I come from water people. My mother, Jean, grew up in Jeonju, the capital of North Jeolla, a province on South Korea’s west coast known for its salt-preserved seafood, assertively seasoned cooking and clear spring water. It’s said that the same water makes the region’s bean sprouts especially sweet, germinating them, then eventually extracting their gentle flavor, as in one of the city’s signature dishes, bean-sprout soup with rice.
Recipe: Gukbap (Beef and Bean Sprout Soup With Rice)
In Korean cuisine, a scoop of steamed white rice nestled inside a bowl of brothy soup, or gukbap, forms a wide category of healing meals. Many things can become gukbap, like those bean sprouts and rice (kongnamul gukbap), our house brew when I was growing up; pork bones and rice (dwaeji gukbap); and beef, radish and rice (sogogi gukbap). There’s always rice, or bap, which also means meal in Korean. To some ears, then, gukbap could be translated to “soup meal,” breakfast, lunch or dinner, not least because that one bowl contains protein, carbohydrates, vegetables, fat, everything. Build a meal around soup — or build a life around it, as my family has, a pot ever-simmering on the stove — and you might slowly find yourself healed.
Soup rice eases as it goes down. My friend Matt Rodbard, who was a writer of the cookbooks “Koreaworld” and “Koreatown,” calls gukbap a “utility player,” because it can be served in the morning, “for fortifying a hangover or just getting you a solid foundation for the day,” or in the evening with soju, to catch (or extend) the night’s excesses. My father, Ki, who grew up in Seoul and visits there regularly, associates gukbap restaurants with the smell of alcohol emanating from the other diners. If some people have a second stomach for dessert, Koreans have one for gukbap, as reliable as it is ubiquitous, a foundation of daily life. If you grew up in a Korean household as I did, you might not have paused to appreciate gukbap, because it’s just always there, right alongside the napkin holder and the salt and pepper shakers.
Build a life around soup, and you might slowly find yourself healed.
It took me until my 30s to realize how much I had taken my mother’s cumulative hours of boiling homemade stocks for granted. In the United States, standard boxed broths like chicken, beef and vegetable are much too assertive for the kinds of gentle Korean soups that nuzzle you from the inside because they’re so rich in flavor yet light on the tongue. There are no shortcuts to that kind of umami, but there are tricks: Sohui Kim, who wrote “Korean Home Cooking,” taught me to sear beef before boiling it for a stronger-tasting broth. Or if you want the kind of quiet savoriness that only vegetables can lend, turn to her ideal soup meal these days: doenjang guk, with hearty greens like spinach and radish tops. For Joanne Lee Molinaro, the author of “The Korean Vegan Cookbook,” her vegetarian yukgaejang fits the bill whenever she’s craving gukbap, which is often meat-based. The spicy soup’s quintessential ingredient, gosari, the new stems of the bracken fern, shreds beautifully, like meat. Caroline Choe, who wrote the cookbook “Banchan,” adds a little ground black pepper and scallions to gomtang, a beef-bone soup, her go-to for gukbap. Each of these cherished home soups is eaten with a scoop of rice, because on the Korean table, when there’s guk, there’s bap.
This Kim-family gukbap, a Korean American iteration of my mother’s hometown classic, leads with beef and radish, bolstered by a hearty handful of soybean sprouts, which lend both protein and aroma. The brightest, reddest gochugaru you can find, bloomed in the beef fat, results in a tongue-tingling chile oil, pure flavor floating atop the soup.
Ordinarily you would use a big, juicy Korean radish for this type of broth, for the edge of sweet bitterness it lends, but I prefer small red radishes, the latent Pink Power Ranger in me emerging as their carmine skins soften to a translucent fuchsia, a sign of tenderness. Where salt seasons this soup, fish sauce dials up its umami. You could add dried anchovies and kelp for yet-another layer of gamchil mat, or savoriness, but I’ve found that sun-dried tomatoes can also step in. Resourcefulness is never bad when you’re cooking from scratch, especially when you remember that water, too, is a resource. In the Korean kitchen, a cook might save the starchy runoff water from rinsed rice to thicken a soup later or to germinate a bean seedling. It’s the kind of thing water people do.
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