Korean Food and Modernity

represents this theory as strongly as beebum bob. Bee bum bob literally means mixed rice and though there's no particular recipe, it is a sizzling rice bowl that is topped with colorful vegetable garnishes and a fried egg. Yeah, Bibimpa means is mixed to rice with the beset of ball. And we used a storm pot and we hit the pot and it sisily. We make the sizzling storm pot b and we meet soon. Mainly, my career name is a sun me Lee and my restaurant's name is a chong

Ju restaurant. And joan Ju is one of the city in Korea is very famous for the bibbiing bob, and we are specialized in the bibby pub that's how we got the name from choon Ju. Yeah Soon Me is a second generation owner of Jianju restaurant that has been specializing in serving bibbon bob for twenty two years. A bowl of bibbing bob at john Ju balances the five

elements through color, flavor, and texture. White strands of crispy day coon radish on a bed of rice, rich yellow and eggs, and crunchy raw bean sprouts, red in the thinly sliced carrots and spicy hot Korean chili paste go to Jong. These warm colors full of yang are balanced in a bowl of beeping Bop with cool Yan colors like the blue and the black of inky mushrooms, the deep forest green of dried seaweed, and the gentle char

from barbecued meats or seafoods. Actually, this restaurant is was owned by my father and mother twenty two years ago, and my father is from Janju, is he is a hometown. So he got the recipe from his best friends who had a very very famous beeping By restaurant in Chongju. So he studied the restaurant, but since my mom passed away the two thousand and five, I started to have an ownership from there. So it's been like more than

fifteen years. And I really love cooking and I like to see people eating my food and make them happy. That's why I have still the owner of a Chouanju restaurant along with Bimbob. Of today, we are served almost a dozen small plates called ban chon. Like many East Asian cultures, cream food does not follow a course by course sequence. Rather, it's a shared meal where all the

dishes are served at the same time. Usually, this means that most of the space on the table is occupied by a full spread of dozens of dishes, ranging from larger mains like the aforementioned people up to smaller pickled side dishes like the bonchon. The number of dishes usually follows a pattern three, five, seven, nine, and twelve dish table settings according to the number of side dishes today on point of origin. We're exploring Korea's ancient culinary traditions

and their modern adaptations. Our first guest, Gee Hey Kim, is the chef and partner at MS Kim's restaurant in Arbor Michigan where she's making a both regional and also a revival kind of Korean cuisine of her youth and her ancestry. Can you tell us some formative food memories from growing up in Soul? One of them is my mother making Napa cabbage kimchi during the fall, and remember

it being very communal. We lived in an area where we had a lot of neighborhood woman and and a lot of relatives, and they will gather together, and I remember their conversations like should we have a hundreds of types of cabbage? At the time, I think I was like seven years old, So what looked to a seven year old like mountains and mountains of Napa cabbage just being brind with like older favored neighborhood women and aunties,

and so that that was very memorable. Kimchi is a staple in Korean cuisine as a famous traditional side dish made from salted and fermented vegetables like Korean radish or Napa cabbage, with the addition of a varying selection of seasonings like go to garu, spring onions, garlic, ginger, et cetera. For gh kim the Napa cabbage her mother made is the one that she considers to be the gold standard.

Because when you grow up with a mother who cooks everything from scratch, you you tend to think that that's all you need to know about clean food. Deep got it right, you Your mom's fabulous. Everything is made from scratch. But it's only reasonly that I realized that a lot of food that she was cooking was actually regional cooking from County Providence to where her family is from. That's

the central part of Crea. So compared to the southern more southern Providence, the County Providence recipeople go through a balance and it's not as salty or as spicy as say like La Providence or kun Kuntsung Providence, uh known for more saltiness and more heavier use of fermented sea food. So then I realized that all the food that I was eating was actually not necessarily standard, but like a one part of many kinds of regional cooking in Korea.

So when I decided to go into the kitchen and become a cook, I started approaching it kind of like a study subject, because I can be a little nerdy, and because my mom was very protective of her own recipes, and number two, she didn't think that I should be in the kitchen, so she wasn't very upfront with her own knowledge. Um, So what I did was that I started reading books. I just started collecting all the books.

And then what really cut my attention was these old cook books from like eighteenth century, nineteenth century, seventeenth century. I think the oldest one goes all the way to like sixteenth century. A lot of it refers to the preservation techniques and how to make alcohol out of cranes and things like that, and that was just amazing discovery. And then I got really hooked because it was breaking a lot of my own preconceived notion of what clean

food is. And by going more in depth into ancine cooking and trying to understand the story uh the evolution of clean cooking, it almost made me feel more free. So one example would be that I have seen American customers come in and tell me that Creans do not use soatro, but that's not true. And then I have clean American customers come in and say that there is no cheese and clean coatina. That's also not true because there's a very very old cheese recipe and it sounds

exactly like ricotta to me. Like you take the milk and then you eas meat like ocean water, it says, and then you curdle it over the over the heat. And if it doesn't curdle very well, then you can throw in a little vinegar or a little bacco leaf, which is a fermented rice wine. And it takes different than we catta because we're using different acid, but the

process itself is almost identical. And then I found recipes that look like a friend chep cheese, like cured hymns, and so it's just like pretty amazing to see where the Clear people has been eating, like what they have been eating fews and cheese ago and what they're eating now and how that became. Yeah, the use of beat doesn't come into play until too was on kingdom and that lastic punk on jod years, so a pot of

five hundred, six hundred years ago. Clear was a Buddhist kingdom, so consumption of meat was fairly small, so a lot of use of different vegetables was more more prolific. And I think as a chef it's more interesting because how do you how do you preserve and make things tasty when you don't have a lot of meat products, especially if you're in the mountain area and your Buddhist what do you do? So what I see is like not

only agriculture, but foraging. So food is medicine, everything stable, if it's not gonna tell you accidible um and um like many many different grains. So very recently running a restaurant, you hear a lot of like celia disease or altoly immune, or like people just avoiding wheat. When I see clean in they're really versatile at using different grains and different grain flour. You know, multi grain mice is an obvious one.

But you can also make noodles not just out of wheat, And there's long history of making like potato noodles or like different types of noodles that like those dishes are fully formed, the developed and just as tasty as like wheat dishes. So when you think about the story broadly speaking of Korean cuisine, what are some some highlights or some milestones in that history. You don't really see youth

of chili peppers. I mean there's stories like there's some beeries out there that it came from Latin America in the seventeenth century, etcetera, etcetera. If you look at the coup books, you don't see it probably big pictured until like late eighteenth century. And but when it comes in like seeing people love that and then they start adding

to kimchi to give. If she didn't look like as fiery and red as it does today, it was more of like more akin to sower crowd in a sense that it had some Arabatic but it was pretty much a salt secure of a vegetable preservation. And then once the chili flakes comes in that that becomes like we really embrace it and then really take it on, and then now we the clean foods have a reputation of like being spicy. Gochu which means pepper and Korean is

very subtle with sweet instituacy notes. It's sort of tangy, but not really hot. Put gochu is the name when the peppers are young, green and used similar to fresh bell peppers. Hongo chu is what the peppers are called when they are red and ready to be harvested and dried for gochu garu or red chili powder, more so than spice. The change that gy c is in modern Korean cuisine is the addition of sugar, but that's a very very recent development. And I would say another development

is the import of like black pepper and sugar. Sugar and black pepper, like very very like simple kitchen staple, but it's not around until very recently before we were using high and actually not a lot of sweetness at all where But I do notice that there's very little sugar in ancient cookbooks. Sweeteners used very sparsely, and it's like a tablespoonful of honey for entire part of something.

And my only guess, and this is just a guess, would be that, like you see a lot of changes to Crean cooking with making like nineteen fifties, with the modernization in Korean War, US trips come in. That's when you see like more use of dairy and butter and cheese, which is now quite popular in Crea. And I'm wondering if that would be the point. It's only like after the nineteen thirties cookbooks that I start seeing like about proportions of sugars going in and then the proliferation of

a strong culture. I think that also kind of like pushes more use of sugar, but also more use of salt, and more use of MSG and more use of spaces. Yeah, just more and more and more. And I think that time period that you're speaking to kind of like mid twentieth century, even in the States, where we start to see the proliferation of grocery stores and a lot more consolidation of the food chain and supply as people are now being encouraged to, you know, eat food from packages

and boxes as a means of convenience. So it's the commodity tion of food. Yeah, you see the United States to around the same time, that's right. Yeah, so that it seems to check out. And I think, you know, the same thing is happening in lots of places around the world for the same reason. And you know, up until like late career was in Clues, we were known as the hermit Kingdom. It was not a whole lot

of things coming in from like West. Definitely mean a lot of trades were with China and Japan a har mm hmm. The swift labor because a long time ago, we didn't have much sugar in our food. But these days the young generation they want more like impact on their palate. So our food is getting spicier and to make get balanced. Then they need more sweet flavor. So the true spicy flavor from our ancestor is from from

the chili powder or chili paste. It's the spiciness. It was very heavy and then it comes, you know, very slowly. But these days, the spiciness of Korean food it comes very rapid because they are using you know, capsize and salts. They take out on the the spiciness from the chilies, and then they make really hot spicy sauce. So to kill the spiciness, you know, they use abundant amount of sugar,

you know, or like a cone syrup. But the true sweetness of our cuisine comes from like rice zerrup, which needs to spend a long time to make it, rather than like in a very easy product like a consuup things. Yeah,

so it's changing a lot. When I was young. That's a young Jong who is the co founder of Bury Kitchen Bori and Korean means route through their website Bury Kitchen, which is young and her co founder Sonja, who you will hear from later in the episode, share what they learned and talking to farmers, fishers, and vendors about the history of Korean ingredients. Her explanation of modern adaptations of Korean cuisine all can be explained in the evolution of taste.

A global increased in a taste for sugar has also meant that those traditional recipes like the ones that g He researched extensively before opening Miss Kims, are now harder to find. Way, but you pronounced it right, And do you have memories from your childhood of this cuisine before it became so sweet and spicy? Yeah? Of course when I was young, my mom's food where my grandma's food. It wasn't sweet. It was a savory rather than spicy

and sweet. But these days the Korean food is described as mostly spicy food or you know, spicy and sweet food. Just wondering for people who aren't familiar with Korean food, what are what are some dishes or ingredients or some characteristics of the of the diet that really are typical

in Korean food. People usually they started with like prugogi or tap te or kim tie, those kinds of recipes, right, but also something like you know, tap te and prugogi will be away sweeter at the restaurant and saltier, and if you go to someone's house in Korea, you will find out, you know, the prugo will be pretty blend, and you will be pretty surprised, you know, with the

difference of the flavor difference. And obviously you know, fermentation plays such a central role in Korean food, and most notably in kim chi. Korean cuisine has a long and rich history of fermentation which dates back thousands of years. It's part of what makes the food distinctly Korean and also incredibly delicious. These recipes range from light and tangy

to deep and complex. I think it's the flavor that you can remember from even your mother's womb for Korean And even though when I was really young, my generation was eating kim ti, even though I was too young, and if I couldn't eat it because it was too spicy, then my mom's generation they rinsed it in the water

and then they they feed us, you know, kimchi. But these days, you know, young generation, the young mother, they never forced, you know, there are kids to eat kimchi like that, So the memory of the kimti is also changing. It's Young Jung guides us through a regional tour of South Korea from the vantage going three distinctive styles of preserved fish. Their methodology and curing are all unique. It's a story that ran as our cover for wet Stone Magazine Volume two. So the first one that we have

is the guamegi which is from the southeast coast. Pamegi is a dried fish you can dry herring or sorry, it is dried near the seaside because you know, the sea breeze, you know, it's freezing the fish and throwing like you repeatedly. It gives really interesting texture of the fish. So if you go to the the Pohan area where is famous for drying this fish during the winter time, then you can't see like in a thousands and thousand thousands fishes hang outside and then drying there like you're

dripping oils in the outside. Is that a methodology that is practiced in coastal areas around Korea or is that just in this point particular region. You can say it's one of the methodology in Korea. Yeah, But Hamegi is very famous from hank because the Poan is the city where it is near to the sea and it has the perfect condition you know to try this, you know,

phreezing throwing, drying method for this fish. And then if we were to go to the northern part of the country, we see winte which is a kind of polic Can you tell us about that? The hunt is really interesting fish because it's um paula Korean people. They have you know, maybe about more than forty two different names you know, only for this fish because we you we use so many different methods, you know, to process the fish. So depends on the dried condition where whether it's a frozen

where like it's fresh. This wish has so many names. I actually love that that depending on where it is and it's life cycle, there's a different name associated with it. How is this wine tape preserved? It's a freezing dry method. But this area where we make this special fish, it's amazing cord and we say this area has uh the kind of blade cord. The wind is so brooder, so you feel if you have the wind during the wintertime in this area, you feel almost you know, the blade

strike to your face. It's so cold, it's so sharp. But this this area has very cold area and so you dry them in the outside during the winter time and then this wish becomes you know freeze with the more sister. And then when you help the moisture when when it is frozen, then it becomes you know, bigger, right, and then during the daytime this fish cut though it's thawing, and then you lose this moisture again because of the repeated freezing and thawing. Huang Tang, which is the pollock,

develops a unique and fluffy texture. When cooked into a soup, it produces a milky like stock. Yes, it's a very face. So Young's cope. Founder at Boori Kitchen, Sonia Swanson elaborates on the different preservation methods here Sonia to further exploit.

And the three fish that we kind of center for this piece are Kanwondo unt so Hunti meaning dried pollock, and Kanwondo is a region in the north of South Korea, So if you're looking at the entire United Peninsula, it's kind of central, but in terms of just South Korea,

it's on the northern part of the country. So what happens is in the winter time, pollock from the east coast are brought into this really snowy, cold like valley in Kongwondo or one of a few valleys where they have this really cold wind that they call a like a translation is a knife wind. It's so cold it's like biting like a knife. And they hang it in these like on these like wooden racks that are in

the middle of a snowy field. So you're just like walking down these roads and you can hear like the rustling sound of these like dried fish kind of moving in the wind, and it's such an incredible feeling. It's almost like you're in this like library of dried fish. Um, what does that smell like? Exactly? You know, if there's very well, we went when the fish were pretty dried. Um, I've not been out there when the fish were like fresh and freshly hung. But it's like so cold, you know,

you don't really smell that much. And then moving to Tolado, which is a more southern West Coast region that's actually where my family's from. Um, and that's where we go down for like all the holidays, and so is a little bit warmer, and it's on the west coast which has a much shallower sea that's more like mud flats.

And the fish you get there are these small croakers. Um. When you dry those, it's called crowby and so crowby are salted and then they're hung to dry for a while, and it drives very slowly because it's very a more

humid region. And what's kind of interesting about crowby, and this is one of those like examples I think of like how in some ways, like Korea has become like a hyper capitalist, is that there's this special kind of grouby called body groupy or barley grooby that's like dried and barley, and it's like a very labor intensive product,

like process. It's a very like luxury product. But if you go to like department stores in Soul and go into the basement where all the food stands are, you can find, especially around the holidays, boxes of crouby, like a box of ten gruby that is like over five yeah,

for a single box. But the reason why I think those are so expensive is because around the holidays, especially like for certain kinds of business relationships and transactions, you're supposed to give the very expensive gifts to like be impressive.

And so that is one of the very expensive gifts you can give, and it's it's usually given in like you know, very specific business contexts you know too, and occasionally for bribes, although some laws of and passed to outlaw how much you can spend on a gift for certain government employees. There's a region called kung Fu and kang Zongu is also like you know, got a lot of like seaports sits on the east coast, like near the East Sea, which has like very cold, deep blue waters.

And the Song and I went down to this really cool area of of Kiangsuan Province called Koyong Harbor, and in that area, it's like very traditional famous kind of dried fish. There's there's a very traditional famous dried fish. They're called quameggi. And I had actually not had had quameggi outside of the Korea before coming to Korea ever, because it's one of those things that doesn't ship very well.

So the way that cameggie has made it was usually traditionally made with herring, but the herring populations kind of started to drop off in the last few years, so they started to replace it with Pacific story, which is a little smaller, but I think they're both both herring and sorry are known for having a lot of like oil um. They're very oily fish, and this is like why this fish is so delicious. I don't know about you,

but I love oily fish. What's cool is that they'll like filet these fish, and they'll so rather than drying them whole as you do with hunt and crooby, Quameggi is dried as a filet, So they will hang up these filets by the ocean. And what's cool is that the temperature kind of fluctuates and you get you know, sort of similar kind of like freezing and warming that results in a little bit of expansion and contraction the flesh, similar to hunk pick. But this fish is like again

really oily. Like when we went there, you could see like the oil literally dripping off of the filets that were sitting in the salty you know, ocean breeze in the sun. And so because of that you get this like really cew really intensely flavored fish filet. And it's almost like this really amazing fish jerky man, It's like

so good. What's interesting about Korean food that I think is not always seeing as broadly in the US is that it's such a seafood centric cuisine, Like it's surrounded on three sides by ocean, Like there's a ton of seafood in the diet. And one of the ways, I mean, there are many ways of preserving seafood, like one of them being salting and um preserving in brine, but one of the most popular ways is by drying them um. And there are different techniques of drying fish for different

regions and different kinds of fish. So for example, the most common dried fish you'll find in almost every Korean meal, and even if it's just in the form of soup stock, is dried anchovy like that is a staple, Like every Korean kitchen will have dried anchovy um. And here's young to talk further about the problems and devastation caused by over fishing in Korea. Fishing it was very common fishing Korea a long time ago, and we used to catch

them so much. That's why I think, you know, people started developing a new method, you know, to preserve this fish. But overall a sudden, like during eighties or seventies, we started, you know, catching too much, like over first seeing it and then the said, sadly, we don't have it anymore these days. But that's part of your I mean, that's really part of the beauty of your work is that you are helping to keep these traditions and the awareness

of these traditions alive. So another fish that I was really interested in because of the salt cured methodology is we used yellow corbina fish to make this one, and a long time ago, we didn't have a refrigerator system, so people started you know, cure with the salt, and then they started trying it's the same method, like you can keep it longer time, and you can eat it like you know, all year round. But again and sadly, we are losing because of the overfishing, you know, we

are losing this fish too. So these days mostly it's you know, we import a lot from China, uh, and then we curate in Korea. Yeah, Sonya. I think this is a very important but nuanced point that you've brought up here, because often the immigrant experience is conveyed in terms of loss or sadness. But what I'm interested in, which is sort of what your mother has instilled upon you, is the ways that we can make new what was

previously lost. And I think that becomes one of the central questions and the central work of many immigrants to in effect make their own history. Part of their contemporary work like Gee Hey and so Young. Sonia has her own memories of kim chi being made by her mother. I mean, I grew up eating Korean food, so there was always kimchi in our fridge, Like we would have kimchi on the Thanksgiving table next to the turkey. You know.

It was like sort of there. But I don't think I really understood like the process by which it was made, like the ferment the fermenting, and like the fans behind it, the fact that you know that so much time goes into it. And I think, like I've been thinking a lot about just about like what Korean American food is because a lot of places where we were living growing up, my mom didn't have access to like a Korean grocery store.

So like I remember sometimes she would make um kimchi using like Chinese cabbage, Thai fish sauce, Mexican red chili pepper, you know, and it was this this like really American blend of ingredients that was an approximation of the kimchi she had growing up. And it's just not to say that like one thing is more authentic than the other, Like I I don't think that my mom, you know, americanized Kim. She was not authentic. It was authentic to

like our lived experience, right. Um. So for me to go back though and taste a different kind of Korean food, like taste you know, kimch that was made from ingredients that were cut in the field like two days before, you know. Um, for me to like taste this ten jung that was like straight from an earthenware pot that

was sitting in the sun. Those flavors made me realize, I think, more than anything, how much my mom lost by immigrating, Like the things that you lose, like the flavors and the tastes and the food that you lose by moving to a new country. Um, just maybe kind of a little bit more aware of like the subtletyes of like the hardships that she experienced too, you know, the distancing she had from her homeland. Cushitty shitty party.

We'd like to thank our guest today, Son me Lee, the owner of John John beephim Bop in Los Angeles, California. Chef g Hay Kim of MS kim and in Arbor, Michigan, So Young Jong and Sonya Swanson, the co founders of Barrie Kitchen, and I would like to give a special thanks to my business partner, Melissa she for helping me bring this episode together. That's all for this episode of Point of Origin. Thanks for listening and supporting the wet Stone podcast, where we travel the world to champion food

as a means of expanding human empathy. Please, if you like what you've just heard, rate us, review us, give us five stars so that we can continue to make these podcasts just for you. To keep abreast with all things wet Stone, follow us on i G at wet Stone Magazine or online at wet Stone Magazine dot com. That's w h E T S t O n E magazine dot com, where you will find the latest on all things wet Stone, including the details from today's show

and information about purchasing our print magazine. Special thanks to Selene Glacier, our lead producer, to Cat Hong, our editor, Quentin Lebau, our production intern, and thanks to our friends at I Heart Radio for helping us bring you this podcast. To Gabrielle Collins, are provising producer, and to Christopher Hasiotis, our executive producer. I'm your host the origin Forager Steven Saderfield, and we'll be back here next week with more from Whetstone Magazine's Point of Origin podcast.