• Eat Your Books

  Originally published in hardcover as K Food: Korean Home Cooking and Street Food (Mitchell Beazley: 2016).

Notes about Recipes in this book

• Soy vinegar dipping sauce (Cho ganjang)

  • lilham on April 16, 2018

    I used cider vinegar instead of apple vinegar, a recommended sub in the introductory chapter. And Chinese dark soy for the Korean soy sauce. With the ratio of 2:1 soy sauce to vinegar, this was too salty and the soy sauce taste was overwhelming. I don’t know what this would taste like with Korean soy sauce, but definitely don’t substitute with Chinese dark soy.

  • Foodycat on July 30, 2018

    I used cider vinegar and aleppo chilli flakes. It was good, but I make a dipping sauce for Chinese dumplings with Chinese black vinegar and roasted chilli oil that I think has a better flavour.

• Crispy seafood pancake (Haemul pajeon)

  • Boffcat on March 01, 2017

    The pancakes had a good texture and were a pleasure to eat - I used plump prawns and chunks of haddock for the seafood, and served them with a dipping sauce made with guochang, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil and garlic. Mike loved them. They took forever to cook, but that was my fault for using a Le Creuset frying pan that could only by put on a moderate heat. Next time I would make smaller pancakes rather than two enormous ones, which would be easier to flip over. I'd be tempted to add more flavouring to the batter, too. And it might be heresy to suggest this, but I think the pancakes could work well served with garlic mayonnaise...

  • lilham on April 16, 2018

    I made half the recipe and formed a single large pancake. I used a bag of mixed frozen seafood with king prawns, squid rings, scallops and mussels. Unlike Boffcat, It didn’t take long for me to cook, around 2 min each side. Mr lilham, my 7 year old and I all enjoyed it.

  • Foodycat on July 30, 2018

    As lilham did, I did a half recipe using frozen mixed seafood. My pan was a bit small and I could not get it to flip neatly, so it looked an absolute mess but tasted good. Next time I would make 4 small pancakes from the same amount of batter.

• Spring onion salad (Pa-jeori)

  • Foodycat on October 12, 2019

    Simple and very tasty side dish. I added a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds for texture.

• Seasoned spinach (Sigeumchi muchim)

  • koolMoD on October 20, 2017

    quick and flavourful!

• Corn on the cob with kimchi butter

  • Foodycat on August 23, 2018

    I didn't make my own kimchi for this! It's SO good! Incredible depth of flavour given length by the butter. Perfect with the sweet corn.

• Stir-fried chilli aubergine (Gaji bokkeum)

  • Foodycat on August 28, 2018

    So delicious. Japanese aubergine with miso is one of my favourite things, but I think the added funk of doenjang makes this even better. Deeply flavourful, lovely silky eggplant. I didn't bother with the initial salting of the aubergine, and don't think it made a difference.

• Kimchi brine

  • Foodycat on October 12, 2019

    I used it to brine chicken thigh fillets. Gave a lot of flavour and the cooked chicken was very succulent.

• Kimchi and pork steamed buns (Kimchi wang mandu)

  • Foodycat on July 30, 2018

    The filling is delicious, the dough is a pleasure to work with but even after almost doubling the cook time the dough wasn't cooked. Ended up finishing them in a hot oven, and when I make them again (I made a double quantity of filling because that was how the ingredients worked out) I will bake them directly instead of trying to steam them.

• Stir-fried 'royal' noodles (Japchae)

  • lilham on April 26, 2018

    I substituted chicken thighs for beef but otherwise followed the recipe. I loved this a lot. Mr lilham said he didn’t expect this to be sweet. The 7 year old found it hard to pick up the sweet potato noodles with a fork (they were very slippery).