These Crispy Kimchi Pancakes Are Unbelievably Fun to Eat - The New York Times

I’ve always been curious — my mom would call it nosy — about how other people live, and that interest extends into the kitchen. It’s a gift to get to pursue my curiosity in this column. When I’m out in the world reporting, cooks open the doors to their kitchens. I watch them knead a dough or stir a sauce until it’s just right, and then try to translate those instinctual or sensory cues into words.

But I’m at home now, like many of you, eating mostly peanut butter sandwiches and quesadillas and trying to escape the taste of my own boring cooking. Within weeks of the stay-at-home order, I couldn’t stomach another bowl of pasta or chickpea soup. Usually when I get into a cooking rut, I go out to eat — to be inspired and learn something new. Now I find myself looking back, toward all of the dishes I’m nostalgic for. Not the food of my childhood, but rather the taste of the neighborhood restaurants where I’ve been eating my entire adult life.

One of them, Pyeong Chang Tofu House, is a family-run spot in Oakland where I’ve been a regular since 2000. In the winter, it’s where I go when I want to be warmed by their sundubu-jigae, a spicy, silky soft tofu soup that arrives at the table at a rolling boil. In the summer, I go for bibim guksu — spicy, sweet, cold noodles — or bibimbap. And no matter which season, I start my meal with kimchijeon. Every time these golden kimchi pancakes arrive at the table, I greedily take the first piece before anyone else can. I wonder aloud how it can be both so satisfyingly chewy and so shatteringly crisp. Whenever I eat the pancake with other cooks, we try to dissect it — is it made with glutinous rice flour? Does it have eggs? What exactly makes this pancake, tart with pungent kimchi and fried to a glorious crisp, so unbelievably fun to eat? I promised myself I would knock on the kitchen door to ask the cooks their secret, but I shied away every time.

Then, a few weeks ago, when I just couldn’t take any more of my own Italo-Mediterranean-ish cooking, I pulled down my Korean cookbooks and took to the internet in search of a recipe that might lead me to some approximation of my beloved kimchi pancake. For a week, I made variation after variation, but none turned out right. The first one I made — the one when I went with my gut and deviated from every single traditional recipe and sneaked in some eggs — was outright disgusting. Once I left the eggs out, things improved, but I still couldn’t get that perfect balance of chewy and crisp. I tweaked the combinations and proportions of various starches, including flour, tapioca starch and potato starch, until I arrived at a respectable pancake. But it still didn’t taste right.

Eventually it occurred to me that I could simply ask the folks at the tofu house for their recipe. I put on my mask and headed over. No manager or chef was present when I got there, so I left a note. To my delight, the manager, Peter Hak Sun Kim, called me back a few hours later. Translating for the chef and owner, Young S. Kim, who is also his mother, Peter told me, “My mom is happy to share her recipe, but she wants me to tell you that it’s our homemade kimchi that makes the pancake so good.”

I had perfectly tasty kimchi in my fridge, so I brushed off his comment; I just wanted to know exactly how they made that pancake! I was thrilled to discover Mrs. Kim’s secret: a combination of tempura mix and Korean pancake mix. So I bought some of each from the Korean market, certain that would solve everything. After analyzing the ingredients lists on both packages (which conveniently listed the percentage of each ingredient), I added baking powder and garlic powder to my own dry mixture. I also added some gochujang, or fermented pepper paste, after recalling that Mrs. Kim’s kimchi is some of the spiciest and most flavorful I’ve ever tasted. Then I made a control pancake using the premade mixes, and another using my own ratios.

They were fine. Good, even. The neighbors I shared them with thought they were amazing — I’d finally achieved that ideal texture and reached a new depth of flavor. But they were virtually indistinguishable. And neither of them tasted like my memory of Mrs. Kim’s version.

A few days later, I remembered that Koreans have a word for the specific, irreplicable taste of someone’s cooking: son-mat. I called Peter and Mrs. Kim to ask them about it. “For my mom,” he said, “son-mat is composed of three things: experience, the passion of the individual and the knowledge gained from constant cooking. For her, it’s like a never-ending learning goal, like an art. She doesn’t use measuring cups or a scale when she makes kimchi.”

In Korea, kimchi-making is typically a family or neighborhood activity. Groups of women spend two or three days making enormous batches of fermented vegetables to last their families through the season or year. Finding herself in Oakland with far less space and far fewer helping hands, Mrs. Kim adapted those traditions when she took over the tofu house in 2004. These days, she transforms 1,400 pounds of napa cabbage into kimchi each month, and for the first time, it’s available to purchase. “It takes so much time and work to make, we never really wanted to sell it,” Peter explained. But now that the restaurant has pivoted to takeout only, its customers have been begging for it. “Because of the lockdown,” he explained, “we decided to let people take our son-mat home.”

I bought a huge container of Mrs. Kim’s kimchi and made the pancake again. This time, it tasted exactly as I remembered. But funnily enough, my neighbors struggled to detect any difference between this pancake and the previous one. Both, they said, were sweet and spicy, tart and crunchy, chewy and delightfully savory. I thought I’d been chasing a precise formula to satisfy my craving. But as it turns out, what I miss most right now can’t quite be captured in a recipe.

Recipe: Kimchijeon (Kimchi Pancake)

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These Crispy Kimchi Pancakes Are Unbelievably Fun to Eat - The New York Times
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