.

So of course one of the first things I tried was Bibimbap, although as it says opposite the picture, "This Is Not a Bibimbap Recipe." I've had bibimbap many times in restaurants; it seems to be many people's intro to Korean food, for good reason. In restaurants it's usually like a rice bowl on steroids, the sticky rice topped with a number of vegetables, some thin-sliced cooked beef, and an egg (in my experience, not a raw egg as in the above photo, though the raw egg yolk does look cool there). But really, as the authors assure us, you can make bibimbap with whatever's on hand, so I used leftovers from the first two dishes I'd made. Kongnamul Muchim, which translates to crunchy sesame bean sprouts, is one of my favorite banchan (the small dishes that precede and accompany the main course at Korean restaurants). If you look at the cover image above, the bean sprouts are at the top center, occupying the letter "O." I also had some leftover Doenjang and Kimchi-Braised Kale (the recipe served 4 generously and there are only 2 of us); amazingly delicious on its own, it lent a wonderful rich earthiness to the bibimbap. And chopped kimchi, of course, with some shredded carrots and, because it was Lent, just an egg, no meat. Ah, heaven! I love leftovers anyway, but this lifts the tasty to the sublime.

Another thing I love about Korean food is the unfussy way it's eaten. At the first Korean restaurant we went to, years ago, the waiter who brought my bibimbap said, "Just take your chopsticks and stir it all up. Mix it up!" No dainty little bites of one thing at a time - we loved it and felt instantly comfortable and well fed.

The first Korean recipe I tried at home (not from this book) was Pajeon or scallion pancake (above). We'd had some at Seoul Kitchen as a complimentary appetizer (with its spicy dipping sauce) and loved it. What I made at home was good, but not as good, and now I know why. According to Deuki and Matt, Korean cooks, including those in restaurants, all use prepackaged Korean pancake mix (no, Bisquick or Krusteaz won't do) with sparkling (unflavored, of course) water. That was hard for me, since generally speaking I don't do mixes. But they are right; the results were so much better.

In fact, this book and all the recipes I wanted and still want to try necessitated a trip to one of the local Korean markets where I bought enough ingredients that we put them all into a "Korean box," but you probably don't need to go quite that far immediately. Kimchi (if you've never tried it, don't resist; even just a little, chopped up and stirred into a bowl of rice, elevates the eating experience), along with some gochujang (spicy fermented pepper paste), and gochugaru (red chile powder) will get you started. A very informative section on ingredients at the beginning of the book will help you know what to look for.

This beautiful book is a marvelous introduction to a cuisine that is only now getting the attention it deserves, as enjoyable to read and look through as it is to cook from.