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Bulgogi and beyond

Fueled by spice-seeking Americans, Korean cuisine is hot

When chef Hooni Kim opened his Korean-inspired restaurant Danji in New York City nearly five years ago, he made sure to couch the cuisine’s bold, funky flavors in familiar items: sliders filled with the marinated beef called “bulgogi,” for example, and chicken wings glazed with garlic, honey and sesame seeds.

“I wanted to deliver the flavors in a non-exotic way,” says Kim, who was born in Korea and moved to the U.S. when he was 10. “This was the way to get the non-Korean eaters in to try these flavors. That was my one and only chance to win them over.”

But Kim’s not sure he’d have to use such artifice today. Characterized by tangy fermented vegetables and rich blends of sweet, salt and spice, Korean food was anointed as the new “it” cuisine by industry experts as early as 2012. Since then, a growing fascination with fermentation, the perennial quest for spice, and expert adaptation by trained chefs has nudged Korean food closer to the American mainstream. Major chain restaurants such as Bennigan’s and TGI Friday’s have offered items such as Korean barbecue burgers and Korean tacos, a mash-up of Asian flavors in Mexican format.

Despite that, if numbers and attitudes are anything to go on, Korean food isn’t the new Chinese – yet.

“You’ve got your entry point, that’s the barbecue experience and tacos,” says Matt Rodbard, co-author of the upcoming book, Koreatown: A Cookbook. “Those are the gateway drugs of Korean food ... But there’s so much more going on.”

Mentions of the word “Korean” on chain restaurant menus have blipped up 2 percent in the last year, according to Chicago-based food industry consulting firm Technomic. Mentions of kimchee, the spicy pickled cabbage dish, have done slightly better, rising 7.5 percent. Still, a National Restaurant Association study of ethnic cuisines to be released in August found that while 61 percent of Americans say they eat Italian food at least once a month, only 4 percent say the same about Korean food. Overall, 50 percent of survey respondents said they’re not at all familiar with Korean food.

Yet Korean food has many attributes that recommend it to the contemporary American diner. The cuisine’s foundation ingredients include doenjang, a fermented soybean paste, and gochujang, a fermented chili paste. These often are used in combination with other ingredients and aromatics to produce a unified experience of salt, sweet, sour, spice and that elusive earthy savory satisfaction called umami.

The magic of this equation arguably first came to wider public notice in 2008 when Roy Choi, a graduate of New York’s Le Bernardin restaurant, began layering double-caramelized Korean short rib into corn tortillas and selling the resulting tacos from a Los Angeles food truck. Since then, chefs such as Kim and others have been liberating the cuisine from the confines of the country’s ethnic Korean neighborhoods and expanding it for a broader audience.

At the Atlanta-area restaurants Sobban and Heirloom Market, husband-and-wife team Cody Taylor and Jiyeon Lee practice an alchemy of Korean flavors and traditional Southern fare. Menu items include kimchee deviled eggs, various tofu preparations, pork, chicken and ribs marinated in gochujang and rubbed with classic barbecue spices, and a spicy pulled pork sandwich topped with Korean pickles.

“You had a lot of classic people who, they see crispy tofu on the menu and they’d be a little turned off,” says Taylor. “But slowly but surely we won a lot of people over with our new classic style of doing it.”

During the last few years, Americans also have discovered fermentation, which was ranked the No. 2 preparation method in the restaurant association’s 2015 “What’s Hot” culinary forecast. The same audience that pays $3 for a bottle of kombucha, a fermented tea, may also be ready for the myriad pickles and fermented flavors of Korean cuisine.

“People are looking for something new,” Kim says. “Even the media is looking for something new to report. It’s an organic process of new, delicious cuisines coming to the limelight.”

And the country that moons over Sriracha also is primed for the smoky, tangy heat of gochujang. The word gochujang gets only a few mentions on chain menus, according to Technomic research. But the spicy paste appears to be leading the migration of Korean ingredients from ethnic groceries to supermarket shelves. And some companies are determined to make it as familiar as ketchup.

As Americans become more familiar with Korean food as a concept, say chefs, retailers and analysts, the range of dishes and ingredients is likely to expand. Cookbook author Rodbard and others point to the exhaustive variety of Korean cuisine, praising its broad repertoire of rice dishes, seafood preparations and famous soups, both hot and cold, often made from unusual ingredients such as Asian pear.

“Asian food in America has exploded,” Rodbard says, adding that so has the sophistication of the average diner. “People are talking about Chinese food in terms of regions. They’re going to Japanese kaiseki (multi-course) meals. Korean is the next one of these East Asian and South Asian cuisines to take hold. Americans are very interested in these flavors.”

Gochujang pumps up grilled chicken

For many years, I was hooked on Thai red curry paste, a thick, unctuous seasoning that packs a little heat and a lot of savory deliciousness. It’s great whisked into vinaigrettes and marinades, smeared straight up onto steaks and chicken, blended into meatloaf and burgers, even pureed into hummus.

Prior to that, I was smitten with miso, a Japanese seasoning paste made from fermented soybeans. It is crazy salty and savory and just a little sweet, and it can do so much more than just make the soup we all slurp at sushi restaurants. Vinaigrettes and marinades? Check. Corn and seafood chowders? Definitely! Meat rubs? Absolutely.

But lately I’ve fallen for yet another Asian seasoning paste – gochujang, a Korean condiment made from chilies, rice, fermented soybeans and a host of other ingredients. It tastes like a blend of sweet white miso and Sriracha. It’s got kick, but it doesn’t overwhelm. It’s salty and savory, but sports just a touch of sweetness.

And it is awesome on so many things. In this recipe, I turn it into a quick marinade for chicken thighs. You could stop there, just grilling the chicken, then slapping the thighs on buns with a dollop of mayo and a slab of tomato. But I like to arrange the thighs on a platter and dress them up a bit with feta cheese and fresh mint. You then could eat them as is, or with hunks of flatbread.

J.M. Hirsch is the food editor for The Associated Press. He blogs at http://www.lunchboxblues.com and tweets at http://twitter.com/JM–Hirsch. Email him at jhirsch@ap.org.

Grilled Gochujang Chicken Thighs with Feta and Fresh Mint

Note: Gochujang is increasingly popular in the U.S., and that’s making it easier to find. Check the international aisle at most larger grocers. It’s also widely available online and at Asian grocers.

Start to finish: 20 minutes, plus marinating

Servings: 6

Ingredients:

3 tablespoons gochujang

3 tablespoons rice vinegar or cider vinegar

2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce

12 boneless, skinless chicken thighs

1 cup cherry or grape tomatoes, quartered

½ cup crumbled feta cheese

¼ cup chopped fresh mint

½ lemon

Ground black pepper

Flatbread (optional)

Method:

In a large zip-close plastic bag, combine the gochujang, vinegar and soy sauce. Mix and mash until well combined, then add the chicken. Seal the bag, then overturn several times, or until all of the chicken is well coated with the marinade. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, or up to 4 hours.

When ready to cook, heat the grill to medium-high. Just before cooking, use an oil-soaked paper towel held with tongs to coat the grates.

Remove the chicken from the marinade and grill for 3 to 4 minutes per side, or until the chicken reaches 165 F at the thickest part. Transfer the chicken to a platter. Top the chicken with the tomatoes, then sprinkle the feta and mint over them. Squeeze the juice of the lemon over everything, then season with pepper. Serve with flatbread, if desired.

Nutrition information per serving: 240 calories; 80 calories from fat (33 percent of total calories); 9 g fat (3.5 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 140 mg cholesterol; 610 mg sodium; 8 g carbohydrate; 1 g fiber; 5 g sugar; 30 g protein.



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