Korean Recipes and Resources

This blog was never intended to be a recipe blog, but suddenly, it turns out I am writing a cookbook.  Most of the recipes I’m working on aren’t in a form I want to share yet — lots of scribbles and splotches of soy sauce.  But I have reasonable confidence in the ones I have published here, and by the time they get refined and published in the cookbook, I will have even more confidence in them!

1. Bindaetteok or mung bean pancakes
2. Bossam or poached pork belly
3. Daeji-bulgogi or spicy grilled pork
4. Grace’s mom’s fried chicken
5. Hoe dup bap or raw fish and vegetables with rice
6. Kkaenip-jeon or stuffed perilla leaf fritters
7. Hotteok or sticky rice pancakes filled with brown sugar and nuts

I can’t vouch for the recipes on these other sites, but I love that there are so many people putting a great deal of time and care into sharing what they know about Korean food.  It’s also interesting to see the differences between the way some of these bloggers cook Korean classics and the way my mother and I do.  It just reinforces what I believe firmly about Korean cooking (and cooking in general).  There is no one best way to do things, despite what Cook’s Illustrated says.  Some Koreans like their food sweeter, some like it saltier, some like it relatively unadorned — they’re all cooking “authentically.”  The most important thing is to know what you like and figure out how to get there.

1. Cooking Korean food with Maangchi: She has it all, recipes, videos, discussion forums, with an engaging personality to boot.
2. Aeri’s Kitchen: Cooking Korean Food: Another comprehensive Korean food blog with a special pictorial section on ingredients.
3. My Korean Kitchen: It looks like she stopped posting, but this Korean woman in Australia also put a ton of work into making her site a resource on Korean food.
4. ZenKimchi: This blog is maintained by an American ex-pat in Korea and his Korean girlfriend.  It’s a magnet for news and information about Korean food in English and they are dedicated, energetic bloggers.
5. Food in Korea: A site maintained by the Korea Agro-Fisheries Trade Corporation!  Stuffed with information, not always in the most elegant prose, but clearly done with a lot of care and pride.

I do my Korean grocery shopping in New York in a number of different places.  Many of the sites I’ve listed above have information on where to get Korean groceries outside of New York.  I’ve blogged about some of the local places below, in which case the link will take you to the post.

1. Han Yang Mart, the best one, but in Flushing and difficult to get to by subway.  It’s very close to the Murray Hill LIRR stop, though.
2. Han Ah Reum on 32nd St. in Manhattan’s Koreatown; H Marts in Flushing and Ridgefield, NJ.
3. Assi Plaza is huge with a food court, and pretty close to the 7 train station in Flushing, but sort of cavernous and depressing.
4. M2M Mart on Third Avenue between 10th and 11th St. has a surprisingly decent selection for a small grocery store in the East Village, and you can avoid the crush of the Han Ah Reum in Koreatown.  There’s apparently a branch near Columbia as well.
5. Chinatown in lower Manhattan is a great, cheap source for produce like lotus root, giant Asian radish, Napa cabbage, king oyster mushrooms, and more, and big grocery stores like Hong Kong Market stock a surprising amount of Korean pantry staples as well, including rice cakes, though if you want to be sure you’ll find what you need, you’re better off going to a Korean grocery.
6. If you’re in New York and your local bodega is owned by Koreans (only in NY could you construct a sentence like that), check their shelves.  In my Fort Greene neighborhood, the little expensive store Greene Farm near the Lafayette C station now sells little plastic tubs of kimchi, and in Prospect Heights, Natural Land stocks things like dumpling wrappers, Asian noodles, and bean sprouts, as well as their own kimchi.