Asian Recipes

Japanese comfort food is the gap between what most people think Japanese cooking is and what it actually is in a real Japanese home on a Tuesday night. Most people’s mental image of Japanese food is sushi, ramen, and the elaborate presentations of high-end Japanese restaurants. This image is real but unrepresentative. What Japanese families cook on weeknights, what appears in bento boxes, in school canteen lunches, in the small izakaya around the corner, is a different and considerably more accessible tradition. Karaage fried chicken that is better than any takeout you have had. A bowl of oyakodon assembled in …

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Sushi at home is one of those projects that sounds intimidating, turns out to be mostly about the rice, and becomes, once you have made it twice, one of the most genuinely fun meals you can cook for other people. The fear most people have is about the fish. Raw fish. Sourcing it, handling it, the safety of it. This guide addresses that fear specifically and clearly. But before the fish, there is a more important fact to understand: the rice is the art form. A sushi master in Japan trains for years primarily on the rice, the fish is …

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A ramen recipe done properly is one of the most satisfying cooking projects in Japanese food, and one of the most misunderstood in terms of what “properly” actually requires. The fear: ramen requires 18-hour bone broths, specialty equipment, imported noodles and years of practice. This fear is not entirely without basis, the best ramen in Japan is the work of chefs who have dedicated their professional lives to a single bowl. But it is also largely irrelevant to the question of making excellent ramen at home. The shortcut that professional ramen cooks themselves use, the tare system, produces a genuinely …

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Japanese pantry essentials are the single biggest barrier between wanting to cook Japanese food and actually doing it, and they are a much smaller barrier than most people think. The honest picture: you need about twelve core ingredients to cook the full range of Japanese home cooking. Most of them are available at any decent Asian grocery store, several are at Whole Foods, and a few require H Mart or an online order. The initial investment is real, a good pantry setup might cost $60-80, but once you have these items, Japanese weeknight cooking becomes fast, effortless and deeply satisfying …

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Japanese recipes represent one of the most coherent, most disciplined, and most deeply considered food cultures in the world, and one of the most misrepresented in the average American understanding of what Japanese food is. Most Americans encounter Japanese food through sushi restaurants, ramen shops, and teriyaki sauce. These are real and genuinely excellent parts of Japanese cuisine. They are also a small fraction of it. Japanese home cooking, the food that Japanese families make on Tuesday evenings, that school cafeterias serve, that convenience stores sell, that grandmothers make for grandchildren, is a different and considerably broader world. It is …

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This kimchi recipe is the one that changed how I think about cooking. Not because kimchi is the most technically difficult thing I have ever made, it is not. Not because it requires specialist equipment or rare ingredients, it requires neither. But because making kimchi from scratch for the first time taught me something that I had understood intellectually but had never truly felt before: that time is an ingredient. That patience does something to food that heat and technique simply cannot replicate. That a jar of salted cabbage left on a counter for four days becomes something completely different …

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Korean BBQ at home is one of the most rewarding cooking experiences you can create in your own kitchen, and it is significantly more achievable than most people realize. I know what you’re picturing. The restaurant experience, the built-in grill in the center of the table, the server bringing tray after tray of marinated meats, the banchan in twelve little dishes arranged around the grill, the smoke curling up to the ventilation hood above. That version is magnificent. But the home version, which I have been doing in Nashville for three years now, is genuinely its own thing. More personal. …

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Korean fried chicken is the recipe that made me question everything I thought I knew about fried chicken and I am from Nashville, which means that is not a statement I make lightly. I grew up eating hot chicken. I have strong, deeply held opinions about fried chicken. I have been eating it my entire life and cooking it seriously for years. And then I had Korean fried chicken for the first time, that impossibly thin, glass-like, shatteringly crispy exterior, and I sat very quietly for a moment and reconsidered some things. This is part of my Korean recipes collection. …

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The Korean pantry essentials you need to cook authentic Korean food are fewer than you think and more available at regular American grocery stores than most people realize. I want to lead with that because the single biggest barrier I hear from people who want to cook Korean food at home is the belief that the ingredients are exotic, hard to find, and expensive. They are not. Some of the most important Korean pantry items, soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, are things you almost certainly already have. Others, gochujang specifically are now available at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and …

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Gochujang is the single most important ingredient in Korean cooking, a fermented red chile paste that is simultaneously spicy, sweet, savory, and deeply umami in a way that no other single ingredient in any cuisine quite achieves. If you have eaten Korean food and wondered what that deep, complex, slightly sweet heat was that ran through everything, that was gochujang. If you have looked at a Korean recipe and paused at an unfamiliar red paste, that was gochujang. If you have a small red tub in your fridge that someone told you to buy and you are not entirely sure …

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